1 . “It’s like tasering an elderly person who’s already on a pacemaker,” says a British newspaper boss of the newsprint market, where prices have risen by over 50% in a matter of months.
When times were good, before ads went online, newspapers had a supportive partnership with paper mills. As ads went away and circulations fell, “paper mills had the worst of it for years as newspapers reduced pages, went wholly digital or shut forever.”
The papers were able to cut down the cost of newsprint from firms fighting for business as demand decreased. Price-taking paper mills suffered in silence, taking out newsprint capacity and adjusting machines to make packaging for e-commerce. The pandemic, with people working from home, meant even fewer newspaper sales, which depressed demand for newsprint again and increased the pain for paper suppliers. In the past 24 months European mills have responded by shutting almost a fifth of their newsprint capacity, says a buyer for a large British newspaper group.
Then reopening of economies and growing demand for newsprint, combined with much reduced capacity and coupled with up-going energy prices, has resulted in a price shock. Particularly controversial are additional energy charges that some paper suppliers are seeking to pass on.
Newspaper firms consider this amounts as breaking agreements. European newspapers will have to pay newsprint prices that are 50—70% higher in the first quarter of 2022 compared with the year before. As for their counterparts in Asia and Oceania, they are facing prices around 25% to 45% above their usual level. North American prices went up earlier, and more gradually; agreements are fixed monthly rather than half-yearly. But there, too, newsprint prices are 20—30% higher in 2021 than in 2020.
Germany’s print and media industry association has warned that mills are going to force newspapers to quit paper editions, hurting each other in the process. But more digital adrenaline is one possible response of newspapers to the paper mills’ tasers.
1. What can be learned from the first three paragraph?| A．Newspapers have raised their prices by over 50% . |
| B．Newspapers and paper mills were good friends all the time. |
| C．Newspapers and paper mills affect each other. |
| D．Newspapers increased their sales and the pain of paper mills. |
| A．Reopening of economies. | B．Growing demand for newsprint. |
| C．Much reduced capacity. | D．Additional energy consumption. |
| A．Europe. | B．Asia. | C．Oceania. | D．North American. |
| A．Health. | B．Science. | C．Business. | D．Environment. |
2 . Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier (安抚奶嘴） for babies and toddlers.School-aged children read stories on smartphones. Their parents read on Kindles or skim a long list of email and news feeds. An invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture:the neuronal circuit(神经元回路）that underlies(成为···的基础）the brain's ability to read is rapidly changing.Our important “deep reading" processes may be under threat as we move further into the new digital-based ways of reading.
We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like' it is with vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further,it will adapt to that environment's requirements. If the environment advantages the reading processes that are fast, multi-task oriented(以···为方向的） and well-suited for large amounts of information,like the current digital-based reading, so will the reading circuit. As a result, less attention and time will be allocated to slower,time-demanding deep reading processes.
Increasing reports from educators and researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students' "cognitive impatience", however than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis enough to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts.
Ziming Liu from San Jose State University has conducted a series of studies which indicate that the “new norm" in reading is skimming. Many readers now use an F or Z pattern when reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot through the rest of the text. When the reading brain skims like this, it doesn't have time to grasp complexity, to understand others' feelings, to be aware of beauty, and to create thoughts of the reader's own.
Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another aspect: physicality. They stress that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important part to information - a kind of“geometry(几何结构）”to words, and a kind of spatial "'thereness" for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination-what he calls the “technology of recurrence (再现）＂.The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back,to check and evaluate one's understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back".
1. What is Paragraph 2 mainly about?| A．What affects people's neuronal circuits. |
| B．Why deep reading is important to people. |
| C．Why people now prefer digital reading. |
| D．What will happen to our brain when we read. |
| A．Their lack of attentiveness. |
| B．Their lack of reading techniques. |
| C．Their inability to understand the complexity. |
| D．Their ignorance of various forms of literature. |
| A．affects the way people skim |
| B．encourages people to read more |
| C．becomes popular among the youth |
| D．limits people's thinking development |
| A．Reading physical books helps us comprehend a text better. |
| B．Techniques should be suited for different reading materials. |
| C．A reading space can help us be more attentive. |
| D．It is important to use all senses to learn. |
