The universities have trained the intellectual pioneers of our civilization—the priests, the lawyers, the statesmen, the doctors

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问题      The universities have trained the intellectual pioneers of our civilization—the priests, the lawyers, the statesmen, the doctors, the men of science, and the men of letters. The conduct of business now requires intellectual imagination of the same type as that which in former times has mainly passed into those other occupations.
     There is one great difficulty which hinders all the higher types of human effort. In modern times this difficulty has even increased in its possibilities for evil. In any large organization the younger men, who are novices. must be set to jobs which consist in carrying out fixed duties in obedience to orders. No president of a large corporation meets his youngest employee at his office door with the offer of the most responsible job which the work of that corporation includes. The young men are set to work at a fixed routine, and only occasionally even see the president as he passes in and out of the building. Such work is a great discipline. It imparts knowledge, and it produces reliability of character; also it is the only work for which the young men, In that novice stage, are fit, and it is the work for which they are hired. There can be no criticism of the custom. but there may be an unfortunate effect: prolonged routine work dulls the imagination.
     The way in which a university should function in the preparation for an intellectual career, is by promoting the imaginative consideration of the various general principles underlying that career. Its students thus pass tutu their period of technical apprenticeship with their imaginations already practiced in connecting details with general principles.
     Thus the proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge. Apart from this importance of the imagination, there is no reason why businessmen, and other professional men, should not pick up their facts bit by hit as they want them for particular occasions. A university is imaginative or it is nothing—at least nothing useful.  
What does the "great difficulty which hinders all the higher types of human effort" mean?

选项 A、Prolonged and fixed routine work in the apprenticeship period.
B、The young employee’s seldom seeing the president of the company.
C、Universities’ failure to get young people ready for future work.
D、Young men having to obey orders in the early stage of their work.

答案A

解析 句意推测题。参见第48题分析。作者在提出“阻碍人们做出更大努力的一个难题”之后,分析的是漫长的“学徒期”对于年轻人想像力的不良影响,并且得出的结论也是如此,因此“难题”指的就是这种不良的传统。
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