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Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2. Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod. A) Taking a step that many professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some colleges and universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to their students. The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students gather together. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu. B) While schools emphasize its usefulness—online research in class and instant polling of students, for example—a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Being equipped with one of the most recent cutting-edge IT products could just help a college or university foster a cutting-edge reputation. Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors. C) Students already have laptops and cell phones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room—a prospect that teachers find most irritating and students view as, well, inevitable. "When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out," acknowledged Naomi Pugh, a first-year student at Freed- Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try even harder to make classes interesting if they were to compete with the devices. D) Experts see a movement toward the use of mobile technology in education, though they say it is in its infancy as professors try to come up with useful applications. Providing powerful hand-held devices is sure to fuel debates over the role of technology in higher education. E) "We think this is the way the future is going to work," said Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at Abilene Christian University in Texas, which has bought more than 600 iPhones and 300 iPods for students entering this fall. Although plenty of students take their laptops to class, they don’t take them everywhere and would prefer something lighter. Abilene Christian settled on the devices after surveying students and finding that they did not like hauling around their laptops, but that most of them always carried a cell phone, Dr. Dickson said. F) It is not clear how many colleges and universities plan to give out iPhones and iPods this fall; officials at Apple were unwilling to talk about the subject and said that they would not leak any institution’s plans. "We can’t announce other people’s news," said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple. He also said that he could not discuss discounts to universities for bulk purchases. At least four institutions—the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman—have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall. G) Other universities are exploring their options. Stanford University has hired a student-run company to design applications like a campus map and directory for the iPhone. It is considering whether to issue iPhones but not sure it’s necessary, noting that more than 700 iPhones were registered on the university’s network last year. H) At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iPhones might already have been everywhere, if AT&T, the wireless carrier offering the iPhone in the United States, had a more reliable network, said Andrew Yu, mobile devices platform project manager at M. I. T. "We would have probably gone ahead with this, maybe just getting a thousand iPhones and giving them out," Mr. Yu said. I) The University of Maryland at College Park is proceeding cautiously, giving the iPhone or iPod Touch to 150 students, said Jeffrey Huskamp, vice president and chief information officer at the university. "We don’t think that we have all the answers," Mr. Huskamp said. By observing how students use the gadgets, he said, "We’re trying to get answers from the students." J) At each college, the students who choose to get an iPhone must pay for mobile phone service. Those service contracts include unlimited data use. Both the iPhones and the iPod Touch devices can connect to the Internet through campus wireless networks. With the iPhone, those networks may provide faster connections and longer battery life than AT&T’s data network. Many cell phones allow users to surf the Web, but only some newer ones are capable of wireless connection to the local area computer network. K) University officials say that they have no plans to track their students (and Apple said it would not be possible unless students give their permission). They say that they are drawn to the prospect of learning applications outside the classroom, though such lesson plans have yet to surface. L) "My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality (a field of computer research dealing with the combination of real-world and virtual reality)," said Christopher Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University, "Alien Contact," for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location. As they walk around a playground or other area, text, video or audio pops up at various points to help them try to figure out why aliens were in the schoolyard. "You can imagine similar kinds of interactive activities along historical lines," like following the Freedom Trail in Boston, Professor Dede said. "It’s important that we do research so that we know how well something like this works." M) The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multi-tasking. "I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis," said Ellen Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.) N) Robert Summers, who has taught at Cornell Law School for about 40 years, announced this week—in a detailed, footnoted memorandum—that he would ban laptop computers from his class on contract law. "I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class," Professor Summers said of the iPhone, after the device and its capabilities were explained to him. "What we want to encourage in these students is an active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of good lawyers." O) The experience at Duke University may ease some concerns. A few years ago, Duke began giving iPods to students with the idea that they might use them to record lectures (these older models could not access the Internet). "We had assumed that the biggest focus of these devices would be consuming the content," said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Duke. But that is not all that the students did. They began using the iPods to create their own "content," making audio recordings of themselves and presenting them. The students turned what could have been a passive interaction into an active one, Ms. Futhey said. The students at the University of Maryland must pay for the service fee if they choose to get an iPhone from school.
