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Acommon sight in malls, in pizza parlors, in Starbucks, and wherever else American teens hangout: three or four kids, hooded, gathered around a table, leaning over like monks or druids, their eyes fastened to the smartphones held in front of them. Looking at them, you can envy their happiness. You can also find yourself wishing them immersed in a different kind of happiness-in a superb book or a series of books, in the reading obsession itself! You should probably keep on wishing.
It’s very likely that teenagers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more words than they ever have in the past. But they often read scraps, excerpts, articles, parts of articles, messages, pieces of information from everywhere and from nowhere. It’s likely that they are reading fewer books. Yes, millions of kids have read Harry Potter, “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Hunger Games,” and other fantasy and dystopian fictions; also, vampire romance,
graphic novels （some very good）, and young-adult novels. Yet what happens as they move toward adolescence？ When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another. The terror of eye contact!
If kids are avoiding eye contact, they are avoiding books even more. Work by the PewResearch Center and other outfits have confirmed that few late teen-agers are reading many books. Arecent summary of studies cited by common Sense Media indicates that American teen-agers are less likely to read “for fun” at seventeen than at thirteen. The category of reading “for fun” is itself a little depressing, since it divides reading into duty （for school） and gratification （sitting on a beach towel）, as if the two were necessarily opposed. My own observation, after spending a lot of time talking to teen-agers in recent years: reading anything serious has become a chore, like doing the laundry or prepping a meal for a kid brother. Or, if it’s not a chore, it’s just an activity, like swimming or shopping, an activity like any other. It’s not something that runs through the rest of their lives. In sum, reading has lost its privileged status. Often, they look at you blankly when you ask them what they are reading on their own. Of course, these kids are very busy. School, homework, sports, jobs, clothes, parents, brothers, sisters, half-brothers, half-sisters, friendships, love affairs, hanging out, music, and, most of all, screens—compared with all of that, reading a book is a weak, petulant claimant on their time. Reading frustrates their smartphone sense of being everywhere at once. Being unconnected makes them anxious and even angry. “Books smell like old people,” I heard a student say in New Haven.
I know that reading literature, history, science, and the rest of the liberal-arts canon helps produce three-dimensional human beings. But how is a taste for such reading created in the first place？Infants held in their parents’ arms, told stories, and read to will not remember the images or the words, but they will likely remember the warmth and comfort associated with books and conversation, especially when the experience is repeated hundreds of times. The luckiest of the children fallout of parents’ arms into preschool. In the good ones, books are read aloud, valued,expounded, held up for kids to enjoy. The rest of American children arrive at school in kindergarten and are then, for thirteen years, either nurtured or betrayed by teachers.
53.Why does the author mention Harry Potter in the second paragraph?
A.To prove that Harry Potter series are popular among teenagers.
B. To show smartphones are more attractive to teenagers.
C.To show that teenagers don’t read seriously.
D.To prove that sports, computer games and friendship are more valuable.
54.In what way does serious reading resemble a chore to teenagers?
A. Serious reading is no longer teenagers’ life-long hobby.
B. Reading books will teach teenagers to be polite.
C.Reading can be divided into duty and gratification.
D.Swimming and shopping are similar activities.
55.According to the author, teachers should encourage students to read seriously by .
A.assigning students less homework
B.associating books with warmth and comfort
C.taking reading as a privilegedstatus
D.developing their love for reading
56.The best title for this passage is .
A.Books smell like old people.
B.Do teens read seriously anymore?
C.Smartphones VS serious reading.
D.Educating 3dimensional human beings.
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