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Nowadays, over-reliance on computers and smartphones has eroded our penmansh

游客2023-11-30  53
问题     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 excerpt carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should:
    1. summarize briefly the author’s opinion;
    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.
    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.
选项
答案                 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 electronic 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 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 are 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.
解析 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问题，属于社会生活类话题。题目要求简要概括材料作者的观点，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。
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