2013高中英语 爱在网络时代作文素材.docVIP

PAGE 3 - 用心 爱心 专心 爱在网络时代 　　The city is full of people we can’t reach. We pass them on sidewalks, sit across from them in the subway and in restaurants; we glimpse their lighted windows from our own lighted windows late at night. That’s in New York. In most of America, people float alongside one another on freeways as they drive between the city and the places where they live. To lock eyes with a stranger is to feel the 1)gulf between 2)proximity and familiarity and to wish—at least sometimes, briefly, for most of us—that we could jump the hedges of our own narrow lives and find those people again when they drift out of sight. 　　In a sense, the explosion of online personals speaks to the 3)fervency of that wish. M alone has more than doubled its traffic over the last 2 years (from March 2010 to March 2012) to a 4)whopping 14 million 5)unique visitors a month. And those are only the unique visitors! Match also sees close to 50 million visitors each month, meaning they’re not only attracting new users, they’re building a loyal consumer base that visits often, and views almost 20 pages a session. 　　And that’s just one website—one of many. In the same amount of time, has expanded from about 0.5 million unique visitors a month to over 5 million; has risen from the same starting point to almost 10 million. Even the newcomer , which got its start in May 2011, already has just over 6 million. In every way, online personals and dating are going through an explosion of growth. 　　The 6)societal reasons for this fury of activity are so profound that it’s almost surprising that online dating didn’t 7)take off sooner: Americans are marrying later and so are less likely to meet their 8)spouses in high school or college. They spend much of their lives at work, but the rise in sexual 9)harassment suits has made workplace relationships 10)tricky at best. Among a more 11)secular and mobile population, social institutions like churches and clubs have faded in importance. That