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  3. Though left and right alike declare that birth shouldn’t determine where you go to university, a fierce debate still rages about

Though left and right alike declare that birth shouldn’t determine where you go to university, a fierce debate still rages about

admin2021-10-14  92
问题     Though left and right alike declare that birth shouldn’t determine where you go to university, a fierce debate still rages about Oxbridge access. This time, complaints come from the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), which represents private schools, in response to proposals from the Office for Students to increase the number of disadvantaged students studying at England’s elite universities by 6,500 each year from 2024-25.
    To illustrate the farcicality of these claims, consider the current proportion of poorer students at universities such as Oxford, which counts 15 students from the UK’s wealthiest neighborhoods for everyone from the most disadvantaged. The HMC claims, unreasonably and even somewhat hysterically, that the move will squeeze out middle-class students by discriminating against private schools, insisting that admissions should be focused on " truly suitable students" rather than "class".
    The private sector accounts for 7% of all schools, yet its graduates already enjoy a wildly disproportionate amount of airtime: they account for 65% of senior judges, 29% of MPs and 43% of top journalists. For the minority of working-class applicants who do make it to elite universities, the entrenched prejudices they face can be debilitating. I arrived at Oxford from a state school in Birmingham and spent years attempting to shake off my sense of socioeconomic difference.
    We should interrogate what the HMC means by that sticky term "suitability". The very notion of intelligence is confused with the hallmarks of a private education. The confidence of a privileged education often carries you further in a university admissions process than determination or rigor. Private schools furnish children with the rhetorical skills and professional veneer to ensure that questions of competence and ability never really matter. Given how successful the private sector has been in supplanting our understanding of intelligence with these qualities, making admissions processes fairer and more representative of society won’t just be about numbers: it will require a radical cultural shift.
    At the root of the frustrations about Oxbridge access is the idea that people should have the freedom to buy their offspring access to the upper echelons of the professional society through sending them to private schools, without acknowledging the inequality and discrimination inherent in that aspiration. Among those angered by the news that fewer privileged students will be offered Oxbridge places in the future, I’m sure there will be many who consider themselves fair-minded and progressive.
    But discussions of inequality, lack of diversity and under representation are futile if they fail to acknowledge the one factor underscoring and exacerbating them all: class.
The statistics in Paragraph 3 indicate that_________.
选项 A、universities should enroll truly suitable students
B、working-class students should also go to elite universities
C、private schools are superior to public schools
D、most private school graduates have moved up into the upper class
答案D
解析 细节题。根据题干定位到第三段第一句“私立学校占学校总数的7％，但其毕业生已经非常不均衡地占据了上层阶级：他们占高级法官的65％，国会议员的29％和顶尖记者的43％”，故答案选[D]。第二段最后一句指出“The HMC claims…，insisting that admissions should be focused on truly suitable students rather than class’”，此处“真正适合的学生”是加了引号的，只是私立学校的抱怨，并不是[A]选项表达的意思，故排除[A]选项。第三段第二句指出“对于确实能够进入精英大学的少数工人阶级申请人来说，他们所面临的根深蒂固的偏见可能使人失望”。出题者用原文提及的“working-class applicants”来迷惑考生选这个选项，实际这些数据并不是为了说明工人阶级也应该进入精英大学，属于对原文的偷梁换柱。[C]选项范围过大，并不能凭借这些数据，就得出私立学校优于公立学校的结论。
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