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  3. If the world’s education systems have a common focus, it is to turn out school-leavers who are proficient in maths. Governments

If the world’s education systems have a common focus, it is to turn out school-leavers who are proficient in maths. Governments

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问题     If the world’s education systems have a common focus, it is to turn out school-leavers who are proficient in maths. Governments are impressed by evidence from the World Bank and others that better maths results raises GDP and incomes. That, together with the soul-searching provoked by the cross-country PISA comparisons of 15-year-olds’ mathematical attainment produced by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, is prompting educators in many places to look afresh at what maths to teach, and how to teach it.
    Those countries fret about how to catch up without turning students off the subject with boring drill. Top performers, most of them Asian, fear that their focus on technical proficiency does not translate into an enthusiasm for maths after leaving school. And everyone worries about how to prepare pupils for a jobs market that will reward creative thinking ever more highly.
    Maths education has been a battlefield before: the American "maths wars" of the 1980s pitted traditionalists, who emphasized fluency in pen-and-paper calculations, against reformers led by the country’s biggest teaching lobby, who put real-world problem-solving, often with the help of calculators, at the centre of the curriculum. A backlash followed as parents and academics worried that the "new maths" left pupils ill-prepared for university courses in maths and the sciences. But as many countries have since found, training pupils to pass exams is not the same as equipping them to use their hard-won knowledge in work and life.
    Today’s reformers think new technology renders this old argument redundant. They include Conrad Wolfram, who worked on Mathematica, a program which allows users to solve equations, visualize mathematical functions and much more. He argues that computers make rote procedures, such as long division, obsolete. "If it is high-level problem-solving and critical thinking we’re after, there’s not much in evidence in a lot of curriculums," he says.
The phrase "fret about" is closest in meaning to ______.
选项 A、care about
B、pay attention to
C、worry about
D、anxious about
答案C
解析 第二段“Those countries fret about how to catch up without turning students off the subject with boring drill. Top performers，most of them Asian，fear that…”中的“fear that”与选项C，worry about一致。词义题一般要立足本句，邻近寻找答案或猜测意思。
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