There is a widespread belief that humanities Ph. D. s have limited job prospects. The story goes that since tenure-track profess

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问题    There is a widespread belief that humanities Ph. D. s have limited job prospects. The story goes that since tenure-track professorships are increasingly being replaced by contingent faculty, the vast majority of English and history Ph. D. s now roam the earth as poorly-paid adjuncts or, if they leave academia, as baristas and bookstore cashiers. As English professor William Pannapacker put it in Slate a few years back, "a humanities Ph. D. will place you at a disadvantage competing against 22-year-olds for entry-level jobs that barely require a high-school diploma. " His advice to would-be graduate students was simple: Recognize that a humanities Ph. D. is now a worthless degree and avoid getting one at all cost.
   It is true that the plate tectonics of academia has been shifting since the 1970s, reducing the number of good jobs available in the field. In the wake of these changes, there is no question that humanities doctorates have struggled with their employment prospects, but what is less widely known is between a fifth and a quarter of them go on to work in well-paying jobs in media, corporate America, non-profits, and government. Humanities Ph. D. s are all around us—and they are not serving coffee.
   The American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) have staked out the position that the lack of reliable data about employment outcomes is hindering any productive discussion about the future of academia. Preliminary reports released in the past few months show that 24. 1 percent of history Ph. D. s and 21 percent of English and foreign language Ph. D. s over the last decade took jobs in business, museums, and publishing houses, among other industries.
   Humanities Ph. D. s typically secure non-academic jobs through their own networks, without the support of their departments. For those Ph. D. s who ultimately find work outside academia, the job-hunting process is often longer and harder than it needs to be. Few universities offer humanities doctoral candidates career counseling for non-academic jobs, which would help them market themselves and leverage alumni networks.
   As a solution to the shrinking academic job market, several top Ph. D. programs have opted to reduce the number of incoming doctoral candidates to limit their oversupply. However, some argue that this approach does not recognize that many humanities Ph. D. s will go on to positively impact other industries, as many already have. "Academic institutions hold a responsibility to advance knowledge," Victoria Blodgett, director of Graduate Career Services at Yale University, argues. "We should be in the business of putting Ph. D. s in government, non-profits, the media and lots of industries where we will be better off if we have people who are trained to think as deeply as they are. "  
The underlined sentence "the plate tectonics of academia has been shifting" most probably means that______.

选项 A、the study of the planet structure has yielded different results
B、the various parts forming the Earth’s crust have been moving
C、the university’s organizational structure has been under close examination
D、the appointments of faculty within universities have undergone a marked shift

答案D

解析 句意理解题。该句字面意思是“学术界板块构造一直在漂移”,结合上下文可以确定该句包含修辞手法,将大学员工的组成比喻为the plate tectonics of academia。正确答案是选项[D]“大学内部的员工聘任经历了巨大的变化”。选项[A]“对地球构造的研究得出了不同的结果”和选项[B]“地球的各大板块在移动”,这两个选项仅停留在该句的字面意思(word-forword meaning)上,均为迷惑性很小的选项;选项[C]“大学的组织结构一直以来受到人们的审视”,原文未提及,所以也不正确。
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