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Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2. Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod. A) Taking a step that many professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some colleges and universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to their students. The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students gather together. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu. B) While schools emphasize its usefulness—online research in class and instant polling of students, for example—a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Being equipped with one of the most recent cutting-edge IT products could just help a college or university foster a cutting-edge reputation. Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors. C) Students already have laptops and cell phones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room—a prospect that teachers find most irritating and students view as, well, inevitable. "When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out," acknowledged Naomi Pugh, a first-year student at Freed- Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try even harder to make classes interesting if they were to compete with the devices. D) Experts see a movement toward the use of mobile technology in education, though they say it is in its infancy as professors try to come up with useful applications. Providing powerful hand-held devices is sure to fuel debates over the role of technology in higher education. E) "We think this is the way the future is going to work," said Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at Abilene Christian University in Texas, which has bought more than 600 iPhones and 300 iPods for students entering this fall. Although plenty of students take their laptops to class, they don’t take them everywhere and would prefer something lighter. Abilene Christian settled on the devices after surveying students and finding that they did not like hauling around their laptops, but that most of them always carried a cell phone, Dr. Dickson said. F) It is not clear how many colleges and universities plan to give out iPhones and iPods this fall; officials at Apple were unwilling to talk about the subject and said that they would not leak any institution’s plans. "We can’t announce other people’s news," said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple. He also said that he could not discuss discounts to universities for bulk purchases. At least four institutions—the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman—have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall. G) Other universities are exploring their options. Stanford University has hired a student-run company to design applications like a campus map and directory for the iPhone. It is considering whether to issue iPhones but not sure it’s necessary, noting that more than 700 iPhones were registered on the university’s network last year. H) At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iPhones might already have been everywhere, if AT&T, the wireless carrier offering the iPhone in the United States, had a more reliable network, said Andrew Yu, mobile devices platform project manager at M. I. T. "We would have probably gone ahead with this, maybe just getting a thousand iPhones and giving them out," Mr. Yu said. I) The University of Maryland at College Park is proceeding cautiously, giving the iPhone or iPod Touch to 150 students, said Jeffrey Huskamp, vice president and chief information officer at the university. "We don’t think that we have all the answers," Mr. Huskamp said. By observing how students use the gadgets, he said, "We’re trying to get answers from the students." J) At each college, the students who choose to get an iPhone must pay for mobile phone service. Those service contracts include unlimited data use. Both the iPhones and the iPod Touch devices can connect to the Internet through campus wireless networks. With the iPhone, those networks may provide faster connections and longer battery life than AT&T’s data network. Many cell phones allow users to surf the Web, but only some newer ones are capable of wireless connection to the local area computer network. K) University officials say that they have no plans to track their students (and Apple said it would not be possible unless students give their permission). They say that they are drawn to the prospect of learning applications outside the classroom, though such lesson plans have yet to surface. L) "My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality (a field of computer research dealing with the combination of real-world and virtual reality)," said Christopher Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University, "Alien Contact," for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location. As they walk around a playground or other area, text, video or audio pops up at various points to help them try to figure out why aliens were in the schoolyard. "You can imagine similar kinds of interactive activities along historical lines," like following the Freedom Trail in Boston, Professor Dede said. "It’s important that we do research so that we know how well something like this works." M) The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multi-tasking. "I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis," said Ellen Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.) N) Robert Summers, who has taught at Cornell Law School for about 40 years, announced this week—in a detailed, footnoted memorandum—that he would ban laptop computers from his class on contract law. "I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class," Professor Summers said of the iPhone, after the device and its capabilities were explained to him. "What we want to encourage in these students is an active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of good lawyers." O) The experience at Duke University may ease some concerns. A few years ago, Duke began giving iPods to students with the idea that they might use them to record lectures (these older models could not access the Internet). "We had assumed that the biggest focus of these devices would be consuming the content," said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Duke. But that is not all that the students did. They began using the iPods to create their own "content," making audio recordings of themselves and presenting them. The students turned what could have been a passive interaction into an active one, Ms. Futhey said. Being equipped with cutting-edge IT products may help colleges and universities build an innovative image.
