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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.  
In order to reduce the cost, American universities have to______.
选项 A、say no to more applications from high school graduates
B、focus on the essential and discard the irrelevant
C、make a budget that caters to the interest of most people
D、give priority to teachers’ rather than students’ needs
答案B
解析 本题是一道细节事实题，但是答案并不那么明显。需要基于对整篇文章的理解才能够选出正确答案。在第二段中作者指出现在美国大学面临的最严峻的问题就是无限制的成本扩张和不断下降的教学质量。美国大学不断地开设新的课程，开发新的研究项目，提供新的体育设施，却不理会这些花费是否物有所值，也不理会谁来为这种种支出买单。要改变这一现状，美国大学必须大刀阔斧地改革，将注意力和资金重新投入到教学质量的提升和培养学生的实际能力上来。[A]选项错误，缩小招生规模并不是降低成本的方法，只会加剧美国大学的财政危机。[B]选项准确概括作者的意见，制定合理的预算，使资金投入进入良性循环的轨道。[C]选项利用budget一词设置干扰，美国大学现在存在的问题就是缺少“the ability to say no”，无论是学生还是教授，无论是教学还是研究上都有求必应，这样必然导致成本的攀升。因此，重新制定预算的目的不是为了满足大多数人的利益，而是应该为降低成本和提高教学质量服务。[D]选项错误，无论是教师的需求还是学生的需求，并不应该成为预算改革的依据。
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