Part B Listening Comprehension
Directions: In this part of the test there will be some short talks and conversations. After each one, you will be asked some questions. The talks, conversations and questions will be spoken ONLY ONCE. Now listen carefully and choose the right answer to each question you have heard and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.
听力原文:M: Julie Ross is the author of Practical Parenting. She has been running parenting workshops for about 18 years now. Hey, Julie. Good morning. Nice to see you.
W: Good morning.
M: So let's go right into some of the things that parents used to do, corporal punishment for example, to try and discipline their kids, at least gain control. Firstly, you say that parents should not say "No" all the time. Try not to focus on the negative. Accentuate the positive. So let's use an example here, my son is playing with the safety pin in the electric socket. I am probably gonna say, Jack, no, don't do that. What's a better way to go about it?
W: Well, I actually believe that "no" should be used in those occasions. It should be our word that we can stop our children on a dime with. But if they get desensitized to it, if it's "no, don't climb on that; no, honey that's a no no", then when you say "no, don't stick that into the socket", they are not gonna be able to listen to it.
M: So only on rare occasions when it's absolutely important to use the word. no. What about the I-message? In other words, the kids make a mess, instead of saying: You made a mess. Look what you did. Turn it into an I-message, and give me the example of that.
W: I am a big believer in I-messages. And they sound like this. When you throw the ball in the house, I feel annoyed because it could break something. I would like you to play with something else instead. What we wanna do here is we want to make it about us in terms of setting the rules, as parents. We are supposed to be the leaders in the house. And now I-message does refer to I am the parent, I am in charge, and I am comfortable being in charge.
M: Tell me how is this next concept. That is the "when and then" rule—the best example I can think of, your children are eating dinner but they wanna go out and play. OK, so, a lot of people will say, hey, if you eat all of the food on your plate, you can go out and play. What's wrong with that?
W: Children hear the word "if" as a challenge, as a threat. And they will rise to that challenge. It's like "Really? If ? OK, let's just test that out". But the either-or, or the when-then choices, when you've done these order things. So that it's a work first, play later. When you've finished the meal, then you can go outside. When you have brushed your teeth, then we can read books.
M: So they don't hear the word "if" as an incentive. They see it as a challenge and they are gonna rebel against it.
W: You bet.
M: What about when people would say something like, parents will end the sentence with OK. Like if you clean up your room, um, we will get ice-cream, OK? Why is that wrong?
W: What an amount of power that gives to the child! The parents are asking the child’s permission. We are gonna go out, OK? And the child thinks, oh, well, I have the rights to say yes or no.
M: Then the child is in control.
W: Yeah, absolutely.
M: We should ask for e-mails on this, and get you back here in one day, and just go through, and there will be about a million of them. Julie, thanks very much.
Questions:
1.Which of the following titles best suits the interview?
2.According to the interview, who is the interviewee, Julie Ross?
3.According to the interviewee, when should parents say "no" to their kids?
4.The interviewee says that parents should avoid using IF message. Why is it so?
5.Which of the following is NOT mentioned as a tool of child disciplining in the interview?
(21)
A. Just Say No to the Kids
B. Discipline is Not a Dirty Word
C. Parenting, a Difficult Job
D. What are Children Thinking?
WHITE people tend to be nervous of raising the subject of race and education, but are often voluble on the issue if a black person brings it up. So when Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain's Commission for Racial Equality, said that there was a particular problem with black boys' performance at school, and that it might be a good idea to educate them apart from other pupils, there was a torrent of comment. Some of it commended his proposal, and some criticised it, but none of it questioned its premise. Everybody accepts that black boys are a problem.
On the face of it, it looks as though Mr Phillips is right. Only 27% of Afro-Caribbean boys get five A-C grades at GCSE, the exams taken by 16-year-olds, compared with 47% of boys as a whole and 44% of Afro-Caribbean girls. Since, in some subjects, candidates who score less than 50% get Cs, those who don't reach this threshold have picked up pretty little at school.
Mr Phillips's suggestion that black boys should be taught separately implies that ethnicity and gender explain their underachievement. Certainly, maleness seems to be a disadvantage at school. That's true for all ethnic groups: 57% of girls as a whole get five A-Cs, compared with 47% of boys. But it's not so clear that blackness is at the root of the problem.
Among children as a whole, Afro-Caribbeans do indeed perform. badly. But Afro-Caribbeans tend to be poor. So to get a better idea of whether race, rather than poverty, is the problem, one must control for economic status. The only way to do that, given the limits of British educational statistics, is to separate out the exam results of children who get free school meals: only the poor get free grub.
Poor children's results tell a rather different story. Afro-Caribbeans still do remarkably badly, but whites are at the bottom of the pile. All ethnic minority groups do better than them. Even Bangladeshis, a pretty deprived lot, do twice as well as the natives in their exams; Indians and Chinese do better still. And absolute numbers of underperforming whites dwarf those of underperforming Afro-Caribbeans: last year, 131,393 of white boys failed to hit the government's benchmark, compared with 3,151 Afro-Caribbean boys.
These figures suggest that, at school at least, black people's problem is not so much race as poverty. And they undermine the idea of teaching black boys separately, for if poor whites are doing worse than poor blacks, there's not much argument for singling out blacks for special measures: whites need help just as badly.
This isn't, however, a message that anybody much wants to hear. Many white people find the idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with black people comforting: it confirms deeply held prejudices and reassures them that a whole complex of social problems-starting with underachievement in schools, but leading on to unemployment, drug addiction and crime—is nothing to do with them.
The race-relations industry also has an interest in explaining educational underachievement in terms of ethnicity. A whole raft of committees, commissions and task forces has been set up on the assumption that racial differences are a fundamental cause of social problems. If that's wrong, then all those worthies might as well pack up and go home.
Trying to explain educational underachievement away as a racial issue may be comforting and convenient, but it is also dangerous, for it distracts attention from the real problem—that the school system fails the poor. That's not a black problem or a white problem: it's a British problem.
The article can be classified as ______.
A. objective commentary
B. detailed illustration
C. chronological description
D. heated argumentation