Passage 55
学霸导读 一所常春藤联盟名校居然开了一门课，课上要求学生“在网上浪费时间”，确定这不是开玩笑？
While many students feel guilty about spending a lot of time online reading gossip news （ 八卦新闻 ）， watching YouTube videos and checking Facebook， a new degree-level course offered at an elite U.S. university requires its students to do j 1 that.
Since 2014, the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania—a prestigious Ivy League college—has offered students the c 2 to study a course entitled “Wasting Time on the Internet”. Participants will be asked to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, social media and email services.
“We spend our lives in front of screens， mostly wasting time： c 3 social media， watching cat videos （ 喜剧视频 ）， chatting and shopping，” the course description says. The students are asked to consider whether such mediums could be used to create great works of literature.
But students who select the course at the world-ranking university won’t escape academic rigor. They will also be r 4 to explore the long history of boredom and time-wasting by reading works by writers, theorists and creatives including Betty Friedan, Raymond Williams and John Cage.
The creative writing course is taught by poet and Professor Kenneth Goldsmith. He wants his students to be distracted， dividing their t 5 between multiple devices including phones， tablets and computers. He also l 6 other similarly unconventional （ 非传统 ） courses： “Uncreative Writing” explores plagiarism （ 抄袭 ）， and “Interventionist （ 干涉主义 ） Writing： Writing Off the Page” bans students from using paper， just to name a few.
The constant experimentation （ 实验法 ） c 7 Goldsmith into a self-described “radical optimist” about the Internet， too. While many other experts worry about the effects that endless tweets and videos have on our minds and souls， he sees a p 8 new culture being built.
“I’m very t 9 of reading articles in The New York Times every week that make us feel bad about spending so much time on the Internet， and about dividing our attention so many times，” Goldsmith said. “I think it’s complete nonsense that the Internet is making us dumber （ 愚 蠢 的 ）. I think the Internet is making us s 10 . There’s this new morality built around guilt in the digital age.”
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高频词汇
divide /dɪ'vaɪd/ v. 使分开，使分组
radical /'rædɪkl/ adj. 激进的；极端的
endless /'endləs/ adj. 无休止的；无穷尽的