Google’s Plan for World’s Biggest Online Library: Philanthropy or Act of Piracy A) In recent years, teams of workers dispatched by Google have been working hard to make digital copies of books. So far, Google has scanned more than 10 million titles from libraries in America and Europe—including half a million volumes held by the Bodleian in Oxford. The exact method it uses is unclear; the company does not allow outsiders to observe the process. Why is Google undertaking such a venture B) Why is it even interested in all those out-of-print library books, most of which have been gathering dust on forgotten shelves for decades The company claims its motives are essentially public-spirited. Its overall mission, after all, is to "organise the world’s information," so it would be odd if that information did not include books. The company likes to present itself as having lofty aspirations. "This really isn’t about making money. We are doing this for the good of society." As Santiago de la Morn, head of Google Books for Europe, puts it: "By making it possible to search the millions of books that exist today, we hope to expand the frontiers of human knowledge." C) Dan Clancy, the chief architect of Google Books, does seem genuine in his conviction that this is primarily a philanthropic (慈善的) exercise. "Google’s core business is search and find, so obviously what helps improve Google’s search engine is good for Google," he says. "But we have never built a spreadsheet (电子数据表) outlining the financial benefits of this, and I have never had to justify the amount I am spending to the company’s founders." D) It is easy, talking to Clancy and his colleagues, to be swept along by their missionary passion. But Google’s book-scanning project is proving controversial. Several opponents have recently emerged, ranging from rival tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon to small bodies representing authors and publishers across the world. In broad terms, these opponents have levelled two sets of criticisms at Google. E) First, they have questioned whether the primary responsibility for digitally archiving the world’s books should be allowed to fall to a commercial company, in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, the head of Harvard University’s library, argued that because such books are a common resource—the possession of us all—only public, not-for-profit bodies should be given the power to control them. F) The second related criticism is that Google’s scanning of books is actually illegal. This allegation has led to Google becoming mired in (陷入) a legal battle whose scope and complexity makes the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House look straightforward. At its centre, however, is one simple issue: that of copyright. The inconvenient fact about most books, to which Google has arguably paid insufficient attention, is that they are protected by copyright. Copyright laws differ from country to country, but in general protection extends for the duration of an author’s life and for a substantial period afterwards, thus allowing the author’s heirs to benefit. (In Britain and America, this post-death period is 70 years.) This means, of course, that almost all of the books published in the 20th century are still under copyright—and the last century saw more books published than in all previous centuries combined. Of the roughly 40 million books in US libraries, for example, an estimated 32 million are in copyright. Of these, some 27 million are out of print. G) Outside the US, Google has made sure only to scan books that are out of copyright and thus in the "public domain" (works such as the Bodleian’s first edition of Middlemarch, which anyone can read for free on Google Books Search). H) But, within the US, the company has scanned both in-copyright and out-of-copyright works. In its defence, Google points out that it displays only small segments of books that are in copyright—arguing that such displays are "fair use." But critics allege that by making electronic copies of these books without first seeking the permission of copyright holders, Google has committed piracy. "The key principle of copyright law has always been that works can be copied only once authors have expressly given their permission," says Piers Blofeld, of the Sheil Land literary agency in London. "Google has reversed this—it has simply copied all these works without bothering to ask." I) In 2005, the Authors Guild of America, together with a group of US publishers, launched a class action suit (集团诉讼) against Google that, after more than two years of negotiation, ended with an announcement last October that Google and the claimants had reached an out-of-court settlement. The full details are complicated—the text alone runs to 385 pages—and trying to summarise it is no easy task. "Part of the problem is that it is basically incomprehensible," says Blofeld, one of the settlement’s most vocal British critics. J) Broadly, the deal provides a mechanism for Google to compensate authors and publishers whose rights it has breached (including giving them a share of any future revenue it generates from their works). In exchange for this, the rights holders agree not to sue Google in future. K) This settlement hands Google the power—but only with the agreement of individual rights holders—to exploit its database of out-of-print books. It can include them in subscription deals sold to libraries or sell them individually under a consumer licence. It is these commercial provisions that are proving the settlement’s most controversial aspect. L) Critics point out that, by giving Google the right to commercially exploit its database, the settlement paves the way for a subtle shift in the company’s role from provider of information to seller. "Google’s business model has always been to provide information for free, and sell advertising on the basis of the traffic this generates," points out James Grimmelmann, associate professor at New York Law School. Now, he says, because of the settlement’s provisions, Google could become a significant force in bookselling. M) Interest in this aspect of the settlement has focused on "orphan" works, where there is no known copyright holder—these make up an estimated 5%-10% of the books Google has scanned. Under the settlement, when no rights holders come forward and register their interest in a work, commercial control automatically reverts to Google. Google will be able to display up to 20% of orphan works for free, include them in its subscription deals to libraries and sell them to individual buyers under the consumer licence. N) It is by no means certain that the settlement will be enacted (执行)—it is the subject of a fairness hearing in the US courts. But if it is enacted, Google will in effect be off the hook as far as copyright violations in the US are concerned. Many people are seriously concerned by this—and the company is likely to face challenges in other courts around the world. O) No one knows the precise use Google will make of the intellectual property it has gained by scanning the world’s library books, and the truth, as Gleick, an American science writer and member of the Authors Guild, points out, is that the company probably doesn’t even know itself. But what is certain is that, in some way or other, Google’s entrance into digital bookselling will have a significant impact on the book world in years to come. Google has involved itself in a legal battle as it ignored the copyright of the books it scanned.
