Gwen Ifill was a famous African-American journalist who fought for social justice through her news stories. After she died in 2016, a student award was set up in her honor.
Ana Rodriguez, a 16-year-old student at Archie Williams High School, won the 2021 Gwen Ifill High School Student of the Year Award. She won due to her real passion for fighting fake news about COVID-19 vaccines, medical studies and other social media dramas.
Rodriguez said that fake news these days is often masked as real news, meaning teenagers and adults need to cultivate a certain type of skepticism before they either react to the news or spread it. “You need to double-check the sources and get a second opinion,” she said, “If you read about vaccines having some kind of aftermath, go and check another website.”
Archie Williams High School English teacher Matthew Leffel nominated (提名) Rodriguez for the award because of her enthusiasm and “purposefulness”. “Ana went very deep with her research,” Leffel said. “She was able to demonstrate the kind of media literacy (媒介素养) skills that we had intended to build.”
The project used a free public fact-checking website called Checkology. Students were required to write an argument on their chosen topic. Then they had to produce a podcast on “The Truth About …”. In Rodriguez’s case, for example, it was “The Truth About Scientific Racism”. Rodriguez also worked on several different topics, including the fake information of COVID-19 vaccines.
She and other students also made their arguments into booklets to hand out. They hoped to educate more people. Some of their other topics included 5G towers, climate change and surveillance (监控) technology.
“Ana was purposeful,” Leffel said. “It was clear she was not just doing it as a class assignment, but as something that had an important meaning for her life.”
【小题1】What does the underlined word “skepticism” probably mean?| A．Doubt. | B．Interest. | C．Curiosity. | D．Concern. |
| A．To praise Ana’s writing skills. | B．To show Ana’s purpose. |
| C．To prove racial existence. | D．To indicate Ana’s ability. |
| A．hand out for money | B．make people think critically |
| C．learn more knowledge | D．enlarge their topics |
| A．Ana does anything with strong purposes | B．Ana does a class assignment very carefully |
| C．Ana does run after her life meaning | D．Ana does everything for herself and others |
