114 年 國立臺灣大學語言學研究所《專業英文（B）》

Read the following article and answer the questions below. Use only English to answer the following questions. Your answers will be graded on the clarity of the exposition, as well as on the appropriateness, correctness and relevance of the particular examples and facts that you use to illustrate or to support your points.

Why Is Australia Banning Social Media for Youth Under 16?

Last week, the Australian government legislated a national minimum age of 16 years for opening accounts on major social media platforms. The legislation was built on the increasing recognition that social media is doing harm to the development of young people, creating a series of knock-on effects for both personal and national capabilities. Australia is seeking to be a world leader in advancing solutions to these problems, although its efforts have not come without pushback, not least from social media companies themselves.

We all love the internet. Its advantages to our daily lives are innumerable. Yet in the close to three decades since it became an everyday feature and then a necessity, we haven't stopped to consider its anthropological effects. The internet has accelerated capitalism into an incessant change machine. As a species whose existence until very recently has experienced change slowly, the permanent economic and social revolutions of the last three decades have been incredibly difficult for our monkey brains to process.

These changes are proving most difficult to adjust to in the developmental stages that precede adulthood. Social media usage has been linked to a lack of sleep in ages where sleep is vital, problems with maintaining attention, feelings of exclusion, cyberbullying and sexual harassment, a constant search for online validation, and an exposure to harmful stereotypes or unhealthy social expectations. Alongside this can be the introduction of ideas that are difficult to process without the wisdom of age.

Economist and Labor Party MP Andrew Leigh and mental health researcher Steven Robson analyzed the Australian data on trends in mental disorders, self-harm hospitalizations, and suicide rates since smartphones and social media have become ubiquitous. They wrote:

"Over the period from 2007-2010 to 2019-2022, the mental wellbeing of young Australians became worse. Much worse. The share of young people reporting a mental disorder rose by 40 per cent for males and 60 per cent for females. Self-harm hospitalizations rose 15 per cent for males and 43 per cent for females. Suicide deaths rose 23 per cent for males and 70 per cent for females."

There may be multiple reasons for these awful shifts, but the correlation with the invention of smartphones and widespread use of social media is a strong one that cannot be ignored. It is something Australian teenagers themselves have highlighted as a factor in their declining mental health. The recognition of this correlation is also found in polling indicates that around 77 percent of Australians support the ban.

Alongside the mental health of the country's youth, Australia should arguably also be concerned with the effect social media is having on politics, in which a rules-free online environment is translating to a rules-free expectation within regular society. The rise of Donald Trump, a man unbound by rules, norms, and institutions, has occurred because people see him as an avatar for their own desire to be free of personal constraints. Limiting access to narcissistic online environments may be seen as a way of building back character and sense of civic duty among Australian youngsters.

The social media ban compels social media companies to restrict access to their platforms for users under 16, with fines of up to US$32 million for failing to comply. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Snapchat are the law's primary targets. YouTube will be excluded due to its significant educational application. Punishment for noncompliance will be directed at platforms, not users.

Although passed into law last week, the legislation won't come into force for 12 months, as the government is waiting on trials of age assurance technology to be tested and deemed reliable to use.

What the Australian government is doing by legislating the ban early is sending a global signal. The hope is that other countries will also come to the same conclusion about the harm social media is doing to their youth and seek to implement similar laws. Australia, after all, is probably too small itself to take on the power of the tech giants, but a united front of multiple countries is far more likely to force these companies to implement measures that take online safety seriously.

However, the elephant in the room is the current relationship between X CEO Elon Musk and United States President-elect Trump. For any new age restrictions on social media to be effective they need Washington's involvement - both as the world's most powerful state, and because most of these tech giants are American-owned and operated. This relationship, plus the fact that social media has been a massive tool in aiding Trump's rise to power, may mean that the U.S. is unlikely to act. The hope for Australia will be that there are enough other powerful allies around the world that can reinforce and advance Australia's decision.

(1) What does "knock-on" mean as in "knock-on effect"? Use your own words to explain, and explain how you come up with this interpretation. (5 points)
(2) Why did the author mention Donald Trump? Why is he relevant to this ban? List the author's points. (12 points)
(3) What is "cyberbullying"? (2 points) To your understanding, why is cyberbullying so pervasive? (6 points)

Imagine you are a GPT robot. You are provided with the following screenshots. Write a 150-word summary explaining the information and messages conveyed by the images and text in these screenshots. Your response will be graded based on the clarity of your exposition, as well as the appropriateness, accuracy, and relevance of the examples and facts used to support your points.

