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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.  
Which of the following statements is true about Ivy League Envy?
选项 A、Professors are encouraged to publish more literary papers under the Ivy League Envy.
B、Ivy League Envy is a phenomenon specific to second-rate American universities.
C、Ivy League Envy stems from an abnormal obsession with academic research.
D、The decline of education quality in universities is partly attributed to Ivy League Envy.
答案D
解析 本题主要考查对文中提出的一个概念“Ivy League Envy”的理解。这个概念首次出现在文章的第三段。在第三段的最后两句话中，作者提出了美国大学面临的另外一个严重问题就是“Ivy League Envy”。所谓的“Ivy League Envy”指的是“大部分美国大学希望通过提升其学术等级的方式改头换面，从乡巴佬大学变为耶鲁大学。”在第四段中，作者集中讨论了“Ivy League Envy”带来的负面效应。第四段的第一句话“Ivy League envy leads to an obsession with research”，“常青藤联盟嫉妒症”会使得教授们只知道一味地做研究而忽视课堂教学。[C]选项颠倒因果关系。常青藤联盟嫉妒症源于学校对于常青藤学校的盲目迷信，结果就是对于学术研究的不正常的迷恋。第四段的第二句话指出“’This can be a problem even in the best universities”，“常青藤联盟嫉妒症”并不只是二流学校的特有现象，甚至是一些一流的大学也没能幸免。[B]选项错误。第四段以文学论文为例说明了“常青藤联盟嫉妒症”现象导致学术泛滥的后果。[A]选项偷换概念，在“常青藤联盟嫉妒症”的蛊惑下，教授们被鼓励发表更多的论文，而不是“文学论文”。正确答案为[D]。
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