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Day 12 of Spring Break – SUMMARISING QUESTIONS – Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation

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Summarise the key points in the writer’s argument against the practice of capturing everything on camera. (4)

New technology has made is simple to record on camera almost any trivial event.  And it’s the work of a mouse-click to distribute those images to all and sundry.  Yet just because something is technically possible doesn’t automatically make it desirable.  I wonder if it is starting to impair the transient joy and spontaneity of daily life.  This ubiquitous, almost obligatory obsession with capturing even the most private thing in life for posterity is starting to rob us of our ability to savour the moment.  And if we don’t fully savour the moment as it happens, we may miss its significance, pungency and richness.   That makes the process of recalling it later much harder.  Paradoxically, our click-click obsession with photographing everything may be sapping, rather than enhancing, our brain’s ability to revisit old events with pleasure or nostalgia.

“You had to be there” isn’t just a cliché.  It’s also good advice.  We should stop trying to freeze-frame treasurable moments for some tomorrow that may never come, or some absentee audience that probably isn’t interested anyway, and just enjoy them as they come and go.  God knows, they come and go quickly enough.

Day 7 of Spring Break – SUMMARISING QUESTIONS– Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation

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In your own words, as far as possible, give four reasons the writer presents in lines 35-46 in favour of maintaining traditional public libraries. (4)

Despite Google we Still Need Good Libraries
It may well be that public demand and technical change mean we no longer need the dense neighbourhood network of local libraries of yore. But our culture, local and universal, does demand strategically situated libraries where one can find the material that is too expensive for the ordinary person to buy, or too complex to find online. Such facilities are worth funding publicly because the return in informed citizenship and civic pride is far in excess of the money spent.

Libraries also have that undervalued resource—the trained librarian. The ultimate Achilles’ heel of the internet is that it presents every page of information as being equally valid, which is of course nonsense. The internet is cluttered with false information, or just plain junk. The library, with its collection honed and developed by experts, is a guarantee of the quality and veracity of the information contained therein, something that Google can never provide.