Issue38 [Jet小组] 第十二次作业

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题目：ISSUE38 - "In the age of television, reading books is not as important as it once was. People can learn as much by watching television as they can by reading books."

In this era of technology, people are offered various approaches to learn. As the popularization of television, more and more people choose to lie on a coach and enjoy television shows while reading, a conventional approach of learning, has been taken lightly. I disagree with the statement that reading is less important as before and people can learn as much by watching television as they can by reading books for the reasons discussed as follows.

As a threshold matter, learning is not only a procedure of receiving, but more of communicating. At this point, watching television can never replace reading books for the communication between readers and authors through words since viewers cannot talk to people appear in the screen.  Authors write book with their feelings and words they use contain specific meanings. Discovering and imagining these feelings deep down in sentences is always more interesting than simply watching images of whatever it shows and listening to voices of whatever it makes on television. Of course, people choose television programs for their personal interests which interaction between the giver and receiver is more important.

Book readers can learn from books much more than learn from watching television. Such as human nature, people usually less likely to learn and come with something meaningful and requires deep thinking. Thus television programs are usually made interesting to absorb viewers rather than instructive. Let along there are usually less programs from which people can learn from than those soap operas which are designed for people to relax, advertisements on televisions are always unavoidable since it is not the viewers who decide which program to be showed next.

Admittedly, television has its unique advantages for learning. Vivid images and sounds make people acquire knowledge in an easier way. This is especially true in abstract subjects such as ancient philosophy. A case in point is a popular television program, Lecture Room, which gains great prestige in this case that famous professors are invited to the television studio, giving lectures on their specific fields and in a more receivable way than simply written words on books. Confucius' theory used to be regarded as profound knowledge that today, through this television program, explained by experts, people around the country get to know more about his theory and relations with contemporary society. Creating an atmosphere of learning that viewers are not along but with instructors at the other side of wire, is the most significant benefit of watching television from learning through reading books.

However, even though Lecture Room earns such an enormous success, follows that there are publications on contends of this program. It is obvious that this kind of books have their market values which are based on people's demands on books. No matter what method of learning is provided by newest technology, people will not abandon the habits of reading books, at least, in a long period of time. Reading always, to some extents, providing people a feeling of satisfactory, through holding the real material of paper, and digesting sentences by the readers themselves. Imagine the picture that one clings on an armchair, with Pride and Prejudice at hand, sunlight covering floor of the living room, nobody else making any sound. This is what people truly get from reading books, lost oneself in the world of the author creates and the reader responds.

Aside from these differences, another merit of books is they are easy to carry with. We don’t need much room for a Television set, neither a socket for wires. What we need to do is to open the light and portable book, reading it with a learning heart.

To sum up, in this age of television, entertaining combined with learning through the simple method of receiving from television programs, reading books is still as important as before. The significance of reading will be discovered by people who do wish to spend time on it and try finding it.