1 . When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word “literacy” is normally used. Traditionally, people think of literacy as the ability to read and write. Why, then, should we think of literacy more broadly?
Nowadays, language is not the only important communication system. Images, graphs, diagrams and many other visual symbols are particularly significant. Thus, the idea of different types of “visual literacy” would seem to be an important one. For example, being able to read the images in advertising is one type of visual literacy.
Furthermore, very often today words and images of various sorts are juxtaposed in a variety of ways. In newspapers and magazines as well as in textbooks, images take up more and more of the space alongside words. In fact, in many modern high school and college textbooks, images not only take up more space, they now carry meanings that are independent of the words in the text. If you can’t read these images, you will not be able to understand their meanings from the words in the text as was more usual in the past.
Now there are different ways to read different types of texts. Literacy is multiple, then, in the sense that the legal literacy needed for reading law books is not the same as the literacy needed for reading physics texts or cartoon books. And we should not be too quick to dismiss the latter form of literacy. Many cartoon books are full of images that would make a modern literary critic’s heart beat fast and confuse any otherwise normal adult.
Once we see this multiplicity of literacy, we realize that when we think about reading and writing, we have to think beyond print. Reading and writing in any field, whether it is law, rap songs, academic essays or cartoon books, are not the only ways of decoding(解密) print. Video games are a new form of art. They will not replace books; they will sit beside them, interact with them, and change them and their role in society in various ways, as, indeed, they are already doing strongly with movies. We have no idea yet how people “read” video games, what meanings they make from them. Still less do we know how they will “read” them in the future.
1. What is the broad meaning of literacy?
| A．The ability to read, write and view. |
| B．The ability to read, listen and play. |
| C．The ability to speak, write and think. |
| D．The ability to listen, speak and think. |
2. What does the underlined word “juxtaposed” mean in Paragraph 3?
| A．Put together. | B．Pulled out. |
| C．Taken away. | D．Replaced with. |
3. How would cartoon books probably make a modern literary critic feel?
| A．Proud. | B．Upset. |
| C．Grateful. | D．Curious. |
4. The author says that video games _______________.
| A．are too violent to risk experimenting with for the purposes of understanding literacy |
| B．are unrealistic and should not fall into the same categories as the other texts he describes |
| C．are not yet entirely understood in terms of literacy, but are already impacting other forms of expression such as filmmaking |
| D．are irrelevant in academic discussion because no one has yet determined how to explain the ways that people understand them |
5. What is the author likely to write about after the last paragraph?
| A．A historical explanation of the very first video game and its evolution. |
| B．A technological definition of video games, how they are made, and how they are played. |
| C．Examples of the way that some people currently interpret video games and what they mean to them. |
| D．A price comparison of video game consoles and whether or not quality has a direct impact on literacy. |
6. In which section of a magazine may this text appear?
| A．Education. | B．Health. |
| C．Advertisement. | D．Traveling. |
