NewspaperA newspaper is a printe

Newspaper

A newspaper is a printed periodical whose purpose is to deliver news and other information in an up-to-date, factual manner. In some countries as many as nine out of ten adults read at least one newspaper a day. Seen in purely business terms, few products can ever have been so successful in reaching as much of their market. Why do so many people read newspapers?

There are five basic functions of a newspaper: to inform, to comment, to persuade, to instruct and to entertain. You may well think that this list of functions is in order of importance but, if so, you would not be in agreement with the majority of the reading public. Of the two broad categories of newspaper, the popular and the quality, the former has a readership of millions, while the latter, only hundreds of thousands. Yet the popular papers seem largely designed for entertainment. They contain a lot of comment and persuasive language. The quality newspapers put a much higher value on information and a much lower one on entertainment.

It is not only in content that the two kinds of paper differ. There is a difference, too, in the style in which the articles are written. The popular papers generally use more dramatic language with a lot of word-play. Their reporters tend to use shorter sentences and avoid less well-known vocabulary. This means that popular newspapers are easier for a native speaker to understand, though probably not for a non-native speaker.

In order to decide whether a newspaper is a quality or a popular one it is not even necessary to read it, since you can tell simply by the way it looks. Popular papers are generally smaller with fewer and shorter articles. But they have bigger headlines and more photographs.

How does the writer describe a popular newspaper?


A、It carries many articles and few photographs.
B、It is intended to educate people.
C、It contains a lot of information.
D、It aims at entertaining people.
【正确答案】：D
【题目解析】：通读全文可知文中第二、三、四段对 popular newspapers 和quality newspapers做了对比。第二段提到，popular newspapers有上百万的读者，内容主要是娱乐性的，其中有大量的评论性和具有说服力的语言。由此可知选项D与原文表述一致。选项A说的是通俗报纸刊载文章多、图片少，与文章最后一句话不符。选项B说通俗报纸是为了教育读者，文章中找不到依据。文章第二段最后一句描述优质报紙的特点 时提到：优质报纸非常重视其所提供的信息，娱乐的成分要少些，由此可以排除C。该题正确答案为D。