Ask just about any high school senior or junior in America—or their parents—and they’ll tell you that getting into a selective c

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问题    Ask just about any high school senior or junior in America—or their parents—and they’ll tell you that getting into a selective college is harder than it used to be. They’re right about that. But the reasons for the newfound difficulty are not well understood.
   Population growth plays a role, but the number of teenagers is not too much higher than it was 30 years ago, when the youngest baby boomers were still applying to college. And while many more Americans attend college than in the past, most of the growth has occurred at colleges with relatively few resources and high dropout rates, which bear little resemblance to the elites.
   So what else is going on? One overlooked factor is that top colleges are admitting fewer American students than they did a generation ago. Colleges have globalized over that time, deliberately increasing the share of their student bodies that come from overseas and leaving fewer slots for applicants from the United States.
   For American teenagers, it really is harder to get into Harvard—or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite colleges—than it was when today’s 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994. At Yale and Dartmouth, the decline has been 24 percent. At Carleton, it’s 22 percent. At Notre Dame and Princeton, it is 14 percent.
   This globalization obviously brings some big benefits. It has exposed American students to perspectives that our proudly parochial country often does not provide in childhood.
   Yet the way in which American colleges have globalized comes with costs, too. For one thing, the rise in foreign students has complicated the colleges’ stated efforts to make their classes more economically diverse. Foreign students often receive insufficient financial aid and tend to be from Well-off families. For another thing, the country’s most selective colleges have effectively shrunk as far as American students are concerned, during the same span that many students and their parents are spending more time obsessing over getting into one.
   Either way, the research emphasizes a problem with the way colleges have globalized. With only a handful of exceptions(including Harvard, Amherst, M.I.T. and Yale), colleges have not tried hard to recruit an economically diverse group of foreign students. The students instead have become a revenue source.
The word "slots"(Para. 3)is closest in meaning to

选项 A、quotas.
B、benefits.
C、advantages.
D、deficiencies.

答案A

解析 含义题。根据题干关键词定位到第三段第三句。由句中的increasing the share of以及后 面的and leaving fewer可知,前后是并列关系,但表示相反的内容,故A项“配额”是share的同 义改写,符合题意,为正确答案。B项“利益,好处”和C项“优势,优点”与数量无关。D项“缺乏, 不足”虽强调数量.但与fewer搭配构成肯定含义,表示“给美国学生留有足够的配额”不符合语 境,故排除。
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