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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.  
It can be inferred from the last paragraph that the credit of American university’s success in the 20th century goes to______.
选项 A、the adaption to the needs in society
B、the protection of the independence of universities
C、the persevering exploration in advanced science and technology
D、the active involvement in social movement
答案A
解析 本题考查对文章最后一段内容的理解。最后一段提到将近100年前，美国大学也曾经面临着与现在相似的境遇，“they have outlived their usefulness，or fail to do the work that the world wants done”。面临困境，America’s universities quickly began“the work that the world wants done”and started a century of American dominance of higher education。由此我们可以判断，美国大学在20世纪的成功应该归功于它的实用性与社会接轨，因此正确答案应该选[A]。[B]和[C]这两个选项虽然属于常识性的观点，但是并不是最后一段讨论的内容。[D]选项利用society一词设置干扰，最后一段强调的是美国大学积极响应社会需求促成了它的成功，而不是美国大学积极参与社会活动促成了它的成功。
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