Questions 16-20

　　We live in an age when everyone is a critic. "Criticism" is all over the internet, in blogs and chat rooms, for everyone to access and add his two cents' worth on any subject, high or low. But if everyone is a critic, is that still criticism? Or are we heading toward the end of criticism? If all opinions are equally valid, there is no need for experts. Democracy works in life, but art is undemocratic. The result of this ultimately meaningless barrage is that more and more we are living in a profoundly--or shallowly--uncritical age.
　　A critic, as T. S. Eliot famously observed, must be very intelligent. Now, can anybody assume that the invasion of cyberspace by opinion upon opinion is proof of great intelligence and constitutes informed criticism rather than uniformed artistic chaos. Of course, like any self-respecting critic, 1 have always encouraged my readers to think for themselves. They were to consider my positive or negative assessments, which I always tried to explain, a challenge to think along with me: here is my reasoning, follow it, then agree or disagree as you see fit. In an uncritical age, every pseudonymous chat-room chatterbox provides a snappy, self-confident judgment, without the process of arriving at it becoming clear to anyone, including the chatterer. Blogs, too, tend to be invitations to leap before a second look. Do the impassioned ramblings fed into a hungry blogosphere represent responses from anyone other than longheads?
　　How has it come to this? We have all been bitten by television sound bytes that transmute into Internet sound b~es, proving that brevity can also be the soul of witlessness. So thoughtlessness multiplies. D~ not, however, think 1 advocate censorship, an altogether unacceptable form of criticism. What we need in this age of rampant uncritical criticism is the simplest and hardest thing to come by: a critical attitude. How could it be fostered?
　　For starters, with the very thing discouraged by our print media: reading beyond the hectoring headlines and bold-type boxes embedded in reviews, providing a one-sentence summary that makes further reading unnecessary. With only slight exaggeration, we may say that words have been superseded by upward or downward pointing thumbs, self-destructively indulging a society used to instant self-gratification.
　　Criticism is inevitably constricted by our multinational culture and by political correctness. As society grows more diverse, there are fewer and fewer universal points of reference between a critic and his or her readers. As for freedom of expression, Arthur Miller long ago complained about protests and pressures making the only safe subjects for a dramatist babies and the unemployed.
　　My own experience is that over the years, print space for my reviews kept steadily shrinking, and the layouts themselves toadied to the whims of the graphic designer. In a jungle of oddball visuals, readers had difficulties finding my reviews. Simultaneously, our vocabulary went on a starvation diet. Where readers used to thank me for enlarging their vocabularies, more and more complaints were lodged about unwelcome trips to the dictionary, as if comparable to having to keep running to the toilet. Even my computer keeps questioning words 1 use, words that can be found in medium-size dictionaries. Can one give language lessons to a computer? What may be imperiled, more than criticism, is the word.
　　I keep encountering people who think "critical" means carping or fault-finding, and nothing more. So it would seem that the critic's pen, once mightier than the sword, has been supplanted by the ax. Yet I have always maintained that the critic has three duties: to write as well as a novelist or playwright; to be a teacher, taking off from where the classroom, always prematurely, has stopped, and to be a thinker, looking beyond his specific subject at society, history, philosophy. Reduce him to a consumer guide, run his reviews on a Web site mixed in with the next-door neighbor's pontifications, and you condemn criticism to obsolescence. Still, one would like to think that the blog is not the enemy, and that readers seeking enlightenment could find it on the right blog--just as in the past one went looking through diverse publications for the congenial critic. But it remains up to the readers to learn how to discriminate.

16. Which of the following expresses the author's reasoning when the author says that the "criticism" over the lnternet, in blogs and chat rooms is "uncritical'"?
 (A) If everyone is a critic, it is neither democracy nor criticism.
 (B) When people only choose to express their opinions pseudonymously, what they were doing is to assault the others simply by waving the "ax".
 (C) Real criticism should be expressed by giving the reasoning, the process of reasoning and letting the audience to reach their own conclusion.
 (D) All the critics should be self-respecting and should be well-informed before they give their criticisms.

17. When the author concludes that "what may be imperiled, more than criticism, is the word"(para. 7), he possibly means that with the shrinking of print space, ____
 (A) words will be less meaningful and criticism much more shallower
 (B) language dictionaries will be much thinner and simpler
 (C) people will not be interested in using dictionaries to learn the vocabulary
 (D) human language will be greatly affected and even deteriorate

18. When the author thinks that the critic has three duties of "novelist or playwright", "teacher" and "thinker"(para. 8), he probably means that a critic should be equipped with all of the following qualities EXCEPT________.
 (A) original thinking (B)enlightened instruction
 (C) philosophical insight (D) matter-of-fact attitude

19. It can be concluded from the last paragraph that the author ____
 (A) encourages the readers to make independent judgment
 (B) fails to advise readers to seek enlightenment on any of the blogs
 (C) never thinks that blogs will share the similar features with traditional publications
 (D) probably agrees that the blog is the enemy

20. Which of the following shows the author's attitude towards the coming of the "uncritical age"?
 (A) sympathetic and supportive. (B) critical and sarcastic.
 (C) optimistic and welcoming. (D) neutral and indifferent.