According to the article, foreigners appearing on Chinese TV ____ .

have helped remove cultural stereotypes

help to sell foreign skin

are very curious about China

help educate the Chinese viewers about the west

haven't changed Chinese people's opinion of them

The history of handwriting.Sumerian merchants were the first to codify their transactions in a recognizable script more than 5,000 years ago. They were alone in this discovery, archaeologists have long claimed, though some new evidence suggests the Egyptians were developing pictorial hieroglyphics independently at the same time. The Sumerians used a stylus and wet clay to record the ingredients for beer. The endlessly inventive outpouring of human writing thus grew out of commercial necessity. Since then, the history of writing is one of a virulent spread of the written word, such as India's 200 different scripts, or Japanese which has three scripts and thousands of characters. But the story also cannot miss the wholesale erasure of written cultures. The Spanish destruction of Mayan civilization meant the loss of thousands of documents; only four codices survive. Today there are different national forms of handwriting that are distinctive - British, French and American schoolchildren, for instance, write in entirely distinct ways. In France an ideological row over handwriting erupted in 2002 when the education minister, Jack Lang, decided to stop teaching French children the traditional baroque handwriting because he claimed it had resulted in loss of legibility at speed and the failure of some disadvantaged secondary students to write at all. Lang said he "felt it was time France had a clearer, more businesslike handwriting for the 21st century", while critics bemoaned the loss of a piece of French heritage. Latin script's global dominance is intensified not just by the global stranglehold of English but because of computers. Times New Roman is everywhere because it is Microsoft's default typeface. Writing and handwriting have grown apart. Brian Dillon, lecturer in English at the University of Kent, writes in his review of Fischer's book: "In a world in which most of our handwriting is as unreadable as ancient Sudanese, writing dominates as never before in the form of a technological spectre: Plato's 'dream-image'." If that is the case, what is the future for handwriting? What, really, is the point of teaching our children to write, when most writing can be word processed and voice recognition technology can turn speech into text?

The French education minister stopped children learning traditional handwriting styles because _____ .

French traditions were being lost

he wanted their writing to be more professional

an ideological row broke out

they were disadvantaged

he wanted French children to write faster

Date: 2014-12-22; view: 1701