1 . “Look how stupid he is!" a 7-year-old said to her dad Daniel Funke, pointing to a picture of a famous person on the Internet. The photo showed the man writing his name with his pen turned upside down.
Of course, the photo was not the original one. It had been changed to look like him using the pen the wrong way. Funke quickly pointed out the mistake, and his daughter got an on-the-spot education in fake news. By then, however, many people had already shared it on social media.
“The pitfalls of sharing misinformation and fake news can be very serious," says Laeeq Khan, who heads the Social Media Analytics Lab at Ohio University in Athens. Sharing something that’s not true can cost people their lives, he says. Last year, people in India used a messaging app, WhatsApp, to spread fake stories about a kidnapping ring. The lies caused violent attacks in which people died.
Fake news stories hurt people in other ways, too. For example, fake reports lead some parents to refuse vaccines (疫苗) for their children. Yet without vaccines, children can get serious diseases or even die.
“About seven in 10 Americans were telling us that fake news has a big influence on the confidence in our government,” says Jeffrey Gottfried. He’s a journalism and media-research expert at Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Researchers there did a survey in the United States about the influence of made-up news. About half the people in the survey said they had shared misinformation online. Most of them said they didn’t realize it at the time.
Besides causing serious results, sharing a fake story makes it harder for people to tell what's real. And when people find out a story is not real, they may not trust other information from a person who spread it. Therefore, it's important to do fact-checking before sharing news stories.
1. What is the purpose of the first two paragraphs?| A．To bring up the topic of the text. | B．To tell an interesting news story. |
| C．To provide the main idea of the text. | D．To list people's popular online behavior. |
| A．Mistakes. | B．Problems. | C．Advantages. | D．Possibilities. |
| A．About 30% of online news wasn't real. |
| B．Made-up news spread faster than expected. |
| C．Made-up news had a bad influence on children. |
| D．Many Americans shared fake news without knowing it. |
| A．Positive | B．Unclear | C．Worried | D．Supporting |