🖼️【此處有附圖，請對照原卷】

Following the previous question, now take on the role of a human reader. As a perceptive and intelligent individual, you quickly realize that all the provided information in the previous question was flawed or misleading. Write a 150-word essay arguing against the standpoint presented in the previous question. Incorporate evidence or counter-evidence to support your argument. Your response will be graded based on the clarity of your exposition, as well as the appropriateness, accuracy, and relevance of the examples and facts used to illustrate or support your points.

🖼️【此處有附圖，請對照原卷】

Please study the graph and answer the following questions.

(1) Please summarize what the graph shows. (10 points)
(2) Based on the graph, what is currently the most popular religion in the world? Would that change in 2050? State your reasons. (5 points)
(3) Based on the graph, which religion(s) would you predict to likely disappear in 2200? State your reasons. (10 points)

🖼️【此處有附圖，請對照原卷】

Please read the article and answer the following questions.

(1) Please write a 250-word summary of the article. (15 points)
(2) Why is this finding scientifically interesting? As a student interested in linguistics, does this ability of migrating birds surprise you? Why or why not? (10 points)

Migrating Birds Sing to Team Up with Other Species

Songbirds may socialize across species during nighttime migrations

Gayoung Lee

Tiny songbirds such as cardinals and warblers migrate thousands of miles, flying at night and resting during the day, to and from their wintering grounds and unlike many larger birds, they forego flocks and travel separately. But new research suggests they're not entirely alone in the dark sky. Benjamin Van Doren, an ornithologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues set up ground-based microphones at 26 sites across Eastern North America and collected more than 18,300 hours of bird flight calls. The researchers found that solitary migrating songbirds seem to cooperate across species and possibly share information with other solo travelers about who they were and what to watch out for ahead.

The findings, published on Wednesday in Current Biology, add to growing evidence that interspecies social interactions may influence songbirds' migratory behavior far more than was previously believed.

The conventional wisdom had been "that each bird is following its own internal instinct or its own experience," Van Doren says. "If it's not a young bird and has already [migrated] a few times, they definitely rely on memory and experience-but generally they're just on their own."

Flying in the dark presents challenges to airborne cooperation, notes biologist Allison Pierce, who studies plover migration at University of Colorado Denver and was not involved in the new paper. For example, visual cues such as another bird's flight path are absent. This impelled Van Doren and his colleagues to look-or rather, listen for other data: the seemingly random pings songbirds chirp out every few seconds to every minute.

"It's really been unclear why exactly they are spending all this energy and all this effort calling while they're migrating," Van Doren says. "There must be some reason why or benefit to this behavior. Otherwise they're just wasting energy."

To analyze what ended up being a gigantic amount of data, Van Doren and his colleagues used machine-learning technology with a customized version of Merlin, a bird-call-identification app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

They found that individual birds from different species were flying near one another and calling out to each other using certain patterns, "more so than we could explain by chance," Van Doren says. So there appeared to be some reason the birds were in proximity. The new study "potentially suggests that these birds aren't completely on their own trying to find their way from Chicago to Argentina ... and that maybe there's actually some social information being exchanged among these billions of songbirds migrating at night, which would totally flip around our understanding of how songbird migration works."

It's still unclear exactly what information the birds may be communicating, Van Doren says. But researchers have some pretty good guesses. For instance, different bird species have different calls, but even within the same species, their "pings" vary across age or sex groups-suggesting that birds could be using such information to introduce themselves. Whatever the case, it's highly likely that "staying in touch with other individuals could help them ... navigate more effectively," Van Doren explains. They could be exchanging knowledge about landing spots and tricky weather conditions such as fog or rain, for instance. "Migration is a very risky time, even for birds that have done it before."

Researchers have previously observed that songbirds form "mixed-species flocks" while searching for food and avoiding predators during the day, Van Doren adds. The new study suggests such partnerships could play a more significant role than researchers realized. Additional studies will further test these hypotheses, hopefully by using more direct tracking methods, such as tagging specific birds to track them during migration.

"If we could take it from this big population-level scale and try to understand what the individual's doing," Pierce says, "It is going to be a key to understanding how birds are migrating."

"To me, it speaks to the amazing complexity of how nature works," Van Doren says, "and it's exciting to be still learning new things about these well-known phenomena that are just spectacular."