科技篇托福素材.doc

科技主题（共三篇，标绿色彩笔的为题目，学生需要查单词、做笔记摘录到考前打印文本）
第一篇：Antisocial Networking科技和青少年交友
第二篇：Generation Y Communication and Technology 美国年轻人一代交流与科技
第三篇：科技进步的优缺点
Antisocial Networking?
“HEY, you’re a dork笨蛋,” said the girl to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you to know.”

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
Andy Wilson, 11, left, and his brother Evan, 14, go on Facebook in their treehouse in Atlanta.
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted表现 on Facebook. The smiles were colons科隆 with brackets括号. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess王妃 phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished空的 long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via通过 e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends联系朋友 than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled震惊 many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.
To date注明日期, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions反弹 has centered集中 on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound深厚的 phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting祷告仪式 have overshadowed失去光彩的 a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically临床的 think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn孤僻的 沉默的 and skittish轻佻的 活泼的 about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
Generation Y Gggeneration Ge Generation[Communication and interaction
The Millennial Generation (or Gen Y), like other generations, has been shaped by the events, leaders, developments and trends of its time.[79] The rise of instant communication technologies made possible through use of the internet, such as email, texting, and IM and new media used through websites like YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, may explain the Millennials' reputation for being somewhat peer-oriented due to easier communication through technology.[80]
Expression and acceptance has been highly important to this generation. In well-developed nations, several cohorts大邦人 of Generation Y members have found comfort in online games such as MMORPGs and virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life.[81] biFlash mobng, internet memes, and online communities have given some of the more expressive Generation Y members acceptance, while online pen pals have given the more socially timid individuals acceptance as well.[82]
There is a trend among Millennials to choose urban, or gentrified中产阶级的 neighborhoods, as their preferred living situations.[83]
[Digital technology
In their 2007 book, authors Junco and Mastrodicasa expanded on the work of Howe and Strauss to include research-based information about the personality profiles of Millennials, especially as it relates to higher education. They conducted a large-sample (7,705) research study of college students. They found that Next Generation college students, born between 1982–1992, were frequently in touch with their parents and they used technology at higher rates than people from other generations. In their survey, they found that 97% of these students owned a computer, 94% owned a cell phone, and 56% owned an MP3 player. They also found that students spoke with their parents an average of 1.5 times a day about a wide range of topics. Other findings in the Junco and Mastrodicasa survey revealed 76% of students used instant messaging, 92% of those reported multitasking while instant messaging, 40% of them used television to get most of their news, and 34% of students surveyed used the Internet. [84][85]
In June 2009, Nielsen released the report, "How Teens Use Media" which discussed the latest data on media usage by generation. In this report, Nielsen set out to redefine the dialogue around media usage by the youngest of Generation Y, extending through working age Generation Y and compared to Generation X and Baby Boomers.[86] One of the more popular forms of media use in Generation Y is through social networking. In 2010, research was published in the Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research which claimed that students who used social media and decided to quit showed the same withdrawal symptoms of a drug addict who quit their stimulant兴奋剂.[87]
Advantages and Disadvantages of Technology Advances
by Lynda Moultry Belcher, Demand Media
In today's world, where just about everything is more convenient and accessible due to advances in technology across almost all sectors, it may seem as though it's a misnomer to even mention any disadvantages of technological advances. However, despite how far technology has taken humans and no matter how convenient it may make things, there are some disadvantages accompanying this level of access.
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Advantage: Great Discoveries In All Industries
Technology advances show people a more efficient way to do things, and these processes get results. For example, education has been greatly advanced by the technological advances of computers. Students are able to learn on a global scale without ever leaving their classrooms. Agricultural processes that once required dozens upon dozens of human workers can now be automated, thanks to advances in technology, which means cost-efficiency for farmers. Medical discoveries occur at a much more rapid rate, thanks to machines and computers that aid in the research process and allow for more intense educational research into medical matters.
Disadvantage: Dependency
The more advanced society becomes technologically, the more people begin to depend on computers and other forms of technology for everyday existence. This means that when a machine breaks or a computer crashes, humans become almost disabled until the problem is resolved. This kind of dependency on technology puts people at a distinct disadvantage, because they become less self-reliant.
Advantage: Cost Efficiency
Cost efficiency is an advantage in some ways and a disadvanta