Thousands of teachers at the elementary, secondary, and college levels can testify that their students’ writing exhibits a tendency toward a superficiality that wasn’t seen, say 10 or 15 years ago. It shows up not only in their lack of analytical skills, but in poor command of grammar and rhetoric. I’ ye been asked by a graduate student what a semicolon is. The mechanics of the English language have been tortured to pieces by’ TV. Visual, moving images—which are the venue of television—can’t be held in the net of careful language. They want to break out. They really have nothing to do with language, grammar, and rhetoric, and they have become fractured. Recent surveys by dozens of organizations also suggest that up to 40% of the American public is functionally illiterate. That is, our citizens’ reading and writing abilities, if they have any, are impaired so seriously as to render them, in that handy jargon of our times, dysfunctional. The reading is taught - TV teaches people not to read. It renders them incapable of engaging in an activity that now is perceived as strenuous, because it is not a passive hypnotized state. Passive as it is, television has invaded our culture so completely that the medium’s effects are evident in every quarter, even the literary world. It shows up in supermarket paperbacks, from Stephen King (who has a certain clever skill) to pulp fiction. These really are forms of verbal TV-literature that is so superficial that those who read it can revel in the same sensations they experience when watching television. Even more importantly, the growing influence of television, Kernan says, has changed people’s habits and values and affected their assumptions about the world. The sort of reflective, critical, and value laden thinking encouraged by books has been rendered obsolete. In this context, we would do well to recall the Cyclops— the race of giants that, according to Greek myth, predated man. Quite literally, TV affects the way people think. In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander quotes from the Emery Report, prepared by the Center for Continuing Education at the Australian National University, Canberra, that, when we watch television, "our usual processes of thinking and discern ment are semi-functional at best." The study also argues that, "while television appears to have the potential to provide useful information to viewers—and is celebrated for its educational function—the technology of television and the inherent nature of the viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we usually think of it.\ The underlined words "an activity" in the context refer to______.

A. reading
B. grammar-learning
C. watching TV
D. writing