"If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce. "Few would object to U. S.

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问题     "If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce. "Few would object to U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s explanation of why Washington is mobilizing $100 billion to schools and universities as part of February’s giant stimulus package. Indeed, other countries are following suit, with Britain, Germany, Canada, and others making new education funding part of their anti-crisis strategies.
    What’s far less clear is that this money is going where it’s most needed—or likely to have the greatest social and economic payoff. In Germany, the bulk of nearly £10 billion in new school spending is being used to renovate buildings, but unlikely to have much effect on the quality of German graduates. In the United States, schools were not using the stimulus money to boost student achievement, as promised by Duncan, but to fund their general budgets. And in still other countries, governments are using money to help build new world-class universities—projects that a World Bank study in July warned risk bleeding resources away from more desperately needed areas.
    The biggest error governments are making is to blindly push for more and better everything at all levels of education; more teachers, flashier facilities, more technology in the classroom, and more elite universities. All such efforts may seem sensible, but studies show that simply spending more on education doesn’t produce better results. Kids don’t necessarily learn more if they sit in smaller classrooms, in more modern and better-equipped schools, or even if their teachers are better-paid. According to Ludger Woessmann of the IFO Institute, merely raising per student spending has zero effect on achievement. The United States, France and Germany have increased spending significantly in past decades only to see performance stagnate, while countries like Sweden and Finland have boosted quality through structural reform.
    Studies suggest another important way education policy should be refocused. They find that the largest returns on investment come not from mobilizing more money toward top or even average performers, but toward those who have been left behind. Raising the achievement of the unskilled and excluded would lead not only to individual payoffs, such as higher incomes and more meaningful lives, but also would generate big benefits for economies, such as higher productivity and greater GDP. It would also result in broad social gains—less crime, less welfare spending, and a greater sense of cohesion. "Improving our education to get the economic growth more broadly shared is the one most important thing we can do," says Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist. He argues that changing education in this way would be one of the few ways governments could promote both justice and economic growth—not one at the expense of the other.
It can be inferred from Para. 3 that______.

选项 A、kids have learned more in better-equipped schools
B、spending more on education has achieved better results
C、the United States has spent a lot of money on education so far
D、Sweden has improved the quality of education through funding

答案C

解析 推理题。由题干提示定位至第三段。该段对第二段的内容进行了进一步的分析评论。作者认为各国政府没有合理使用教育基金,学生学习进步与否与教室陈设好坏、教师工资高低等并没有直接关系。接下来作者举例来证明自己的观点:美国、法国和德国虽然增加了大笔教育投人,但并没有产生预期效果;与此相反,瑞典和芬兰却通过机构改革提升了教育水平。依据此段内容可以推断出[C]为正确答案。第三段作者通过引用或举例的方式证明了本段的论点,即政府所犯的最大错误在于盲目投资教育。虽然花费巨资,但并没有从根本上提高教育质量。[A]、[B]和[D]
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