Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of

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问题     Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of last week’s coverage of Apple’s new iBooks platform, which the company promises will radically change how students use and experience textbooks. Under Apple’s plan, companies and individuals will be able to self-publish textbooks, ideally creating a wider array of content. Students will be able to download and use these books on their iPad much like they would use a regular textbook.
    Let’s slow down. Textbooks or tools that look a lot like textbooks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And since high quality educational material isn’t cheap to generate, simply tearing down distribution barriers will only go so far in reducing the costs of producing good content. Lost in the heated claims, however, is a more fundamental question: what have educational technology efforts accomplished to date and what should we expect?
    As a field, education is easily seduced by technological promises. Textbooks? Thomas Edison saw movies as way to replace them. These days, conservatives are in love with the idea that technology will not only shrink the number of in-classroom teachers but render the teachers’ unions obsolete.
    The experience to date is less grandiose and more worrisome considering the billions that have been spent on technology in schools in the past few decades. Interactive whiteboards have been around since the early 1990s and done little to transform how teachers teach, and computers are often unaligned with classroom instruction, even though 90% of classrooms around the country have them.
    The reasons for the slow pace of change are as obvious as they are stubborn. Altering classroom and school practice in our wildly decentralized education system is always a slow process. Many teachers are not familiar with technology or how to use it in the classroom, and high-quality training programs—either in schools of education or as part of a teachers’ professional development—are rare.
    Besides, even a top-shelf product can only augment live teaching. Likewise, technology is bringing back in vogue the idea of the "flipped classroom" with the teacher acting as a " guide on the side" rather than the primary source of instruction. I say back in vogue because, ironically, talk of devaluing the teacher as content provider has been a fixture of progressive education thought for a century. Another variation of the flipped-classroom idea is to use technology to explain concepts at home and use classroom time differently. But much of the online content available today merely replicates the lame instruction already available in too many of our nation’s schools.
    American education desperately needs an overhaul that goes far beyond upgrading computers in the classroom. Jobs was right: technology by itself won’t fix what ails our schools. He saw teachers’ unions and archaie practices as the big barriers. Perhaps, but I’d argue they are symptoms of our larger inattention to instructional quality. The bells and whistles of technology, for all its promise, are distracting us from this mundane but essential reality.
Which of the following phrases is closest in meaning to" be unaligned with" ?

选项 A、be incompatible with
B、be unassisted by
C、be inseparable from
D、be indispensible for

答案A

解析 题干中的短语出现在文章的第四段。在这一段中,作者主要讨论了美国在过去的几十年中,虽然投入不少资金更新学校设备,但是却没有能够起到很好的教学效果。例如,90年代引入课堂的交互式电子白板并没有在多大程度上改变教学模式。而互联网也往往unaligned with课堂指导。根据上下文意思判断,这里应该填一个短语表示“不协调的,不一致的,无法融合的”,正确答案为[A],be incompatible with 表示“与……不兼容”。[B]选项be unassisted by表示“没有得到……的帮助”。[C]选项be inseparable from意思是“与……不可分割”。[D]选项be indispensible for表示“对……不可或缺”。
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