View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the name Google a play on?

2. What did Samuel Johnson do on the night of April 18, 1775, when he visited the library at Cambridge's grand villa?

3. What was Google's ambitious social networking site that launched at the end of 2009?

4. Who is the managing director of Guardian News and Media that Carr mentions in Chapter Five?

5. Which company owns YouTube?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the Flynn effect?

2. Who did Larry Page recruit to help him build what became Google's original search engine, and why did he choose this person?

3. In Chapter Seven, what does Carr think about the positives and negatives of skimming while reading?

4. What factors does the UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield attribute the Flynn effect to?

5. What did Google's Eric Schmidt tell the Wall Street Journal is Google's main goal, and how long does he expect it to take to achieve that goal?

6. In Chapter Six, what does Carr cite French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine as saying would be the death of books in 1831?

7. In Chapter Seven, about how long did researcher Gary Small find that it took for people's brains to become rewired after using the Internet?

8. In Chapter Seven, what does Carr say is the greatest long-term paradox of the way human attention works when using the Internet?

9. In Chapter Eight, what sentiment of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne's does Carr highlight?

10. In Chapter 7, what idea from Samuel Johnson does Carr end the chapter with?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay explaining the meaning of the term "switching costs," and explain how they relate to the act of surfing the Internet.

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay analyzing Nicholas Carr's early personal forays into using computers and adapting to new technologies. How do Carr's early experiences with new technologies predict his later interest, as manifested in his book The Shallows, in the links between technology and the brain?

Essay Topic 3

According to Carr, why do so many people not only welcome, but seek out, interruptions when they use the Internet? Write an essay explaining your answer, citing specific references to the text to support your arguments.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 807 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample