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  3. Forget the widely unloved redesign. Facebook has committed a greater offense

Forget the widely unloved redesign. Facebook has committed a greater offense

游客2023-08-10  58
问题     Forget the widely unloved redesign. Facebook has committed a greater offense. According to a new study by doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University and her co-author Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University, college students who use the 200 million-member social network have significantly lower grade-point averages(GPAs)than those who do not.
    The study surveyed 219 undergraduate and graduate students and found that GPAs of Facebook users typically ranged a full grade point lower than those of nonusers—3.0 to 3.5 for users versus 3.5 to 4.0 for their non-networking peers. It also found that 79% of Facebook members did not believe there was any link between their GPA and their networking habits.
    Karpinski says she isn’t surprised by her findings but clarifies that the study does not suggest that Facebook directly causes lower grades, merely that there’s some relationship between the two factors. "Maybe Facebook users are just prone to distraction," said Karpinski.
    John Kamin, a student at Hofstra University in New York who uses Facebook, says it’s "absurd" to associate the social network with poor grades. "It’s a networking tool for people," says Kamin, who adds that he spends about an hour a day on Facebook, far less time than he spends playing the addictive game Brick Breaker on his BlackBerry—there’s that question of users’ distractibility. But, Kamin says, "I don’t think someone is more or less intelligent because they sign up for it."
    Karpinski and Duberstein’s study isn’t the first to associate Facebook with diminished mental abilities. In February, Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield cautioned Britain’s House of Lords that social networks like Facebook and Bebo were "infantilizing(使幼儿化)the brain into the state of small children" by shortening the attention span and providing constant instant excitement. And in his new book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small warns of a decreased ability among devotees of social networks and other modern technology to read real-life facial expressions and understand the emotional context of subtle gestures. Young people are particularly at risk for these problems, he writes, because "young minds tend to be the most sensitive, as well as the most exposed, to digital technology."
    Some experts dismiss all studies of Internet use as flawed, since there is no reasonable way to control the countless variables that may affect such research. For its part, Facebook declined to address the specific findings of the new study but issued a statement on Monday, April 13, saying that Facebook isn’t the only diversion around: TV and video games can be just as distracting as online social networks. The company also pointed to a study released earlier this month by researchers at the University of Melbourne showing that personal Internet use at work can help focus workers’ concentration and increase productivity. [br] Gary Small is most likely to agree that social networks result in the users’ _____.
选项 A、inability to communicate in real-life
B、over-sensitivity to digital technology
C、lower GPAs than nonusers
D、diminished mental ability
答案 D
解析 第5段第1句是该段主题句，接下来提到的研究都是作为例子说明主题句的观点，由此可见，第3句提到的Gary Small的研究应表明社交网络会造成用户的智力下降(第1句提到)，因此本题应选D。
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