In the early 19th century, when a     1     cholera hit Europe, John Snow became frustrated because no one knew how to prevent or treat cholera. But he never lost his desire to destroy cholera once and for all. Snow subscribed to the theory that cholera was caused by an     2     from germs in food or water but he needed     3    . Snow began by marking on a map the exact places where all those who died had lived. As a result, John Snow was able to announce that the pump water was to     4    . Accordingly, he had the handle of the pump removed so that it could not be used. Through this     5    , the disease was stopped in its tracks.

There’s been a warning about the immediate death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to bring disaster for the written world. None did. Reading     1    ; in fact, it has thrived. The world is more     2     than ever before—there are more and more readers, and more and more books.

The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry about. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has     3     shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example. Devices like Amazon’s Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.

As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are now     4    . Inter-connectivity allow for a reading experience that was     5     imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with a(n)     6     number of links: to texts, pictures and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.

On the other hand, there is the danger of underestimating. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long “     7     of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation (碎片化) of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed     8     of the internet will reduce our attention span—that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep     9    .

In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be     10     each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology as well as make sense of a dynamic yet confusing world.