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Ubiquitous, addictive and transformative, smartphones become a necessity of

游客2024-11-06  9
问题     Ubiquitous, addictive and transformative, smartphones become a necessity of our daily lives. Along with the conveniences smartphones bring us, worries about the negative effects of them have never stopped. In the following excerpt, the author gives his views on smartphones. 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.
    Planet of the Phones
    The dawn of the planet of the smartphones came in January 2007, when Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in front of a rapt audience of Apple acolytes, brandished a slab of plastic, metal and silicon not much bigger than a Kit Kat. "This will change everything," he promised. For once there was no hyperbole. Just eight years later Apple’s iPhone exemplifies the early 21st century’s defining technology.
    Smartphones matter partly because of their ubiquity. They have become the fastest-selling gadgets in history, outstripping the growth of the simple mobile phones that preceded them. They outsell personal computers four to one. Today about half the adult population owns smartphones; by 2020, 80% will. Smartphones have also penetrated every aspect of daily life. The average American is buried in one for over two hours every day. Asked which media they would miss most, British teenagers pick mobile devices over TV sets, PCs and games consoles. Nearly 80% of smartphone-owners check messages, news or other services within 15 minutes of getting up.
    The bedroom is just the beginning. Smartphones are more than a convenient route online, rather as cars are more than engines on wheels and clocks are not merely a means to count the hours. Much as the car and the clock did in their time, so today the smartphone is poised to enrich lives, reshape entire industries and transform societies—and in ways that Snap-chatting teenagers cannot begin to imagine.
    As with all technologies blessed by smartphones, this future conjures up a host of worries. Some, such as "text neck" (hunching over a smartphone stresses the spine) are surely transient. Others, such as dependency—smartphone users exhibit "nomophobia" when they happen to find themselves empty-handed—are a measure of utility as much as addiction. After all, people also hate to be without their wheels or their watch.
    The greater fear is over privacy. The smartphone turns the person next to you into a potential publisher of your most private or embarrassing moments. Many app vendors, who know a great deal about you, sell data without proper disclosure; mobile-privacy policies routinely rival "Hamlet" for length. And if leaked documents are correct, GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency, has managed to hack a big vendor of SIM cards in order to be able to listen in to people’s calls. If spooks in democracies are doing this sort of thing, you can be sure that those in authoritarian regimes will, too. Smartphones will give dictators unprecedented scope to spy on and corral their unwilling subjects.
    By their nature, seminal technologies ask hard questions of society, especially as people adapt to them. Smartphones are no different. If citizens aren’t protected from prying eyes, some will suffer and others turn their backs. Societies will have to develop new norms and companies learn how to balance privacy and profit. Governments will have to define what is acceptable. But in eight short years smartphones have changed the world—and they have hardly begun.
    Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR.
选项
答案                 The Negative Impact of Using Smartphones
    Ubiquitous and convenient, smartphones storm into almost every aspect of our life. Along with the advantages they offer such as enrichment of our life and easy interaction with each other, their setbacks ranging from physical harm to mental addiction are obvious too. Worst of all, the violation of privacy facilitated by smartphones troubles us. To tackle with this problem, in future, new norms should be taken into serious consideration.
    Smartphone, as its label suggests, floods into every corner of our life, presenting itself as the latest cosset for almost everybody with its ubiquity. Its glamour overshadows almost every other gadget so much that today the name of a new "disease" has been coined ("nomophobia") to define the anxiety of those whose phone connection gets cut off.
    Against the cry aimed at hailing the advantages of smartphones, more outcry over their eroding power can be heard everywhere. Psychologists say that smartphones are sucking users into an unsatisfying digital facsimile of reality, frying their memories, atrophying their social skills and generally rotting their brains. Sociologists point out social networks which prevail over smartphones such as Weibo and WeChat make their users lonely, socially inept and envious. Educationists protest that easy search engines are immersing a generation in shallow answers to trivial questions and crowding out the capacity for deep and serious thought. All these blames are true in some sense but they can never stop our insatiable appetites for information, stimulation, and validation which are conveniently offered by smartphones.
    To summarize, there are perils of smartphones which are already enslaving our life. However, these risks should not obscure the huge benefits of them. Hopefully, sober use of smartphones can be adopted by us in the near future.
解析 本题探讨的是使用智能手机的负面影响。题目要求简要概括所给材料中关于智能手机的观点，并发表自己的评论。在具体行文方面，考生可以开篇点题，简要概括作者的观点；第二、三段可以提出自己对这一问题的观点并给出充分的论据支撑；最后一段总结全文，重述论点并提出建议。
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