Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 1 to 8.
For most undergraduates today, opening a laptop at the start of a lecture has become as automatic as sitting down. The device is no longer a tool consciously chosen; it is simply there, blinking softly, ready to absorb every word that the instructor utters. Yet researchers who study students' attention argue that this convenience comes at a price most learners are unaware that they are paying.
A recent multi-campus study tracked the in-class behaviour of nearly two thousand undergraduates across humanities and science courses. Even when students claimed to be "fully focused," eye-tracking data showed that they shifted between unrelated tabs an average of fourteen times per fifty-minute session. The students themselves were astounded when they were shown the results. Many had believed that they were absorbing every point made in class.
The findings underline an unsettling truth: digital multitasking is not just inefficient; it is invisible to those engaged in it. Cognitive scientists describe this as "the illusion of competence" – the false sense that because information has passed beneath one's eyes, it has been understood and stored. Tests administered a week after the lectures consistently revealed otherwise, with laptop-using students recalling roughly a third less than those taking handwritten notes.
Things go from bad to worse when we take into account the fact that the very tools that distract students are also genuinely essential for some forms of academic work. Annotating digital texts, accessing research databases and recording lectures all benefit from screen-based learning. The crucial question for tertiary institutions, then, is not to get rid of devices altogether but to teach students when and how to set them aside. Until that skill is cultivated, the lecture hall may continue to function less as a place of collective inquiry and more as a quiet place of solitary screens.
Question 1. In paragraph 1, the writer is ______.
A. warning against a common habit among students
B. contrasting different methods of notetaking
C. arguing in favour of undergraduates' use of laptops
D. questioning the real worth of costly laptops
Question 2. The word tracked in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to ______.
A. controlled
B. represented
C. examined
D. copied
Question 3. The word astounded in paragraph 2 is OPPOSITE in meaning to ______.
A. calm
B. honest
C. anxious
D. brave
Question 4. The word those in paragraph 3 refers to ______.
A. tests
B. students
C. scientists
D. lectures
Question 5. Which of the following best paraphrases the underlined sentence in paragraph 4?
A. Some academic work at university requires students' genuine concentration, which has become a complicated matter with bad-quality digital tools.
B. It is the digital devices used for certain complicated academic tasks at university that are distracting students from more important assignments.
C. Not only certain academic assignments at university but also the digital tools useful for these tasks are causing complicated problems for students.
D. What complicates matters is that digital devices necessary for completing some university work can interfere with students' concentration.