Thirst Grows for Living Unplugged More people are taking breaks from the connected life amid the stillness and quiet of retreats like the Jesuit Centre in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. A) About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on "Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow." Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began, was stillness and quiet. B) A few months later, I read an interview with the well-known cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve "I never read any magazines or watch TV," he said, perhaps with a little exaggeration. "Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that." He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because "I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere." C) Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in "black-hole resorts", which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms. D) Has it really come to this The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug, Internet rescue camps in Republic of Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time (no phone or e-mail) every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. Workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. E) The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen. Nicholas Carr notes in his book The Shallows. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will long for nothing more than intervals of freedom from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. F) The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new, of course, and wiser sods have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. "Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries," the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, "and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries." He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. G) When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content, Henry David Thoreau reminded us that "the man whose horse trots (奔跑) a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages." Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, "When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself." We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we are so busy communicating. And we are rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. H) So what to do More and more people I know seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation (沉思), or tai chi (太极); these aren’t New Age fads (时尚事物) so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two friends of mine observe an "Internet sabbath (安息日)" every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning. Other friends take walks and "forget" their cellphones at home. I) A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects "exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper." More than that, empathy (同感，共鸣), as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are "inherently slow." J) I turn to eccentric measures to try to keep my mind sober and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I have yet to use a cellphone and I have never Twittered or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot. None of this is a matter of asceticism (苦行主义); it is just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, or music. It is actually something deeper than mere happiness: it is joy, which the monk (僧侣) David Steindl-Rast describes as "that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens." K) It is vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world. But it is only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. For more than 20 years, therefore, I have been going several times a year—often for no longer than three days—to a Benedictine hermitage (修道院), 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I am there, and I have never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it is only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I will have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to meet with a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old boy around his shoulders. L) "You’re Pico, aren’t you" the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we had met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he had been living in the hermitage as an assistant to one of the monks. "What are you doing now" I asked. We smiled. No words were necessary. "I try to bring my kids here as often as I can," he went on. The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what is new, but what is essential. The author moved from Manhattan to rural Japan partly because he could live without modern transportation.
In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooks A) They text their friends all day long. At night, they do research for their term papers on laptops and commune with their parents on Skype. But as they walk the paths of Hamilton College, a poster-perfect liberal arts school in this upstate village, students are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks—and loving it. "The screen won’t go blank," said Faton Begolli, a junior from Boston. "There can’t be a virus. It wouldn’t be the same without books. They’ve defined ’academia’ (学术) for a thousand years." B) Though the world of print is receding before a tide of digital books, blogs and other Web sites, a generation of college students growing up with technology appears to be holding fast to traditional textbooks. That loyalty comes at a price. Textbooks are expensive—a year’s worth can cost $700 to $900—and students’ frustrations with the expense, as well as the emergence of new technology, have produced a perplexing array of options for obtaining them. C) Internet retailers like Amazon and Textbooks.com are selling new and used books. They have been joined by several Web services that rent textbooks to students by the semester. Some 1,500 college bookstores are also offering rentals this fall, up from 300 last year. Here at Hamilton, students this year have a newway to avoid the middleman: