Задание №150633: Задание 3

Task 3 Read an excerpt from the essay by James Marriott, a writer at The Times, then listen to an interview with him. You will notice that some ideas coincide and some differ in the text and the interview. Answer questions 16-25 by choosing A if the idea is expressed in both materials, B if it can be found only in the reading text, C if it can be found only in the audio-recording, and D if neither of the materials expresses the idea. Now you have 10 minutes to read the text. The dawn of the post-literate society And the end of civilisation Now, more than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis. In the UK, a third of adults say they have given up reading at all and prefer listening to podcasts. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading for pleasure, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.” Most remarkably, in late 2024 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a report which found that literacy levels were declining in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system. What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait. If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their Всероссийская олимпиада школьников по английскому языку 2026 г. заключительный этап стр. 4 из 8 first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI). Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them. The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life. Now listen to an interview with James Marriott and then do the tasks (questions 16-25), comparing the text above and the interview. You will hear the interview TWICE.