Passage 3
Forget what Virginia Woolf said about what a writer needs—a room of one’s own. The writer she had in mind wasn’t at work on a novel in cyberspace, one with multiple hypertexts, animated graphics and downloads of trancey, chiming music. For that you also need graphic interfaces, RealPlayer and maybe even a computer laboratory at Brown University. That was where Mark Amerika—his legally adopted name; don’t ask him about his birth name—composed much of his novel Grammatron. But Grammatron isn’t just a story. It’s an online narrative (Grammatron.com) that uses the capabilities of cyberspace to tie the conventional story line into complicate knots. In the four year it took to produce—it was completed in 1997—each new advance in computer software became anther potential story device. “I became sort of dependent on the industry,” jokes Amerika, who is also the author of two novels printed on paper. “That’s unusual for a writer, because if you just write on paper the ‘technology’ is pretty stable.”
Nothing about Grammatron is stable. At its center, if there is one, is Abe Golam, the inventor of Nanoscript, a quasi—mystical computer code that some unmystical corporations are itching to acquire. For much of the story, Abe wanders through Prague-23, a virtual “city” in cyberspace whare visitors indulge in fantasy encounters and virtual ***, which can get fairly graphic, The reader wanders too, because most of Grammatron’s 1,000-puls text screens contain several passages in hypertext. To reach the next screen, just double-click. But each of those hypertexts is a trapdoor that can plunge you down a different pathway of the story. Choose one and you drop into a corporate-strategy memo. Choose another and there’s a XXX-rated ***ual rant. The story you read is in some sense the story you make.
Amerika teaches digital art at the University of Colorado, where his students develop works that straddle the lines between art, film and literature. “I tell them not to get caught up in mere plot,” he says. Some avant-garde writers—Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino—have also experimented with novels that wander out of their author’s control. “But what makes the Net so exciting, “says Amerika, “is that you can add sound, randomly generated links, 3-D modeling, animaion.” That room of one’s own is turning into a fun house.
73. The passage is mainly to tell __________________.
A. differences between conventional and modern novels
B. how Mark Amerika composed his novel Grammatron
C. common features of all modern electronic novels
D. why Mark Amerika took on a new way of writing
74. Why does the author ask the reader to forget what Virginia Woolf said about the necessities of a writer?
A. Modern writers can share rooms to do the writing.
B. It is not necessarily that a writer writes inside a room.
C. Modern writers will get nowhere without a word processor
D.It is no longer sufficient for the writing in cyberspace.
75.As an on-line narrative, Grammatron is anything but stable because it ______________.
A. provides potentials for the story development
B. is one of the novels at
C. can be downloaded free of charge
D. boasts of the best among cyber stories
76.By saying that he became sort of dependent on the industry, Mark Amerika meant that _________.
A. he could not help but set his Grammatron and thers in Industrial Revolution
B. conventional writers had been increasingly challenged by high technology
C. much of his Grammatron had proved to be cybernetic dependent
D. he couldn’t care less about new advance in computer software
77. As the passage shows , Grammatron makes it possible for readers to _____________-
A. adapt the story for a video version
B. “walk in” the story and interact with it
C. develop the plots within the author’s control
D. steal the show and become the main character
78. Amerika told his students not to ____________
A.immerse themselves only in creating the plot
B. be captivated by the plot alone while reading
C. be lagged far behind in the plot development
D. let their plot get lost in the on-going story
Passage 4
In 1993, a mall security camera captured a shaky image of two 10-year-old boys leading a much smaller boy out of a Liberpool, England, shopping center. The boys lured James Bulger, 2, away from his mother, who was shopping , and led him on a long walk across town. The excursion ended at a railroas track. There, inexplicably, the older boys tortured the toddler, kicking him, smearing paint on his face and pummeling him to death with bricks before heaving him on the track to be dismembered by a train. The boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, then went of to watch cartoons.
Today the boys are 18-year-ole men, and after spending eight years in juvenile facilities, they have been deemed fit for release--probably this spring. The dilemma now confronting the English justice system is how to reintegrate the notorious duo into a society that remains horrified by their crimes and skeptical about their rehabilitation. Last week Judge Elizabeth Butler-Sils decided the young men were in so much danger that they needed an unprecedented shield to protect them upon release. For ht e rest of their lives, Venable sands Thompson will have a right to anonymity. All English media outlets are banned from publishing any information about their whereabouts of the new identities the government will help them establish. Photos of the two or even details about their current looks are also prohibited.
In the U.S, which is harder on juvenile criminals than England, such a ruling seems inconceivable. “We’re clearly the most punitive in the industrialized world,” says Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University professor who studies juvenile justice. Over the past decade, the trend in the U.S. has been to allow publication of ever more information about underage offenders. U.S. courts also give more weight to press freedom than English courts ,ewhich, for example, ban all video cameras.

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