You cannot place a value on education. Knowledge is the food of the soul, Plato supposedly remarked. Great literature "irrigates

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问题     You cannot place a value on education. Knowledge is the food of the soul, Plato supposedly remarked. Great literature "irrigates the deserts" of our lives, as C. S. Lewis put it. But a college education comes with a price tag—up to $60,000 a year for a four-year residential degree at an American university.
    A report by Pay Scale, a research firm, tries to measure the returns on higher education in America. They vary enormously. A graduate in computer science from Stanford can expect to make $ 1. 7m more over 20 years than someone who never went to college, after the cost of that education is taken into account. A degree in humanities and English at Florida International University leaves you $ 132,000 worse off. Arts degrees at 12% of the colleges in the study offered negative returns: 30% offered worse financial rewards than putting the cash in 20-year Treasury bills.
    None of this matters if you are rich and studying fine art to enhance your appreciation of the family Rembrandts. But most 18-year-olds in America go to college to get a good job. That is why the country’s students have racked up $1.1 trillion of debt—more than America’s credit-card debts. For most students college is still a wise investment, but for many it is not. Some 15% of student debtors default within three years: a startling 115,000 graduates work as caretakers.
    If the job market picks up, this dismal picture will improve. But there is another obvious way to increase the returns on a college education: make it cheaper. The price of college has risen more than four times faster than inflation since 1978 , easily outpacing doctors’ bills. Much of this cash has been wasted on things that have nothing to do with education—plush dormitories, gleaming stadiums and armies of administrators. In 1976 there were only half as many college bureaucrats as academic staff: now the ratio is one to one.
    By the universities’ own measures, this has produced splendid results. Students are more than twice as likely to receive "A" grades now than in 1960. When outsiders do the grading, however, they are less impressed: one study found that 36% of students " did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college.
In the first paragraph, Plato and C. S. Lewis are cited to______.

选项 A、demonstrate the author’s view
B、introduce the topic of knowledge
C、share the idea of great men in history
D、introduce the discussion of college education

答案D

解析 文章首句指出:You cannot place a value on education.“你无法衡量教育的价值”。接着提到Plato和C.S.Lewis讲的话,然后便转折指出:“大学教育却明码标价。”可见作者提到Plato和C.S.Lewis的主要目的是引出下文关于college education的讨论,故该题的答案为[D]。选项[B]虽然相近,但是下文讨论的话题是关于“大学教育”而不是“知识”,故排除。
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