It is hardly necessary for me to cite all the evidences of the depressing 【M1】______.
state of literacy. These sums from the Department of Education are 【M2】______.
sufficient: 27 million Americans cannot read at all, a further 35 million read
on a level that is less than sufficient to survive in our society. 【M3】______.
But my own worry today is more that of the overwhelming problem of 【M4】______.
elemental literacy than it is of the slightly more luxurious problem of the
decline in the skill even of the middle-class reader, of his unwillingness to afford
those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time and concentrating, 【M5】______.
that surrounds the image of the classic act of reading. It has been suggested 【M6】______.
that almost 80 percent of America's literate, educated teenagers can no
longer read with accompanying noise (music) in the background or a
television screen flickered at the corner of their field of perception. We know 【M7】______.
very little about the brain and how it dealt with simultaneous conflicting 【M8】______.
input, but every common-sense intuition suggests we should be profoundly
alarmed. This violation of concentration, silence, solitude goes to the very
heart of our notion of literacy; this new form. of par--reading, of part-
perception against background distraction, renders impossibly certain 【M9】______.
essential acts of apprehension and concentration, leave alone that most
important tribute any human being can pay on a poem or a piece of prose he or 【M10】______.
she really loves, which is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the
expression is vital.
【M1】