In the first paragragh, the writer is presenting __________.

II. Read the text and choose the correct answer A, B, C or D for each question.

THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS

Anybody who says they can reliably forecast the future of newspapers is either a liar or a fool. Look at the raw figures, and newspapers seem doomed. Since 2000, the circulation of most UK national dailies has fallen by between a third and a half. The authoritative  Pew Research Center in the USA reports that newspapers are now the main source of news for only 26 percent of US citizens as against 45 percent in 2001. There is no shoratge of prophets who confidently predict that the last printed newspaper will be safely buried within 15 years at most.

Yet one of the few reliable facts of history is that old media have a habit of surviving. An over-exuberant New York journalist announced in 1935 that books and theatre ‘have had their day’ and the daily newspaper would become ‘the greatest organ of social life’. Theatre dully withstood not only the newspaper, but also cinema and then television. Radio has flourished in the TV age; cinema, in turn, has held its own against videos and DVDs. Even vinyl records have made a comeback, with online sales up 745 percent since 2008.

Newspapers themselves were once new media, although it took several centuries before they became the dominant medium for news. This was not solely because producing up-to-date news  for a large readership over a wide area became praticable and economic only in the mid-19th century, with the steam press, the railway and the telegraph. Equally important was the emergence of the idea that everything around us is in constant movement and we need to be updated on its condition at regular intervals- a concept quite alien in the medieval times and probably also to most people in the early modern area. Now, we expect change. To our medieval ancestors, however, the only realities were the passing of the seasons, punctuated by catastrophes such as famine, flood or disease that they had no reliable means of anticipating. Life, as the writer Alain de Botton puts it, was ‘ineluctably cyclical’ and ‘the most important truths were recurring’.

Journalism as a full-time trade from which you could hope to make a living hardly existed before the 19th century. Even then, there was no obvious reason why most people needed news on a regular basis, whether daily or weekly. In some respects, regularity of newspaper publication and rigidity of format was, and remains, a burden. Online news readers can dip in and out according to how they perceive the urgency of events. Increasingly sophisticated search engines and  algorithms allow us to personalise the news to our own priorities and interests. When important stories break, internet news providers can post minute-by-minute updates. Error, misconception and foolish speculation can be connected or modified almost constantly. There are no space restrictions to prevent narrative or analysis, and documents or events cited in news stories can often be accessed in full. All this is a world away from the straitjacket of newspaper publication. Yet few if any providers seem alive to the new medium’s capacity for spreading understanding and enlightenment.

Instead, the anxiety is always to be first with the news, to maximise reader comments, to create heat and sound and fury and thus add to the sense of confusion. In the medieval world what news there was was usually exchanged amid the babble of the market place or the tarven, where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding. In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning. Newspapers have never been very good- or not as good as they ought to be- at telling us how the world works. Perhaps they now face extinction. Or perhaps , as the internet merely adds to what de Botton discribes as our sense that we live in ‘ an improvable and fundamentally chaotic universe’, they will discover that they and they alone can guide us to wisdom and understanding.

In the first paragragh, the writer is presenting __________.

• A. his interpretation of a current trend.
• B. evidence that supports a widespread view.
• C. his prediction on the future of print journalism.
• D. reasons for the decline in newspaper readership.