Cellphone use and texting are increasingly common, especially among teenagers. Many students think that multitasking(同时做多件事) has no effect on how they perform in school, says Colter Norick, 17. So the Montana teenager and his 16-year-old brother Colin decided to test that notion.
They invited 47 classmates at Columbia Falls High School to take part in a two-phase experiment. The goal was to measure how well these students understood written material. Each participants had to read a paragraph or two about a certain topic, then answer a question about it.
In the first phase, the teenager participants had 15 minutes to digest and then answer questions about six reading exercises. Throughout this testing, the volunteers encountered no distractions.
A little later, Colter and Colin had their participants tackle a new set of readings. This time, the brothers used a computer program to send texts to the volunteers' cellphones every 90 seconds. In each text, fictional character named "Bob" asked questions that required a reply. One example: What's your favorite type of music?
Results were enlightening, the Norick brothers found. In theory, volunteers should have scored better, not worse, on the second test because it was slightly easier. In fact, the participants scored 9 percent worse overall when distracted by incoming texts asking for some response. Only a few students scored as well when replying to text as they did when undistracted. But importantly, Colter and Colin say, nobody performed better during the texting phase.
Boys and girls scored equally poorly while texting, the brothers note. Older volunteers didn't do any better than younger ones. And it didn't matter if a student thought he or she was good at multitasking. On average, the brothers found that even students who were confident of their abilities did just as poorly while texting. Oddly, even though the students remembered less of what they read while texting, most of them answered questions in Bob's texts perfectly.
"Our teachers were very happy to see these results," says Colter. The teenagers' new data strongly support their teachers' claim that texting while studying is a serious distraction.
32. What is the main purpose of the article?
A. To teach the reader how to multitask effectively.
B. To advise people not to use cellphones when multitasking.
C. To report on a study about how cellphone use affects academic performance.
D. To analyze why cellphone use would cause problems for teenagers who multitask.
33. In the second part of their experiment, the Norick brothers
A. collected participants' opinions on their favorite type of music
B. made participants finish six reading exercises and then tested their understanding
C. used a computer program to distract participants from their reading
D. asked participants to send texts to Bob's cellphone every 90 seconds
34. How did the Norick brothers conduct their experiments?
A. They invited their teachers to help design their experiments.
B. They invited students across the US to participate in their experiments.
C. They tested the participants' writing skills before the experiments.
D. They compared the results of the two parts of an experiment to draw a conclusion.
35. We can infer from the last two paragraphs that____.
A. male students are more easily distracted by texting than female ones
B. texting is a lesser distraction for senior students than younger ones
C. students with better academic performance are less affected by texting
D. texting distracts students regardless of their gender, age or academic performance