It is hardly necessary for me to cite all the evidences of the depressing 【M1】______. state of literacy. These sums from the Department of Education are 【M2】______. sufficient: 27 million Americans cannot read at all, a further 35 million read on a level that is less than sufficient to survive in our society. 【M3】______. But my own worry today is more that of the overwhelming problem of 【M4】______. elemental literacy than it is of the slightly more luxurious problem of the decline in the skill even of the middle-class reader, of his unwillingness to afford those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time and concentrating, 【M5】______. that surrounds the image of the classic act of reading. It has been suggested 【M6】______. that almost 80 percent of America's literate, educated teenagers can no longer read with accompanying noise (music) in the background or a television screen flickered at the corner of their field of perception. We know 【M7】______. very little about the brain and how it dealt with simultaneous conflicting 【M8】______. input, but every common-sense intuition suggests we should be profoundly alarmed. This violation of concentration, silence, solitude goes to the very heart of our notion of literacy; this new form. of par--reading, of part- perception against background distraction, renders impossibly certain 【M9】______. essential acts of apprehension and concentration, leave alone that most important tribute any human being can pay on a poem or a piece of prose he or 【M10】______. she really loves, which is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. 【M1】
A. state B. sufficient: C. But D. elemental E. that F. that G. very H. input, I. essential J. she K. 【M1】