Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)
Your Smartphone Has Officially Hijacked Your Life
(46)
It’s time for you to take step No.1 and acknowledged that there is a problem that you are powerless to resolve—that the moment you and your date finish ordering dinner you pull out your smartphones and start texting so you don’t have to face the possibility of silence; that you have come to believe that you more-or-less actually have read War and Peace because you read the plot summary on Wikipedia; that you find out what your kid is up to not by talking to her but by monitoring her Facebook page; (47)
that at work you simply cannot go more than 10 minutes without surreptitiously checking email no matter how much else you have to do—and that if there are no new messages you feel like a total loser; that you’re always taking pictures of yourself with your friends so you can check on how good you look; that you cheat on the crossword puzzle; that even though you’re married you are always assessing your market value on match.com—which is not cheating, right?
(48)
But think of the upsides. You can never get lost anymore, you always know how to pack for wherever it is you’re going. You deal with fewer mediocre meals, fewer hotels with lousy service. There are no ticket lines for the movie, no need for pick-up lines at bars or excruciating intro Q-and-As at parties, no risk of boredom as you play Temple Run or check stock prices between subway stops. (49)
Gone is the frustration of not being able to identify the song you’re hearing, or the inadequacy of not knowing the meaning of the acronym that the know-it-all in the next office used at yesterday’s staff meeting. Instant expertise on every subject, and all the data you could imagine to back up your own personal convictions about the evils of gluten, delivered to your brain in predigested paragraphs. Camera at the ready for every photo op, voice recorder for whatever idea pops into your head and out of your mouth. (50)
So what if your attention span has been fragmented into nanoseconds, if you measure your social life by Facebook friends, your professional worth by Google hits, and the worst words you can imagine are “airplane mode”?
We are all one-marshmallow OCD narcissists, granted by our devices the magic of comprehensive instant gratification, of self-reinforcing world views, of control over the daily minutia of our fates and fortunes. To not be irrevocably addicted to our smartphones would be senseless.
That being said, why is it that the essence of our app-mediated existence seems so eerily reminiscent of some of our most famous and enduring visions of dystopia?
