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  3. Competition makes losers as well as winners. This fact makes a simple rule for judging when it is useful to society and when it

Competition makes losers as well as winners. This fact makes a simple rule for judging when it is useful to society and when it

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问题    Competition makes losers as well as winners. This fact makes a simple rule for judging when it is useful to society and when it is dangerous. Can we afford to look after the losers? They are not going to vanish.
   Education is a typical example. The market, and the self-interest of parents, would ensure that good schools flourished and bad ones—well, they would disappear. Yet authorities still must ensure that every child has a school place in order to avoid discontent among parents even while the means to do so has largely vanished now that two thirds of secondary schools in Britain are academies which they do not control.
   By encouraging parental choice in schools, successive governments hoped to harness the ambition of families to give their children the best education possible. But this ambition is by its nature limited. It does not extend to other people’s children. In fact, "it is not enough to succeed; others must fail". The burden of student loans increases the price of failure for those who fail to get into the "right" universities or study the "right" subjects. The result is an increase of inequality without any corresponding increase in quality at the top.
   One measure of this is house prices. State schools with a good reputation increase the price of houses in their catchment areas (学生来源地区) substantially. A survey showed that outside London parents were willing to pay up to three times the average price for a house to get their children into desirable schools. Catchment areas operate as a kind of pre-exclusion mechanism, which keeps poorer children out of good schools. In all this, both schools and parents are responding to the competition as a zero-sum game. We are all poorer as a result.
   It is arguable that the cost of bad schools to society, as well as to the children involved, far outweighs the benefits that competition has brought the good ones. School systems should be judged on the basis of their worst performances, not their best.
Why does the author say that the ambition of families is limited?
选项 A、Because only a few families will win.
B、Because it is ineffective.
C、Because all the families are losers.
D、Because some families have no school places.
答案A
解析 事实细节题。由定位句可知，家庭的野心本质上是有限的，只有部分家庭成功，不会扩展到所有人的孩子身上，故答案为A)。B)“因为它是无效的”，第三段第三句提到家庭野心带来的成功不会扩展到其他人的孩子身上，说明有部分家庭是成功的，所以并不是无效的，故排除；C)“因为所有的家庭都是失败者”，第四段倒数第二句虽然指出竞争是一种零和博弈，并没有提到所有家庭都是失败者，故排除该项；D)“因为部分家庭没学可上”，第二段第三句指出政府部门仍然必须确保每个孩子都有学上，故排除。
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