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  3. Getting an Early Start Pine Jog Elementary School seems more like a green-themed educational resort than an attractive old s

Getting an Early Start Pine Jog Elementary School seems more like a green-themed educational resort than an attractive old s

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问题                         Getting an Early Start
    Pine Jog Elementary School seems more like a green-themed educational resort than an attractive old school house. The brand-new $ 30 million facility was planned with extreme sustainability in mind: classroom design maximizes fresh air and natural light; solar panels power much of the energy grid. "We really wanted the students to be excited about learning from the moment they walk on campus," says the school’s principal.
    More than two dozen U.S. primary schools have poured thousands of dollars into fancy facilities and shiny green curricula. There’s little doubt as to the value of green education—how trading outdated textbooks for the great outdoors lets developing minds wander more freely. But some teachers and parents wonder whether the same effects could be reached with far fewer resources, giving students in more ordinary schools the same chance to excel by interacting and solving problems with the world around them.
    Environmental learning isn’t always about climate change or the Earth’s plight. Rather, teachers with green lesson plans use the natural world as a tool, like leading a study on an ordinary stream, which can include language, math and social studies. "If you take kids outside, it typically engages them, especially ones who are struggling," says Jerry Lieberman, an educational researcher. A handful of studies show the same connection, that students exposed to a nature-based curriculum score higher more than 90 percent of the time than students taught the same subjects in the classroom out of a textbook.
    Some schools take that as a must, making sure that their students have immediate access to the natural world. Administrators at Sidwell Friends Middle School figured that the best way to acquaint kids with the water cycle would be to build a sewage-treatment plant in the middle of campus to recycle wastewater. But for much of the rest of the country, elementary schools—often stricken with inadequate funding and little room to deviate from state-standardized curricula— rarely find money or time for promoting real— world learning.
    Brian Day, director of the North American Association, says that incorporating sustainability into education is important, but it’s not an issue of money. Part of the answer could be Project Learning Tree (PLT) , an environmentally based curriculum that parallels federal standards. This program train educators in green-based teaching for about $15, which includes a teaching workshop and guidebook of lesson plans, like analyzing water samples from a nearby river or studying the history of local wildlife.
    That’s all Principal Thomas Irvin of Oil City Elementary in Louisiana had to hear. The school board threatened to shut down the campus a few years ago due to low performance and inconsistent enrollment. Suspecting that an environmentally based curriculum might turn things around, he trained his entire teaching staff in PLT other green-based curricula and raised a few thousand dollars of private funds to build three outdoor classrooms. As a result, enrollment rose nearly a third and test scores jumped, making the school one of the highest-achieving in the district.
According to the author, what can keep ordinary schools from promoting eco-education is______.
选项 A、their lack of proper methods
B、their lack of funds
C、their adherence to the national curriculum standards
D、their lack of green teaching staff
答案A
解析 本题考查推理引申。第四段末句(But for much．．．)指出了普通学校开办绿色教育的两大困难：缺少资金、没有能力偏离国家课程。但作者在随后的第五段中给出了解决方案：PLT。一方面，PLT可以提供低收费培训(about$15)，且教学不需要高投入的设施，而是从自然中取材(a nearby river，local wildlife)；另一方面，其教学标准达到了国家课程标准(parallel federal standards)。这无疑使得[B]、[C]不再成为困难，同时也解决了[D]选项中描述的问题。且综上分析可以推导出：普通学校错误地认为绿色教育需要高投入，需要偏离国家课程，而意识不到正确的方法：开办低投入绿色教育，所以[A]正确。
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