We are told the mass media are the greatest organs for enlightenment that the world has yet seen; that in Britain, for instance, several million people see each issue of the current affairs programme, Panorama. It is true that never in human history were so many people so often and so much exposed to so many intimations about societies, forms of life attitudes other than those which obtain in their local societies. This kind of exposure may well be a point of departure for acquiring certain important intellectual and imaginative qualities, width of judgment, and a sense of the variety of possible attitudes. Yet in itself such exposure does not bring intellectual or imaginative development. It is no more than the masses of stone which lie around in a quarry and which may, conceivably, go to the making of a cathedral. The mass media cannot build the cathedral, and their way of showing the stones does not always prompt others to build. For the stones are presented within a self-contained and self-sufficient world in which, it is implied, simply to look at them, to observe—fleetingly—individually interesting points of difference between them, is sufficient in itself.
Life is indeed full of problems on which we have to—or feel we should try to—make decisions, as citizens or as private individuals. But neither the real difficulty of these decisions, nor their true and disturbing challenge to each individual, can often be communicated through the mass media. The disinclination to suggest real choice, individual decision, which is to be found in the mass media, is not simply the product of a commercial desire to keep the customers happy. It is within the grain of mass communication. The organs of the Establishment, however well-intentioned they may be and whatever their form (the State, the Church, voluntary societies, political parties), have a vested interest in ensuring that the public boat is not violently rocked, and will so affect those who work within the mass media that they will be led insensibly towards forms of production which, though they go through the dispute and enquiry, do not break through the skin to where such enquiries might really hurt. They will tend to move, when exposing problems, well within the accepted cliché assumptions of the society and will tend neither radically to question these clichés nor to make a disturbing application of them to features of contemporary life. They will stress the “stimulation” the programs give, but this soon becomes an agitation of problems for the sake of the interest of that agitation itself; they will therefore, again, assist a form of acceptance of the status quo. There are exceptions to this tendency, but they are uncharacteristic.
The result can be seen in a hundred radio and television programs as plainly as in the normal treatment of public issues in the popular press. Different levels of background in the readers or viewers may be assumed, but what usually takes place is a substitute for the process of arriving at judgment. Programs such as this are noteworthy less for the “stimulation” they offer than for the fact that that stimulation (repeated at regular intervals) may become a substitute for, and so a hindrance to, judgments arrived at and tested in the mind and on the pulses. Mass communications, then, do not ignore intellectual matters; they tend to castrate them, to allow them to sit on the side of the fireplace, sleek and useless, a family plaything.
Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR. 审题思路
本题探讨的是大众传媒对公众的影响，属于社会焦点类话题。要求简要概括所给材料中作者的观点，并发表自己的评论。在具体行文方面，考生可以开篇点题，简要概括作者对大众传媒的负面观点。第二部分可以提出自己对这一问题的看法，并阐明理由。最后一段总结全文，重述论点，提出倡议。
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高分范文
My Views on the Mass Media
Undeniably, the mass media have been greatly influencing our lives. However, in essence, they don?t prompt intellectual development for the sake of their poor power of offering solutions to our real troubles in real life. This inability lies in the grain of communication which has been invented to pacify rather than agitate the masses. So with few exceptions, the mass media, instead of stirring intellect among their users, choose to castrate it, making themselves useless pastimes.
A century or so ago, a book named The Crowd written by LeBon shocked the world into a new recognition about the role the controlling power played in influencing the masses. A century later, that controlling power puts on a new vest and calls itself the mass media.
While we hail the juggernaut of information thanks to its ubiquity, more sober minds worry about suffocating whiff the mass media puff. More often than before, we witness several reversals of the same story publicized by the media, which is so twisting that it can rank a Hollywood movie. Due to their haste to catch the public attention, many mass media lose their professionalism of accuracy to rash reports. For example, some irresponsible editors base their reports on unreliable sources to cry wolf to cater to the prying eyes, only to make themselves subject to later mockery. Worse still, owing to the strict censorship, the so-called visceral truth-telling may turn out to be a thinly or thickly veiled lie to serve some purposes. “So wicked it looks loyal; so fake it looks real” speaks true of some if not many pieces of information the mass media presented.
All in all, bad omens though these may sound from doom-mongers, the mass media, as the most powerful mouthpiece of one group or another, cannot withdraw themselves from us. It is us, who are equipped with better-nurtured minds, that should choose to digest the news they offer.
押题6 别跟汉字说再见
题目要求
Nowadays, over-reliance on computers and smartphones has eroded our penmanship. Worse still, it may further worsen our reading skills which are based on the recognition of Chinese characters. Read the excerpts carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should:
1. summarize briefly the views on this issue; 2. give your comment. Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
Bad Characters
Some Chinese Forget How to Write
Calligraphy has been a revered art form in China for centuries. Children are taught to write with brushes; endless copying of characters is a rite of passage in their schooling. Writing is a feat of memory. Mastery requires learning thousands of unique characters. Despite these ordeals, literacy rates have increased from around 20% in 1949 to over 95% now. But computers, smartphones and tablets are posing a new obstacle to progress. Penmanship is on the decline. Reading skills may follow.
