10. There is a crisis of literacy in this country. One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are "functionally illiterate" and cannot read or write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.
   10)在美国存在着读写能力的危机。据一项研究估计，约有三千万美国成年人是“读写能力无法应付生活及工作需要的半文盲”。他们的读写能力无法回答招聘广告，或读懂药瓶上的说明。

    11. Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the highly literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even unattainable. We are not only not attaining it as a nation, statistically speaking, but we are falling further and further short of attaining it. And, while I would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is the cause, I believe it contributes and is an influence.
    11)能读写可能算不得是一项不可剥夺的人权，但是我们极有学问的开国元勋们并不感到它是不合理的或甚至达不到的。从统计数字上看，我们不仅未在全国达到人人能读写，而且离达到这一目标越来越远。尽管我不会天真到认为电视是造成这一状态的原因，我却相信它起了一定的作用，是有影响的。

    12. Everything about this nation -- the structure of the society, its forms of family organization, its economy, its place in the world -- has become more complex, not less. Yet its dominating communications instrument, its principal form of national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to human problems that usually have no neat resolutions. It is all symbolized in my mind by the hugely successful art form that television has made central to the culture, the 30-second commercial: the tiny drama of the earnest housewife who finds happiness in choosing the right toothpaste.
    12)美国的一切：社会结构、家庭组织形式、经济、在世界上的地位，都变得更为复杂，而不是相反。然而它占主导地位的传播媒介，全国联系的主要形式，却在人类具有的问题上推销干脆利落的解决方式，而这些问题通常是没有干脆利落的解决方式的。在我的心目中，这一切的象征就是那30秒钟一个的商业广告：一位家庭主妇因选对了牙膏而感到幸福的那小小的戏剧性场面。电视已使这极其成功的艺术形式成为我们文化不可缺少的一个部分了。