a nonprofit Web site, created by the college’s Entrepreneur Club, that lets them sell used books directly to one another. The explosion of outlets and formats—including digital books, which are rapidly becoming more sophisticated—has left some students bewildered. After completing the difficult job of course selection, they are forced to weigh cost versus convenience, analyze their own study habits and guess which texts they will want for years to come and which they will not miss. D) "It depends on the course," said Victoria Adesoba, a student at New York University who was standing outside that school’s bookstore, a powder-blue book bag slung over her shoulder. "Last semester, I rented for psychology, and it was cheaper. But for something like organic chemistry, I need to keep the book. E-textbooks are good, but it’s tempting to go on Facebook, and it can strain your eyes." For all the talk that her generation is the most technologically knowledgeable in history, paper-and-ink textbooks do not seem destined to disappear anytime soon. E) According to the National Association of College Stores, digital books make up just under 3% of textbook sales, although the association expects that share to grow to 10%～15% by 2012 as more titles are made available as e-books. In two recent studies—one by the association and another by the Student Public Interest Research Groups—three-quarters of the students surveyed said they still preferred a bound book to a digital version. Many students are reluctant to give up the ability to flip quickly between chapters, write in the margins and highlight passages, although new software applications are beginning to allow students to use e-textbooks that way. F) "Students grew up learning from print books," said Nicole Allen, the textbooks campaign director for the research groups, "so as they transition to higher education, it’s not surprising that they prefer a format that they are most accustomed to." Indeed, many Hamilton students grow passionate about the weighty volumes they still carry from dorm room to lecture hall to library, even as they compulsively (克制不住地) check their smartphones for text messages and e-mails. "I believe that the codex is one of mankind’s best inventions," said Jonathan Piskor, a junior from North Carolina, using the Latin term for book. G) That passion may be one reason that Barnes & Noble College Booksellers is working so hard to market its new software application, NOOKstudy, which allows students to navigate e-textbooks on Macs and PCs. The company, which operates 636 campus bookstores nationwide, introduced the free application last summer in hopes of luring more students to buy its electronic textbooks. H) "The real obstacle is getting them to try it," said Tracey Weber, the company’s executive vice president. The company is giving away "College Kick-Start Kits" to students who download NOOKstudy in the fall semester, with a dozen classic e-books like The Canterbury Tales and The Scarlet Letter. CourseSmart is letting students try any e-textbook free for two weeks. But not every textbook is available in digital or rental format. At Hamilton, for instance, only about one-fifth of the titles are sold as e-textbooks this fall. A stroll through the campus store revealed the price difference. A book on constitutional law, for instance, was $189.85 new, $142.40 used and $85.45 for rent. (Typically, an e-textbook is cheaper than a used book, though more expensive than a rental.) I) The expense of college textbooks, which is estimated to have risen four times the inflation rate in recent years, has become such a concern that some politicians are taking up the cause. Last month, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York urged more college stores to rent books, after a survey of 38 campus bookstores in New York City and on Long Island by his office found that 16 did not offer the option. J) On Thursday, students at more than 40 colleges nationwide are planning an Affordable Textbooks Day of Action to encourage faculty members to assign texts that are less expensive, or offered free online. K) For now, buying books the old-fashioned way—new or used—prevails. Charles Schmidt, the spokesman for the National Association of College Stores, said that if a campus store sold a new book for $100, it would typically buy the book back for $50 at semester’s end and sell it to the next student for $75. L) The buy-back price plunges, however, if the professor drops the book from the syllabus or if the bookstore has bought enough books to meet demand. When Louis Boguchwal, majoring in economics and math, tried to sell a $100 linear algebra (线性代数) textbook back to the college bookstore, he was offered $15. "It was insulting," he said. "They give you next to nothing." M) Thus, the creation of Hamilton’s new nonprofit Web site, getmytextbooks.org. So far, traffic has been light: only about 70 books have been sold this fall. But Jason Mariasis, president of the EntrepreneurClub, said he expected sales to pick up as word spread. N) Mr. Begolli, a member of the club, recently sold three German novels for $17 on the site. "If I had sold them back to the bookstore, I would have gotten $7 or $8," he said. "The bookstore is king when it comes to textbook sales. We felt there should be something for students, by students." O) Yet some students have to go it alone. Rosemary Rocha, an N.Y.U. student pursuing a degree in hospitality and tourism management, added up her required reading for the semester: $600. "It’s harsh," she said. "I’m currently collecting unemployment, so that’s not going to happen." P) Instead, she waits to borrow the few copies her professors leave on reserve at the library, or relies on the kindness of classmates. "My friends will let me borrow their books in exchange for coffee or a slice of pizza," she said. "I very seldom buy the textbooks, but I’m always like a chicken without a head." Most students still prefer the traditional paper-and-ink textbooks because they have been used to their format ever since childhood.
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