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 There’s little doubt as to the value of green education—how trading outdated textbooks for the great outdoors lets developing minds wander more freely.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.
Which of the following is true of green education?

选项 A、It poses high requirements to school facilities.
B、It encourages free thinking amongst students.
C、It is the privilege of a small number of schools.
D、Its value hasn’t been realized by the teachers in ordinary schools.

答案B

解析 本题考查事实细节。第二段第二句提到:较之传统教育,绿色教育更能让学生的思维自由驰骋(wander more freely),因此[B]为正确选项。文中第一段及第二段首句提及绿色学校投入大量资金用于设施建设是为了引出第二段末句的问题——利用很少的资源进行绿色教育能否取得同样的效果?而不是为了说明绿色教育对学校设施要求很高。[A]无从推知。第二段首句提到一些学校(more than two dozen)投入了大量资金进行绿色教育,但并不意味着绿色教育只是少数学校的特权。且从下文可知:普通学校照样能够开办绿色教育。所以[C]错误。第二段最后一句说明:普通学校的教师对“利用很少的资源进行绿色教育是否能取得好效果”有所疑问,而不是对“绿色教育的价值”感到怀疑。故排除[D]。
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