A. On the bus into Norwich, almost every young passenger is watching something. The clips are short — most run under thirty seconds — and they are engineered so that the next one starts before the viewer decides to continue. By the time the bus reaches the terminus, some riders have watched thirty or more clips without choosing a single one.
B. Teachers report a knock-on effect. Pupils used to slow texts say they now skim and give up quickly, and a survey found half of first-year students admitted they had not finished a book in the past year. Attention, one lecturer sighed, has become a teachable skill again.
C. What matters, researchers caution, is not winning the argument about screens but giving young people both the reasons and the room to concentrate on something longer. Defenders of the format push back. Short videos teach cooking, repairs and languages to people who never opened a textbook; the problem, they argue, is not length but the endless scroll that follows each clip.
D. Neither side claims victory, but both agree the classroom conversation about attention is healthier than the silence that preceded it. There is truth on both sides, and the emerging compromise is practical rather than moral: schools now schedule short "focus blocks" in which phones go into locked pouches, while teaching students why their attention drifts. The scroll is not banned — it is simply given a time and a place.
E. Library borrowing among the same students, curiously, has begun to tick up again, which librarians attribute to the focus blocks. If attention is a skill, the argument runs, it can be practised anywhere — including beside a phone.
下面这句话出自哪个段落？
“The clips are short — most run under thirty seconds — and they are engineered so that the next one starts before the viewer decides to continue.”