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  3. Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House on December 5th: university presidents. Whatever they might

Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House on December 5th: university presidents. Whatever they might

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问题     Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House on December 5th: university presidents. Whatever they might be, they are at the heart of a political firestorm. Anger about the cost of college extends from the parents to Occupiers. Mr. Obama is trying to urge universities to address costs with " much greater urgency".
    This sense of urgency is justified: ex-students have debts approaching $ 1 trillion. But calm reflection is needed too. America’s universities suffer from many maladies besides cost. And rising costs are often symptoms of much deeper problems: problems that were irritating during the years of affluence but which are fatal in an age of austerity.
    The first problem is the inability to say "no". For decades American universities have been offering more of everything—more courses for undergraduates, more research students for professors and more athletics for everybody—on the merry assumption that there would always be more money to pay for it all. The second is Ivy League Envy. The vast majority of American universities are obsessed by rising up the academic hierarchy, becoming a bit less like Yokel-U and a bit more like Yale.
    Ivy League Envy leads to an obsession with research. This can be a problem even in the best universities; students feel short-changed by professors fixated on crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass. At lower-level universities it causes dysfunction. American professors of literature crank out 70,000 scholarly publications a year, compared with 13,757 in 1959. Most of these simply molder: Mark Bauerlein of Emory University points out that, of the 16 research papers produced in 2004 by the University of Vermont’s literature department, a fairly representative institution, 11 have since received between zero and two citations. The time wasted writing articles that will never be read cannot be spent teaching.
    Popular anger about universities’ costs is rising just as technology is shaking colleges to their foundations. The internet is changing the rules. Star academics can lecture to millions online rather than the chosen few in person. And for-profit companies such as the University of Phoenix are stripping out costs by concentrating on a handful of useful courses as well as making full use of the internet. The Sloan Foundation reports that online enrolments grew by 10% in 2010, against 2% for the sector as a whole.
    Nearly 100 years ago American universities faced similar worries about rising costs and detachment from the rest of society. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard, argued that " Institutions are rarely murdered; they meet their end by suicide. .. They die because they have outlived their usefulness, or fail to do the work that the world wants done. " America’s universities quickly began " the work that the world wants done" and started a century of American dominance of higher education. They need to repeat the trick if that century is not to end in failure.
The word maladies is closest in meaning to______.
选项 A、disorders
B、disabilities
C、disadvantages
D、disagreement
答案A
解析 首先在文中找到maladies一词出现的段落，是在文章的第二段。“America’s universities sufferfrom many maladies besides cost．And rising costs are often symptoms of much deeper problems：problems that were irritating during the years of affluence but which are fatal in an age of austerity．”上文都在讨论美国大学学费上涨的问题，这里笔锋一转，指出成本问题只是美国大学众多的弊病之一，而且上升的成本只是一些更深层次问题的表征。因此，maladies一词在意思上应该接近于“问题，弊病”。[A]选择disorders表示“失调，紊乱”，是maladies的同义词，为正确答案。[B]选项disabilities表示“残疾”，比maladies的程度更重。[C]选项disadvantages是advantage的反义词，表示“缺点，不利条件”，这里主要讨论的并不是美国大学面临的不利条件，而是美国大学自身的一些弊病。[D]选项disagreement的意思相差太远。
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