Johanna Levelt Sengers stands at the top of her profession but confesses that " it can be a little lonely" as one of only two wo

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问题     Johanna Levelt Sengers stands at the top of her profession but confesses that " it can be a little lonely" as one of only two women in the 82-member engineering sciences section of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences(NAS). A scientist emeritus at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, she belongs to both NAS and its partner, the National Academy of Engineering, where she’s one of seven women within the 173-member chemical engineering section. So in late 2004, when she was asked to co-chair an international panel on women in science with Manju Sharma of India, they decided to examine not just women’s place in society but also their status within the 90 national academies that had requested the report.
    The report, posted last week by the Inter Academy Council(IAC), offers a refreshingly candid assessment of the problems facing women trying to enter and move up in the world of science and engineering. Although it strikes familiar chords about the need to remove barriers and increase opportunities for girls and women, it sings a new tune in commanding the national academies themselves to "first put their own houses in order. " In addition to choosing more women as members and leaders of their organizations, each national academy should form a standing committee on diversity to gather and discuss gender-related data, it says.
    "Wow. This is far more hard-hitting and to the point than I had expected," says Donna Dean, president of the Association for Women in Science in Washington, D. C. , and a former senior administrator at the National Institutes of Health, who is now at the Washington, D. C. , science-lobbying firm of Lewis-Burke Associates. "It tells the various academies to stop pontificating about the right thing to do and start showing it in how they operate. "
    The report was funded in part by a $50,000 grant from L’Oreal. Since 1998, the France-based cosmetics company has honored outstanding women scientists around the world—including five of the eight women on the 10-person IAC panel. Jennifer Campbell, who heads the company’s philanthropic efforts, says she would like to see across-the-board parity for women in science. But Levelt Sengers says she thinks that "a reasonable goal would be no major disparity between the percentage of Ph. D. degrees awarded to women in a particular field and the percentage elected in that field. " Most academies are a far cry from reaching even that level.
    NAS President Ralph Cicerone says that there’s "no magic bullet" for adding women to the academy’s ranks but that NAS is trying to increase their chances of gaining the type of recognition—through service on academy panels, keynote speeches, and major scientific awards—that traditionally leads to NAS membership. NAS has no plans "to collapse its activities into one committee on gender issues," he says, adding that the challenge calls for "a sustained effort... along the entire pipeline."
By saying "first put their own houses in order"(Line 5, Para. 2), the author probably means

选项 A、they should do their only housework properly.
B、house tidiness should be put in a priority.
C、women scientists should not be stuck by housework.
D、they should first settle problems occurring in their institutions.

答案D

解析 语义理解题。根据题干提示定位至第二段。结合上文谈到的“……为女性剔除障碍、增加机会……”,本句中“责令国家科学团体本身……”把“他们自己的房子先整理好”应该指的是:首先处理好内部存在的女性问题,故选[D]。[A]、[B]都是housework一词字面意思的解析;而强干扰项[C]中“女性科学家不应该被家务劳动所羁绊”虽然符合常识,但文中未曾涉及,故排除。
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