专业英语八级（作文）模拟试卷293
写作
1. Nowadays, over-reliance on computers and smartphones has eroded our penmanship. Worse still, it may further worsen our reading skills which are based on the recognition of Chinese characters. Read the excerpt carefully and write your response in NO LESS THAN 300 WORDS, in which you should：
1. summarize briefly the author’s opinion;
2. give your comment.
Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
Some Chinese Forget How to Write
Calligraphy has been a revered art form in China for centuries. Children are taught to write with brushes; endless copying of characters is a rite of passage in their schooling. Writing is a feat of memory. Despite these ordeals, literacy rates have increased from around 20% in 1949 to over 95% now. But computers, smartphones and tablets are posing a new obstacle to progress. Penmanship is on the decline. Reading skills may follow.
Pundits all over the world blame a reliance on computers for shoddy handwriting and spelling. In China the problem is particularly acute. The number of primary schoolchildren with severe reading difficulties is rising, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors linked poor reading scores to increased use of keyboards.
One reason is that learning to write is so arduous. Chinese uses ideograms, or characters, rather than an alphabet, to represent each syllable. An ideogram is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meanings through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms. It normally takes six years of primary education to master the 3,000 or so characters required to read a newspaper.
Nowadays Chinese can use keyboards to type a word in pinyin, a Romanization of Chinese words that reflects the sound but not the appearance. They then select the right character from a list. This process does not reinforce how to write the separate strokes that make up a character, and may even disrupt the process of remembering, says Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong. Ms. Siok predicts that on current trend literacy levels will begin declining within ten years.
The problem is already evident. A government body helped to launch a popular television spelling show that pits middle-school students against each other to write difficult words; in one episode in July more than 50% of the adult audience incorrectly drew a two-character word meaning \\
Do Not Say Goodbye to Chinese Characters
Nowadays, our penmanship of Chinese characters is being eroded for two main reasons. One is that as an ideogram system, it is hard to learn to write Chinese characters. Worse still, most keyboards of electronic devices allow typing in pinyin, which skips the arduous drawing of each stroke. Their users can select the right character from a list, which leads to the neglect of mastery of separate strokes that make up a character. Statistics show that with the decline of penmansh
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