Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

Inconclusive (adj) 
- not giving or having a result or decision 
Example: The evidence is inconclusive.
18 
Excessive (adj) 
( C 1 ) - to o much
Example: Excessive exercise can sometimes cause health problems.

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Day 7
You should spend about 20 minutes on 
Questions 1-13, 
which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
IS CONSTANT USE OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA CHANGING OUR
MINDS?
The power of modern electronic media - the net, mobile phones and video games - to 
capture the attention of the human mind, particularly the young mind, and then distract it, 
has lately become a subject of concern. We are, say the worriers, losing the ability to apply 
ourselves properly to a single task, like reading a book in its entirely or mastering a piece 
of music on an instrument, with the result that our thinking is becoming shallower.
Nicholas Carr, the American science writer, has explored this theme for his new book,
The Shallows, in which he argues that new media are not just changing our habits but our 
brain too. It turns out that the mature human brain is not an immutable seat of personality 
and intellect but a changeable thing, subject to ‘neuroplasticity. When our activities alter, 
so does the architecture of our brain. I’m not thinking the way I used to think, writes Carr.
‘I feel it most strongly when I’m reading.” Years of internet use have, he suspects, dented 
his ability to read deeply, to absorb himself in books: “My brain wasn’t just drifting. It was 
hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the net fed it. He describes getting fidgety 
when faced with a long text: ‘When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes 
cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.”
Carr cites research by Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, who concluded that 
constant exposure to modern media strengthens new neural pathways while weakening 
older ones. Just five hours of internet use is enough to awaken previously dormant parts 
of the brain’s pre-fontal cortex, concluded Small. For Carr, this is proof that the net can 
rewire the mind. He sees dangers. Deep thought, the ability to immerse oneself in an area 
of study, to follow a narrative, to understand an argument and develop a critique, is giving 
way to skimming. Young users of the Internet are good at drawing together information for 
a school project, for example, but that does not mean they have digested it.
But is a changing mind a more stupid one? Jake Vigdor and Helen Ladd are researchers 
at Duke University, North Carolina. In a study spanning five years and involving more 
than 100,000 children, they discovered a correlation between declining test scores in both 
mathematics and reading and the spread of home computers and broadband. “The decline 
in scores was in the order of one or two percent but it was statistically significant, says 
Vigdor. T h e drop may not be that great but one can say that the increase in computer use 
was certainly not positive. The cut-off year for the study was 2005, when socialising was 
more primitive. Since then, social networking sites have become enormously powerful 
consumers of young people’s time. Vigdor and Ladd concluded that the educational 
value of home computing was best realised when youngsters were actively supervised by

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Reading Passage 1
parents.
This tendency to skim is compounded by the temptation of new media users to ‘multi-task. 
Watch a youngster on a computer and he could be Facebook-ing while burning a CD or 
Tweeting on his mobile phone. Modern management tends to promote multi-tasking as an 
expression of increased efficiency. Science, on the other hand, does not. The human brain 
is, it seems, not at all good at multi-tasking - unless it involves a highly developed skill like 
driving, David Meyer, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, says: T h e bottom line 
is that you can’t simultaneously be thinking about your tax return and reading an essay, 
just as you can’t talk to yourself about two things at once. People may think otherwise but 
it’s a myth. With complicated tasks, you will never, ever be able to overcome the inherent 
limitations in the brain.’
Paying attention is the prerequisite of memory: the sharper the attention the sharper the 
memory. Cursory study born of the knowledge that information is easily available online 
results, say the worriers, in a failure to digest it. In addition, the brain needs rest and 
recovery time to consolidate thoughts. Teenagers who fill every moment with a text or 
Tweet are not allowing their minds necessary downtime. All rather worrying, but is it that 
bad?
We have been here before, of course. The Ancient Greeks lamented the replacement of 
the oral tradition with written text, and the explosion in book ownership resulting from the 
printing press was, for some, a disaster. In the 18th century, a French statesman railed 
against a new device that turned people into dispersed’ individuals, isolated in ‘sullen 
silence’. He was talking about the newspaper.
The net is supposed to consume the lives of young people, yet the only reliable studies 
about the time spent online, collated by the World Health Organization, suggest children 
spend between two and four hours in front of screens, including television screens, and 
not six or seven, as often suggested. Moreover, there is evidence that youngsters who use 
social networking sites have more rewarding offline social lives than those who do not.
A study on children and new technology in the UK included a ‘study of studies’ by 
Professor David Buckingham of the University of London’s Institute of Education. He 
concluded: ‘Broadly speaking, the evidence about the effects of new media is weak and 
inconclusive - and this applies to both positive and negative effects.
Certainly the ‘old’ media don’t seem to be doing that badly. An annual survey shows that 
sales of children’s books this year were 4.9 per cent greater than last year, with more than 
60 million sold. The damage, if any, done by excessive computer time may not be so much 
to do with what is being done online as what is being missed-time spent with family or 
playing in trees with friends.

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In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write