SPEED READING
Skim or scan the following passages and then decide on the best answer.

     During the latter part of the 19th century two kinds of entertainment developed in America to meet the needs of the new urban dwellers--the ballpark and vaudeville. Both kinds of entertainment helped to fill the growing amount of leisure time that workers enjoyed. both later were transformed into mass-mediated（大众媒体化的） activities
     The first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was founded in 1869 and soon there were teams in all the major Eastern and Mid-western cities. The ballpark brought together crowds of strangers who could experience a sense of community within the big city as they watched a baseball game. Immigrants were able to shake loose their ethnic ties and become absorbed in the new national game, which was becoming representative of the "American spirit". The green fields and fresh air of the ballpark were a welcome change from the sea of bricks, stone and eventually concrete that dominated the city scene.
     Workers could temporarily escape the routine and dullness of their daily lives by indirectly participating in the competition and accomplishment that baseball games symbolized. Baseball reflected the competitiveness of the workplace and the capitalist ethic, regarded as players were bought and sold and were regarded as property. The ballpark also provided a means for spectators to release their frustrations against authority figures.
     As professional baseball emerged as a popular pastime, it became an increasingly commercial enterprise. Stadiums were built to seat the spectators, and the hawkers(小贩) of beer, soda, hot dogs, peanuts and popcorn soon appeared Advertising on signboards, streetcar posters, balloons and in newspapers helped "sell" the ballpark to the public. With the arrival of the electronic media in the 20th century, baseball and other sports would become a form of mass-mediated entertainment. Vaudeville was the other popular form of entertainment in the 19th century. Vaudeville took the traditional forms of popular entertainment or folk art, such as ethnic humor, juggling dancing and clown acts, and made them part of the new mass culture.
     Vaudeville set the mold(形式) for entertainment programs on the electronic media that eventually displaced it in the 20th century. Radio incorporated the style and humor of vaudeville, and television in turn took over the entertainment format of radio when it developed in the late 1940s and 1950s. The quick cuts and action of modern-day television are ultimately based on the conventions of vaudeville entertainment.