KKiTank question 3/3:
READING PASSAGE 3
Read the text carefully and answer the questions that follow.
The Truth Is Out There On The Net
PARAGRAPH 1. Everyone tells a white lie now and then but Comell University professor, Jeffrey Hancock, recently claimed to have established the truth of a curious proposition: we deceive less frequently when we're online than when talking in person. He asked thirty undergraduates to record all their communications and lies for a week. Calculating the results, he found the students had mishandled the truth in about one-quarter of all face-to-face conversations, and in 37 percent of phone calls. But once in cyberspace, only one in five instant-messaging chats contain a lie, and barely 14 percent of email messages were dishonest. While you can't make generalizations about society solely on the basis of college students' behavior, and recognizing there's also something odd about asking people to be honest about how often they lie, Professor Hancock's results were intriguing, not least because they change some of our primary expectations about life on the net.
PARAGRAPH 2. Wasn't cyberspace supposed to be the scary zone where you couldn't trust anyone? Back went the internet first went mainstream, those experts in the govemment, media and academia worried that the digital age would open the floodgates of deception. Since anyone could hide behind an anonymous chat room nickname, net users would be free to lie without punishment, Parents panicked and frantically supervised their children's use of cyberspace, under the assumption that anyone
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