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Read the following essay and answer the questions. 

The New Global Addiction:Smartphones

Damian Thompson

We’re becoming addicted to iPhones and Blackberrys—and it’s not only manners that suffer.

1. Who would have thought, 20 years ago, that a plastic and glass box smaller than the palm of your hand would ruin the good manners of millions of people?

2. Yes, we know about the digital miracles wrought by the smartphone. But there’s no more powerful measure of its growing influence on our lives than the sudden shattering – in less than a decade – of standards of etiquette dating back centuries.

3. Imagine two 1950s housewives meeting for tea and pastries in a department store. One of them is chirping about some teak dining-room chairs that she thinks her husband will adore. But the other woman, instead of nodding politely, fishes her engagement diary out of her handbag and flicks through its pages with glazed eyes. That would be the last time those ladies met for tea, I fancy.

4. These days, in contrast, many of Britain’s 30 million smartphone owners think nothing of surreptitiously checking Twitter during a conversation. Usually this digital rudeness takes place while someone else is talking: a spouse, friend, colleague or boss. But younger smartphone users have mastered the art of texting one person while talking to another. You need only travel on the top of a London bus to see virtuoso demonstrations of this trick by teenagers.

5. My friend Rob hates his girlfriend’s habit of replying to texts half way through an episode of Game of Thrones. “She sits there with her phone on the arm of the sofa, and when she gets a text she always replies,” he says. “I offer to pause the DVD. She says no, she’s quite capable of multitasking – then, 10 minutes later, she asks what’s going on in the plot.”

6. Other people are so inconsiderate, aren’t they? Because, of course, it’s always other people who, say, park their BlackBerry next to their wine glass in a restaurant, thus effectively putting up a sign that says: “Available for more interesting or urgent conversation.” We would never dream of doing it ourselves… except when we’ve promised our client that we’ll be 'on call’. Or when we’re expecting that hot date to ring. Etc.

7. As I explain in my book The Fix, more and more of us are developing addictive relationships with our smartphones. At Stanford University in California – just a stone’s throw from Apple’s headquarters – 44 per cent of students claim to be either very or totally addicted to their smartphones. Nine per cent admit to “patting” them. Eight per cent recalled thinking that their iPods were “jealous” of their iPhones.

8. These are strange things for students at one of America’s top universities to say about their phones, even in jest. They also reveal how completely the smartphone has become part of these students’ identities and social frameworks. They’re not just tools that allow them to connect instantaneously and prolifically with others: they’re also being afforded identities of their own, protected and cherished.

9. Much of this has to do with the way these devices are engineered. They practically force you to perform repetitive rituals of the sort associated with obsessive-compulsive behaviour. From the initial activation of the phone to the weekly “syncing” and nightly charging, your relationship to the phone is structured for you.

10. And because the iPhone’s battery life isn’t quite enough to last a full day’s use – and certainly not long enough to withstand hours of constant fiddling and gaming – “pit stop” charges become a regular feature of the day. Users can often be seen checking for power sockets in coffee shops so that, while they get their fix of caffeine, their phones can get juiced up as well.

11. The makers of smartphones know far more about our mental reward circuits than is good for us. They divide information into bite-sized chunks that, a leading educationalist warned this week, may damage children’s ability to study complex issues. Games apps, in particular, are ruthless brain-hijackers.

12. Take the example of Angry Birds, a computer game app that has been downloaded over 200 million times. The premise is simple: players launch birds across the screen with a slingshot, judging the trajectory of flight and altering the force and initial direction accordingly. It sounds harmless enough. But type “Angry Birds addiction” into Google and you’re presented with 3.34 million results. So many people complain about being addicted to the game that it has spawned self-help pages all over the internet.

13. Some of these pages ask whether Angry Birds addictions are changing people’s brains. Self-described addicts say they don’t know why they can’t put the game down, and talk about compulsively tracing their fingers on tables as they subconsciously recall the catapult action of the game. These sound suspiciously like the little rituals associated with alcoholism and drug abuse.

14. Perhaps a degree of scepticism is called for. The Angry Birds craze will fade, as these crazes always do. But it may leave behind a residue, in the form of the compulsive instinct to perform repetitive actions.

15. It’s not a conspiracy theory to suggest that the primary task of iPhone game developers is learning how to manipulate our brains’ reward circuits. They cheerfully admit as much.

16. Peter Vesterbacka, lead developer for Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds, describes how they make the game so addictive. “We use simple A/B testing,” he says, referring to a technique where different versions of a game are tested on live traffic. “We don’t have to guess any more. With so many users, we can just run the numbers.”

17. To quote a leading technology journalist: “What you have in your back pocket is now as powerful as the thing you had on your desktop three years ago. There’s almost nothing you can’t do on your phone. It wakes you up. It plays games with you. It turns you on, if you’re into smartphone porn. And it will play you soothing music to put you to sleep.”

18. The crucial point is that owning one is a pleasure in itself. This was Steve Jobs’s great insight: that engineering was a means to an end – the creation of an intuitive, elegant accessory that you want to be seen using in public.

19. Inevitably, though, smartphones are not the status symbols they were in 2008. Vendors shipped nearly 500 million of them last year – an annual increase of 63 per cent as opposed to only 15 per cent for personal computers.

20. The implications for the developing world are fascinating. The smartphone, rather than the grubby PC in an internet café, is the political dissidents’ tool of choice in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. On the other hand, oppressive police forces have them, too. As do drug dealers.

21. So it’s really too early to say whether this revolutionary technology will produce actual revolutions. But we can be confident of one trend, at least. With every passing day, more and more people in Lesotho, Patagonia and Papua New Guinea are learning the infuriating knack of checking their smartphone’s inbox while someone is talking to them. （1161 words）

1. Judge, according to the text, whether the following statements are true or false. (T or F) 

①The housewife meeting in paragraph 3 is fictional, illustrating a similar manner from nowadays smartphone owners. (        )

②According to the text, smartphones are now as powerful as the thing we had on your desktop three years ago. (     )

③Paragraph 8 is an analysis of the data of university students in paragraph 7. (      )

④The example of angry birds is taken to support the mechanism of metal reward circuits. (     )

⑤Smartphones’ sales volume has an annual increase of 63 per cent as opposed to only 15 per cent for personal computers. (      )

2. Please write the Thesis Statement of Paragraph 7 on the lines. 

3. A writer may use many different methods in developing his argumentation. Please list and explain at least three important methods adopted by Damian Thompson to support his thesis statement with details from the essay. You should write at least 150 words. 

                       参考答案

1. ①F  ②T  ③T  ④F  ⑤T  

2. Please write the Thesis Statement of Paragraph 7 on the lines. 

KEY：More and more of us are developing addictive relationship with our smartphones.

3. A writer may use many different methods in developing his argumentation. Please list and explain at least three important methods adopted by Damian Thompson to support his thesis statement with details from the essay. You should write at least 150 words.

本题是半开放题型， 参考答案如下：

  The most important methods adopted in this essay are ①exemplification (listing examples), ②quotation, ③ cause and effect, ④data analysis, etc.

Free choice of examples or details from the essay.