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Pundits all over the world blame a reliance on computers for shoddy handwriting and spelling. In China the problem is particularly acute. The number of primary schoolchildren with severe reading difficulties is rising, according to a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors linked poor reading scores to increased use of keyboards.
One reason is that learning to write is so arduous. Chinese uses ideograms, or characters, rather than an alphabet, to represent each syllable. An ideogram is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms. It normally takes six years of primary education to master the 3 ,000 or so characters required to read a newspaper.
Nowadays Chinese can use keyboards to type a word in pinyin, a Romanisation of Chinese words that reflects sounds but not appearance. They then select the right character from a list. This process does not reinforce how to write the separate strokes that make up a character, and may even disrupt the process of remembering, says Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong. Ms. Siok predicts that on current trends literacy levels will begin declining within ten years.
The problem is already evident. A government body helped to launch a popular television spelling show that pits middle-school students against each other to write difficult words; in one episode in July more than 50% of the adult audience incorrectly drew a two-character word meaning “gossip”, feiwen.
Over the past century, some have campaigned to raise literacy by replacing characters with an alphabet. That remains unlikely. Homophones are so common in Chinese that many different words would be spelled the same. And China views its script as near-sacred. Abandoning its written form would be entirely out of character.
Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR.
审题思路
本题探讨的是在数字时代，中国汉字所面临的种种困境这一话题。命题属于社会焦点类话题。要求简要概括所给材料中的观点，并发表自己的评论。在具体行文方面，考生可以开篇点题，简要概括材料中的观点。然后提出自己对这一问题的看法，并给出充分的论据支撑。最后总结全文，重述论点，升华主题。
高分范文
Do not Say Goodbye to Chinese Characters
Nowadays, our penmanship of Chinese characters is being eroded for two main reasons. One is that as an ideogram system, it is hard to learn to write Chinese characters. Worse still, most keyboards of electric devices are equipped with pinyin, which skips the arduous drawing of each stroke. Their users can select the right character from a list, which leads to the neglect of mastery of separate strokes that make up a character. Statistics show that with the decline of penmanship, so down goes the literacy level.
Try drawing a difficult word yourself and then lament over what we have lost. Once revered as an art so beautifully created, Chinese characters have traversed mountains and seas to the neighboring countries and influenced their cultures to a large extent. Chinese characters, as
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hieroglyphs, are laced with ideograms and pictograms. More than a way to communicate, characters are entitled as jewel of the soul of Chinese culture.
This shrined position of Chinese characters can be vividly epitomized in a legend in Huai Nan Zi, which says in ancient times when Cang Jie, the forefather of Chinese characters created them, grains poured from the heaven and spirits wailed at nights. Ironically though, these soul-soaked characters which survived many chapters of time are on the endangered list nowadays owing to our reliance on the easy access of pinyin on our keyboards. Gone with them is our reading ability and possibly our overall literacy. Gone with them is the treasure of a unique tradition of fairly long time.
In an era where people dash for conveniences, dismissing an easy way of typewriting seems like a sting in the tail. So the question is how to worry wisely. New ways of script should be invented to cater to keyboard users. Hopefully, we will not soon forget the characters our ancestors have passed down from thousands of years ago.
押题7 老龄化问题
题目要求
Just like other nations in the world, China has been entering an ageing era demographically. How serious is this problem and what can we do to tackle it? Read the excerpts carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should:
1. summarize briefly the author?s opinions about this issue; 2. give your comment.
Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
Ageing
Liu Caiping is a former teacher, now 71, who has lived alone in Xi?an since her husband died last year. The radio is her steadfast companion. Her eyesight is failing and she rarely goes out. Like many city residents, her former neighbours have scattered, and her two daughters live far away. When she can no longer cope on her own she will go to a nursing home, she says. That option remains extremely rare for old Chinese. And that highlights the problem: China is struggling to cope with a rapidly ageing society and a rising number of elderly people living by themselves.
For most of the past two millennia the family has been central to how Chinese have seen themselves—and the state has been seen as a family writ large. Filial piety was somewhere near the heart of a Confucian order regulating society, and the family was an extended, stable unit of several generations under one roof. A very common saying encapsulated it all: yang er fang lao—“raise children for your old age”.
Today multi-generation families are still the norm. Almost three-fifths of people over 65 live with their children, a higher proportion than in most rich countries. Yet things are changing fast. Increasingly, parents are living apart from their children—and when one spouse dies, as with Ms. Liu, the other often lives alone. A fifth of all single-person households in China are made up of over-65-year-olds. In contrast to younger Chinese living alone, few elderly do so by choice. Many are poorly educated. Women predominate, because they tend to outlive their husbands.
China is unprepared for the consequences of solo dwelling among the elderly. Government policy enshrines the idea that families should live together and provide for the old and others unable
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