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  3. They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When Newsweek recently asked 1 000 US citizens to t

They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When Newsweek recently asked 1 000 US citizens to t

admin2012-08-05  48
问题     They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When Newsweek recently asked 1 000 US citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29% couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6% couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar. Don’t get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they’ve existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us.
    To appreciate the risks involved, it’s important to understand where American ignorance comes from. Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the US political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority party rules without having to "share power with a lot of subnational governments," notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, coauthor of Winner-Take-All Politics. In contrast, we’re saddled with a nonproportional Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office. "Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote," says Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen. "You know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more."
    Other factors exacerbate (加重) the situation. A big one, Hacker argues, is the decentralized US education system, which is run mostly by individual states: "When you have more centrally managed curricula, you have more common knowledge and a stronger civic culture." Another hitch is our reliance on market-driven programming rather than public broadcasting, which, according to the European Journal of Communication study, "devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas. "
    For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they’ve changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in China and India affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the Internet, brawn was enough) now the information economy demands brains instead. And where we once relied on political institutions to school the middle classes and give them leverage (影响), we now have nothing. "The issue isn’t that people in the past knew a lot more and know less now," says Hacker. "It’s that their ignorance was counterbalanced by denser political organizations."
Why does the author say "... we can no longer afford to mind our own business" in the fourth paragraph?
选项 A、It is a big advantage to be well informed in competition.
B、Cooperation between countries becomes very important.
C、There is no relation between emerging countries and America.
D、The countries in today’s world are interdependent.
答案D
解析 细节推断题。由定位句可知，在孤立的社会中当然可以采取闭关主义政策，然而今天美国人再也不能只关注自己的事情。中国和印度发生的事情会影响到底特律汽车制造厂工人；州议会大厦和白宫中发生的事情会影响到在中国和印度国内的竞争。从作者所举的这两个例子可以推断，作者说美国人不能只关注自己的事情，原因是现在世界上的国家是紧密联系的，因此答案为D)。
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