大学英语精读-1 Unit Four: Turning off TV：A Quidt Hour -2

With free time and no TV, children and adults might rediscover reading.

There is more entertainment in a good book than in a month of typical TV programming.

Educators report that the generation growing up with television can barely write an English sentence, even at the college level.

Writing is often learned from reading.

A more literate new generation could be a product of the quiet hour.

A different form of reading might also be done, as it was in the past: reading aloud.

Few pastimes bring a family closer together than gathering around and listening to mother or father read a good story.

The quiet hour could become the story hour.

When the quiet hour ends, the TV networks might even be forced to come up with better shows in order to get us back from our newly discovered activities.

At first glance, the idea of an hour without TV seems radical.

What will parents do without the electronic baby-sitter? How will we spend the time?

But it is not radical at all. It has been only twenty-five years since television came to control American free time.

Those of us thirty-five and older can remember childhoods without television, spent partly with radio -- which at least involved the listener's imagination --

but also with reading, learning, talking, playing games, inventing new activities.

It wasn't that difficult. Honest. The truth is we had a ball.