When it comes to schooling, Herrera boys are no match for Herrera girls. Last week, four years after she arrived from Honduras,

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问题     When it comes to schooling, Herrera boys are no match for Herrera girls. Last week, four years after she arrived from Honduras, Martha, 20, graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. She managed decent grades while working 36 hours a week at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Her sister, Marlin, 22, attends a local community college and will soon be a certified nurse assistant. The brothers are a different story. Oscar, 17, was expelled two years ago from Fairfax for carrying a knife and later dropped out of a different school. The youngest, Jonathan, 15, is now in a juvenile boot camp after running into trouble with the law. "The boys go astray more, " says the kids’ mother, "The girls are more confident. "

    This is normal. Immigrant girls consistently outperform boys, according to the preliminary findings of a just-completed, five-year study of immigrant children — the largest of its kind, including Latino, Chinese and Haitian kids — by Marcelo and Caro-la Orozco of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Though that trend holds for U. S. -born kids as well, the reasons for the discrepancy among immigrants are different. The study found that immigrant girls are more adept at straddling cultures than boys. "The girls are able to retain some of the protective features of their native culture" because they’re kept closer to the hearth, says Marcelo, "while they maximize their acquisition of skills in the new culture" by helping their parents navigate(操纵).
    Consider the kids’ experiences in school. The study found that boys face more peer pressure to adopt American youth culture. They’re disciplined more often and, as a result, develop more adversarial relationships with teachers and the wider society. They may also face more debilitating(使人气馁的)prejudices. One teacher interviewed for the study said that the "cultural awareness training" she received as part of her continuing education included depictions of Latino boys as "aggressive" and "really macho(大男子气概的)" and of the girls as "pure sweetness".
    Gender shapes immigrant kids’ experiences outside school as well. Often hailing from traditional cultures, the girls face greater domestic obligations. They also frequently act as "cultural ambassadors", translating for parents and mediating between mem and the outside world, says Carola Orozco. An unintended consequence: "The girls get foisted into a responsible role more than the boys do. "
    The Harvard study bears a warning note: If large numbers of immigrant boys continue to be alienated academically, they risk sinking irretrievably into an economic underclass. Oscar Herrera, Martha’s dropout brother, may be realizing that. "I’m thinking of returning to school," he recently told his mother. He ought to look to his sisters for guidance.
What can we know about immigrant girls?

选项 A、They have no difficulty in adopting American youth culture.
B、Parents impose more duties on them than on the boys.
C、It is not easy for them to shake off the influence of traditional culture and adopt the new one.
D、They can cope very well with two different cultures in which they are involved.

答案D

解析 事实细节题。答案在第二段,“girls are more adept at straddling culturesthan boys”.(女孩比男孩更善于驾驭不同文化),[D]“她们能够很好的处理他们所处的两种文化”符合原文的意思。[A]文中没有提到,[B]从文中看不出这些家庭的职责是父母强加的;从第二段的末句她们在保留本族文化中一些保护性特征的同时最大限度地获取新文化的技能可知[C]错误。
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