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  3. Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pa

Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pa

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问题     Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets and newsletters. "The coffee houses particularly are very roomy for a free conversation, and for reading at an easier rate all manner of printed news," noted one observer. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, The New York Sun , pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news from a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media.
    Now, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The internet is making news more participatory, social and diverse, reviving the discursive characteristics of the era before the mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics. In much of the world, the mass media are flourishing. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005 and 2009. But those global figures mask a sharp decline in readership in rich countries.
    Over the past decade, throughout the Western world, people have been giving up newspapers and TV news and keeping up with events in profoundly different ways. Most strikingly, ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing, filtering, discussing and distributing news. Twitter lets people anywhere report what they are seeing. Classified documents are published in their thousands online. Mobile-phone footage of Arab uprisings and American tornadoes is posted on social-networking sites and shown on television newscasts. Social-networking sites help people find, discuss and share news with their friends.
    And it is not just readers who are challenging the media elite. Technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have become important conduits of news. Celebrities and world leaders publish updates directly via social networks; many countries now make raw data available through "open government" initiatives. The internet lets people read newspapers or watch television channels from around the world. The web has allowed new providers of news, from individual bloggers to sites, to rise to prominence in a very short space of time. And it has made possible entirely new approaches to journalism, such as that practiced by WikiLeaks, which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets.
    In principle, every liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment, with a remarkable diversity and range of news sources, is a good thing. The transformation of the news business is unstoppable, and attempts to reverse it are doomed to failure. As producers of new journalism, individuals can be scrupulous with facts and transparent with their sources. As consumers, they can be general in their tastes and demanding in their standards. And although this transformation does raise concerns, there is much to celebrate in the noisy, diverse, vociferous, argumentative and stridently alive environment of the news business in the ages of the internet. The coffee house is back. Enjoy it.
According to the passage, what initiated the transformation of coffee-house news to mass-media news?
选项 A、The emergence of big mass media firms.
B、The popularity of radio and television.
C、The appearance of advertising in newspapers.
D、The increasing number of newspaper readers.
答案C
解析 事实细节题。由题干中的coffee-house和mass—media定位至首段。从首段第三句“Everything changed…to a wider audience．”可以看出，通过利用广告来降低新闻的成本，使得广告商能够触及更为广泛的受众群体，因而可以判断，正是由于报纸广告的出现，才使得新闻向大众传媒的方式改变，故[C]为答案。首段末句提到“with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media”，是大众传媒方式出现后的情况，并非最初向其转变的原因，排除[A]；末句虽然提到“The penny press…a one-way broadcast”，也涉及新闻方式改变的原因，但本题题干中的initiated表明，这里问的是最初发生改变的原因，故排除[B]；第三句中的“thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience”是“pioneered the use to advertising”的结果，不是发生改变的原因，排除[D]。
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