How many times a day do you check your email? When you wake up? Before bed? A dozen times in between? The technology that was supposed to simplify our lives has become the vital time-suck: the average teen spends more than seven hours a day using technological devices, plus an additional hour just text-messaging friends. The advantage of technological devices is connectedness: email lets us respond on the go, and we are in touch with more people during more hours of the day than at any other time in history. But is it possible we're more lonely than ever, too? That's what MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes in her new book, Alone Together, a fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology. Turkle details the ways technology has redefined our comprehension of closeness and loneliness--and warns us of the danger of accepting such virtual relationships in place of lasting emotional connections. For Turkle, the biggest worry is the effect all these shallow connections have on our development. Is technology offering us the lives we want to live? "We're texting people at a distance," says Turkle, "We're using lifeless objects to convince ourselves that even when we're alone, we feel together. And then when we're with each other, we put ourselves in situations where we are alone--constantly on our mobile devices. It's what I call a perfect storm of confusion about what's important in our human connections." What can't be denied is that technology, whatever its faults, makes life a whole lot easier. It allows us to communicate with more people in less time and makes conversation simple. But it can also be seductive , providing more stimulation than our natural lives. There are usually some unhealthy videos online which remove teenagers' attention from their schoolwork. Besides, some online activities make people addicted, which occupied their daily life and affected their ability to form real-world relationships."Technology can be more immediately satisfying than the labor of building an intimate... What worries Turkle most is that more and more people are _ . A) starting to accept emotional connections in place of virtual connections B) convincing themselves by using fewer lifeless objects in connections C) dropping the use of technological devices for connection with each other D) being affected by the shallow connections through the mobile devices
D
(Question)
Dangerous as they are, extreme sports remain appealing among many Australian young people! Camp Xtreme is the perfect test of your heart. Kite Surfing It's the exciting mixture of kite, board and waves. The idea of using a kite to accelerate speed seems like a new challenge, yet the art of kite flying dates back to the 13th-century Chinese when _ was used as a simple means of transport. Catch a wind and you're moving -- up, down and across the surf. "It's always exciting. You'd jump 5 feet or 35 feet. You never know if you're going to go up in the air, and your heart is just going boom, boom, boom." Coasteering It is by far the best activity and the event that everyone is still talking about. This is exploring the coastline without worrying about a coastal path or finding a rocky bay blocking your route. You climb, dive and swim from one place to another. With Coasteering, you don't have to be able to swim as the wet suit and buoyancy aid will keep you floating when you are in the water. Sky Diving Traditional parachuting doesn't sound risky enough. So now sky diving is the name for jumping from a plane and listening to your heart beating heavily as you move fast towards earth before you open your parachute at the last moment. Mountain Biking It's been around so long that bikers are no longer satisfied with just going up and down a mountain. Mountain biking is a sport which consists of riding bicycles off-road, often over rough land, using specially adapted mountain bikes. Mountain bikes share similarities with other bikes, but include features designed to improve strength and performance in rough areas. For details, please call us on 1300-792-668 or click here: www.xtremecamp.com.au. All the four extreme sports are mainly intended to test one's _ . A) heart beat B) physical health C) potential strength D) courage
(Answer)
D
Ques: British men are couch potatoes. They spend nearly half their freetime watching TV. They watch more TV than women, do less housework, less charity work and less childcare--but spend more time shopping, a poll suggests. Analysts from Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, interviewed working men and women in 10 countries. Britain, where men devoted 49% of their freetime to the box, came a narrow second to the Hungarians with 51%.German and Norwegian men watched the least TV--just over one third of their spare time. The analysts took the average of the figures for the whole year including holidays and weekends. They broke down the "average day" into five categories --free-time, sleep, meals and personal care, travel, domestic chores and work or study. It shows that British men have four hours and 41 minutes free time each day--20 minutes more than women. But women spend nearly double the amount of time on domestic chores than men. Almost three-and-a-half hours of a woman's day is taken up with domestic work, compared to less than two hours for men. Food preparation makes up the bulk of the chores, with leaning and shopping the next most time-consuming. They further broke down the free-time and domestic categories to show that men spend 137 minutes each day in front of the TV, compared to women's 114 minutes. Women spend slightly more time socializing resting and reading than men, but slightly less time on hobbies, sport and exercise. Universally unpopular with both sexes is culture--accounting for just 2% of both men and women's leisure time. What would be the best title for the passage? A) Domestic Chores--Only Women's Right B) British Men--Couch Potatoes C) What the Research Means D) Men and Women in Different Situations
Ans: B
You may not pay much attention to your daily lift ride. Many of us use a lift several times during the day without really thinking about it. But Lee Gray, PhD, of the University of North Carolina, the US, has made it his business to examine this overlooked form of public transport. He is known as the "Lift Guy". "The lift becomes this interesting social space where etiquette is sort of odd ," Gray told the BBC. "They (Lifts) are socially very interesting but often very awkward places." We walk in and usually turn around to face the door. If someone else comes in, we may have to move. And here, according to Gray, lift users unthinkingly go through a set pattern of movements. He told the BBC what he had observed. He explained that when you are the only one inside a lift, you can do whatever you want--it's your own little box. If there are two of you, you go into different corners, standing diagonally across from each other to create distance. When a third person enters, you will unconsciously form a triangle. And when there is a fourth person, it becomes a square, with someone in every corner. A fifth person is probably going to have to stand in the middle. New entrants to the lift will need to size up the situation when the doors slide open and then act decisively. Once in, for most people the rule is simple--look down, or look at their phones. Why are we so awkward in lifts? "You don't have enough space," Professor Babette Renneberg, a clinical psychologist at the Free University of Berlin, told the BBC. "Usually when we meet other people, we have about an arm's length of distance between us. And that's not possible in most lifts." In such a small, enclosed space it becomes very important to act in a way that cannot be construed as threatening or odd. "The easiest way to do this is to avoid eye contact,"she said. The main purpose of the article is to _ . A) remind us to enjoy ourselves in the lift B) tell us some unwritten rules of lift etiquette C) share an interesting but awkward lift ride D) analyze what makes people feel awkward in a lift
B