Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten
blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of
choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through
carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a
letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2
with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words
in the bank more than once. The
case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation.
All high school graduates ought to go, says conventional wisdom and statistical
evidence, because college will help them earn more money, become ’better’
people, and learn to be more 1 citizens
than those who don’t go. But college has never been able to
work its 2 for everyone. And now that
close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don’t fit the
pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates are
selling shoes and driving taxies; college students 3
with each other’s experiments and write false letters of
recommendation in the intense competition for admission to graduate school.
Others find no 4 in their studies, and
drop out—often encouraged by college administrators. Some
observers say that the fault is with the young people themselves—they are
spoiled and they are 5 too much. But
that’s a condemnation of the students as a whole, and don’t explain all campus
unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are 6 fight. We’ve been told that young people have
to go to college because our economy can’t absorb an army of untrained
eighteen-year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no
longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-olds. Some
adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that
college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person
after the 7 of high school. We may have
been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside down, it seems, and
through the rosy glow of our own remembered college experience. Perhaps college
doesn’t make people intelligent, 8 ,
happy, liberal, or quick to learn things—maybe it’s just the other way around,
and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are merely the
ones who have been 9 to college in the
first place. And perhaps all those successful college would have been successful
whether they had gone to college or not. That is heresy (异端邪说) to those of us
who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has
to be much better. But 10 evidence is
beginning to mount up. A. partly
F. contrary K.
responsible B. magic
G. stimulation L. attracted
C. interrupt H. preferred
M. efficiency D. expecting
I. completion N. interfere
E. indicating J. ambitious
O. careful