The methods of testing a person’ s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. After all these years, education

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问题    The methods of testing a person’ s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. After all these years, educationists have still failed to device anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the skill of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’ s true ability and aptitude.
   As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are markers of success or of failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured.
   A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
   The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’ s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person ’ s true abilities.
   Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: I were a teenage drop-out and now I am a teenage millionaire.
The main idea of this passage is_____.

选项 A、examinations exert a detrimental influence on education
B、examinations are ineffective
C、examinations are profitable for institutions
D、examinations are a burden on students

答案A

解析 总览全文可知,文章第一段指出考试是测试记忆力的好方法,但是测试可检测 出一个人在巨大的压力下快速工作的技巧和方法,却测不出一个人真正的能力和水平。接 着分析了考试是学生焦虑情绪的原因,即考试造成了教学上的应试教育,考试让老师或者 测试人的压力和学生一样大,所以文章的主旨是为了论述考试产生的负面影响。A项“考 试对教育产生不利影响”是对原文的同义替换,故正确。B项“考试是无效的”、C项“考试对 一些机构来说是有利可图的”和D项“考试是学生的负担”都不符合题意,故选A。
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