《2014年6月英语四级长篇阅读原文来源及标准答案》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《2014年6月英语四级长篇阅读原文来源及标准答案（12页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、2014年6月英语四级长篇阅读原文来源及答案本文节选自2013年4月大西洋月刊(The Atlantic)上的一篇同名文章触屏一代(The Touch Screen Generation)。On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of childrens apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off their games. One developer, a self-describe
2、d “visionary for puzzles” who looked like a skateboarder-recently-turned-dad, displayed a jacked-up, interactive game called Puzzingo, intended for toddlers and inspired by his own sons desire to build and smash. Two 30something women were eagerly seeking feedback for an app called Knock Knock Famil
3、y, aimed at 1-to-4-year-olds. “We want to make sure its easy enough for babies to understand,” one explained.The gathering was organized by Warren Buckleitner, a longtime reviewer of interactive childrens media who likes to bring together developers, researchers, and interest groupsand often plenty
4、of kids, some still in diapers. It went by the Harry Potterish name Dust or Magic, and was held in a drafty old stone-and-wood hall barely a mile from the sea, the kind of place where Bathilda Bagshot might retire after packing up her wand. Buckleitner spent the breaks testing whether his own remote
5、-control helicopter could reach the halls second story, while various children who had come with their parents looked up in awe and delight. But mostly they looked down, at the iPads and other tablets displayed around the hall like so many open boxes of candy. I walked around and talked with develop
6、ers, and several paraphrased a famous saying of Maria Montessoris, a quote imported to ennoble a touch-screen age when very young kids, who once could be counted on only to chew on a square of aluminum, are now engaging with it in increasingly sophisticated ways: “The hands are the instruments of ma
7、ns intelligence.”What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging for hermit crabs. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, thei
8、r faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. A couple of 3-year-old girls were leaning against a pair of French doors, reading an interactive story called Ten Giggly Gorillas and fighting over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had t
9、urned his fingertip into a red marker to draw an ugly picture of his older brother. On an old oak table at the front of the room, a giant stuffed Angry Bird beckoned the children to come and test out tablets loaded with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped to them, since an 18
10、-month-old might not otherwise be able to reach the table, though shed know how to swipe once she did.Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domes
11、tic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties. “Mom, everyone has technology but me!” my 4-year-old son sometimes wails. And why shouldnt he feel entitled? In the same span of time it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids apps have been developedthe majority aimed at
12、 preschoolers like him. To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Good
13、night Moon.In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age groups critical need for “direct interactions with
14、parents and other significant care givers.” The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then. In 2006, 90 percent of parents said that their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Nonetheless, the group took largely the same approach
15、 it did in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids. (For older children, the academy noted, “high-quality programs” could have “educational benefits.”) The 2011 report mentioned “smart cell phone” and “new screen” technologies, but did not address intera
16、ctive apps. Nor did it broach the possibility that has likely occurred to those 90 percent of American parents, queasy though they might be: that some good might come from those little swiping fingers.I had come to the developers conference partly because I hoped that this particular set of parents, enthusiastic as they were about interactive media, might help me out of this conundrum, that they might offer some guiding principle for American parent
