题型：概要写作 题类：常考题 难易度：困难
上海市虹口区2019届高三上学期英语期末考试试卷
Curiosity Is an Increasingly Rare Virtue
Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints (打火石) for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: They are the result of curiosity. But the journalist Ian Leslie, in his newly-published book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, insists that curiosity is a much overlooked human virtue, crucial to our success, and we are losing it.
Leslie presents considerable evidence for the claim that the society as a whole is growing less curious. In the U.S. and Europe, for example, the rise of the Internet, among other social and technological changes, has led to a declining consumption of news from outside the reader's borders. Indeed, Google, for which Leslie expresses admiration, is also his frequent whipping boy (替罪羊): we seek only the information we want. But not everything is to be blamed on technology. The decline in interest in literary fiction is also one of the causes identified by Leslie.
Why is this a problem? Because without curiosity we will lose the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship (企业家精神). Worse still, that lack of curiosity produces a relative lack of knowledge, and the lack of knowledge is difficult if not impossible to compensate for later on.
Fortunately, some strategies can be employed to develop curiosity: If you just accept the world as it is without trying to dig deeper, you will certainly lose the 'holy curiosity'. Of course, one effective way to dig deeper beneath the surface is asking questions: What is that? Why is it made that way? Who invented it? How does it work? ...And if you see learning as a burden, there's no way you will want to dig deeper into anything. That will just make the burden heavier. But if you think of learning as something fun, you will naturally want to dig deeper.
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