According to the text, which of the following is correct?
A. Howard’s Istitute aims to help the students in Boston.
B. Most of the students feel their classwork irrelevant to their ambitions.
C. The students have to do some volunteer work as their homework.
D. Michael is the president as well as a professor of the Efficacy institute.
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
In the relationship of education to business we observe today a fine state of paradox. On the one hand, the emphasis which most business places upon a college degree is so great that one can almost visualize the time when even the office boy will have his baccalaureate. On the other hand, we seem to preserve the belief that some deep intellectual chasm separates the businessman from other products of the university system. The notion that business people are quite the Philistines sounds absurd. For some reason, we tend to characterize vocations by stereotypes, none too flattering but nonetheless deeply imbedded in the national conscience. In the cast of characters the businessman comes on stage as a ill-mannered and simple-minded person. It is not a pleasant conception and no more truthful or less unpleasant than our other stereotypes.
Business is made up of people with all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of motivations, and all kinds of tastes, just as in any other form. of human endeavour. Businessmen are not mobile balance sheets and profit statements, but perfectly normal human beings, subject to whatever strengths, frailties, and limitations characterize man on the earth. They are people grouped together in organizations designed to complement the weakness of one with strength of another, tempering the exuberance of the young with the caution of the more mature, the poetic soarings of one mind with the counting house realism of another. Any disfigurement which society may suffer will come from man himself, not from the particular vocation to which he devotes his time.
Any group of people necessarily represents an approach to a common one, and it is probably true that even individually they tend to conform. somewhat to the general pattern. Many have pointed out the danger of engulfing our original thinkers in a tide of mediocrity. Conformity is not any more prevalent or any more exacting in the business field than it is in any other. It is a characteristic of all organizations of whatever nature. The fact is the large business unit provides greater opportunities for individuality and requires less in the way of conformity than other institutions of comparable size — the government, or the academic world, or certainly the military.
The paradox in the relationship of education to business is that
A. businessmen are both unmindful of history and sophisticated in it.
B. businessmen show both contempt and respect for noble activities.
C. there are both highly intellectual and uneducated businessmen.
D. there are both noticeable similarities and differences between businessmen and intellectuals.
It’s not quite that simple. “Kids can be given the opportunities to become passionate about a subject or activity, but they can’t be forced, ” says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who led a landmark, 25-year study examining what motivated first grade students in three school districts. Even so, a growing number of educators and psychologists do believe it is possible to unearth ambition in students who don’t seem to have much. They say that by instilling confidence, encouraging some risk taking, being accepting of failure and expanding the areas in which children may be successful, both parents and teachers can reignite that innate desire to achieve.
Figuring out why the fire went out is the first step. Assuming that a kid doesn’t suffer from an emotional or learning disability, or isn’t involved in some family crisis at home, many educators attribute a sudden lack of motivation to a fear of failure or peer pressure that conveys the message that doing well academically some how isn’t cool. “Kids get so caught up in the moment-to-moment issue of will they look smart or dumb, and it blocks them from thinking about the long term,” says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford. “You have to teach them that they are in charge of their intellectual growth and that their intelligence is malleable. ”
Howard (a social psychologist and president of the Efficacy Institute, an organization that works with teachers and parents to help improve children’s academic performance) and other educators say it’s important to expose kids to a world beyond homework and tests, through volunteer work, sports, hobbies and other extracurricular activities. “The crux of the issue is that many students experience education as irrelevant to their life goals and ambitions, ” says Michael Nakkual, a Harvard education professor who runs a Boston-area mentoring program which works to get low-income underachievers in touch with their aspirations. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to disabuse them of the notion that classwork is irrelevant, to show them how doing well at school can actually help them fulfill their dreams beyond it. Like any ambitious toddler, they need to understand that you have to learn to walk before you can run.
What’s the main idea of the first paragraph?
A. Children are born with plenty of ambition.
B. A baby learns to walk and talk ambitiously.
C. Ambition can be taught like other subjects at school.
D. Some teenage children lose their drive to succeed.
Which of the following is true according to the last paragraph?
A. Rich countries might help poor countries to treat the waste.
B. California’s “zero waste” program makes no environmental sense.
C. More taxes are needed to collect and treat the waste efficiently.
D. Governments’ policies on waste industry are largely incoherent.