题目内容
I've twice been to the wars. and as I survey the battlefield, something different is happening. It’s oneupmanship among parents. We see our kids' college pedigrees as trophies attesting to how well--or how poorly--we've raised them. But we can't acknowledge mat our obsession is more about us than them. So we've contrived various justifications that turn out to be half-truths, prejudices or myths. It actually doesn't matter much whether Aaron and Nicole go to Stanford.
Admissions anxiety afflicts only a minority of parents. It's true that getting into college has generally become tougher because the number of high-school graduates has grown. From 1994 to 2006, the increase is 28 percent. Still, 64 percent of freshmen attend schools where acceptance rates exceed 70 percent, and the application surge at elite schools dwarfs population growth.
We have a full blown prestige panic; we worry that there won't be enough trophies to go around. Fearful parents prod their children to apply to more schools than ever. "The epicenters of parental anxiety used to be on the coasts: Boston, New York, Washington, Los Angeles," says Tom Parker, Amherst's admissions dean. "But it's radiated throughout the country."
Underlying the hysteria is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts, All that's plausible--and mostly wrong. "We haven't found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters," says Ernest T. Pascarella of the University of Iowa, co-author of How College Affects Students, an 827 page evaluation of hundreds of studies of the college experience. Selective schools don't systematically employ better instructional approaches than less-selective schools, according to a study by Pascarella and George Kuh of Indiana University. Some do; some don't. On two measures--professors' feedback and the number of essay exams--selective schools do slightly worse.
By some studies, selective schools do enhance their graduates' lifetime earnings. The gain is reckoned at 2 percent to 4 percent for every 100 point increase in a school's average SAT scores. But even this ad vantage is probably a statistical fluke. A well known study by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale of Mathematica Policy Research examined students who got into highly selective schools and then went elsewhere. They earned just as much as graduates from higher-status schools.
Kids count more than their colleges. Getting into Yale may signify intelligence, talent and ambition. But it's not the only indicator and, paradoxically, its significance is declining. The reason: so many similar people go elsewhere: Getting into college isn't life's only competition. In the next competition--the job market, graduate school--the results may change. Old-boy networks are breaking down, Krueger studied admissions to one top Ph. D. program. High scores on the Graduate Record Exam helped explain who got in; Ivy League degrees didn't.
So, parents, lighten up. The stakes have been vastly exaggerated. Up to a point, we can rationalize our pushiness. America is a competitive society, our kids need to adjust to that. But too much pushiness can be destructive; The very ambition we impose on our children may get some into Harvard but may also set them up for disappointment. One study of students 20 years out found that, other things being equal, graduates of highly selective schools experienced more job dissa
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She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton Nuttel when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.
"I hope Vera has been amusing you？" she said.
"She has been very interesting," said Framton.
"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly. "My husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way. They've been out for snipe in the marshes today, so they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you menfolk, isn't it？"
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.
"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's infirmities, their cause and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," be continued.
"No？" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention--but not to what Framton was saying.
"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with a dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window, they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you bound？"
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to a void imminent collision.
"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window, "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up？"
"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton, "could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of goodbye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."
"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly. "He told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve."
Romance at short notice was her speciality.
It can be inferred from the passage that Mrs. Sappleton was all EXCEPT ______.
如果一个人的一项经济活动会给社会上其他成员带来危害，但他自己却并不为此而支付足够抵偿这种危害的成本，此时这个人从其经济活动中所付出的私人成本就小于该项经济活动所造成的社会成本，这种性质的外部影响被称为外部经济。()
现实中有时评估的不一定是公开市场价值，而是某些特定条件限制下的价值，比如城市房屋拆迁是强制性的，所以城市拆迁房屋估价不应采用公开市场价值。()
Don't tell that to your local sushi chef. Over the past three decades, the fish export trade has grown fourfold, to 30 million tons, and its value has increased ninefold, to $ 71 Billion. The dietary attractiveness of seafood has stoked demand. About 90% of the ocean's big predators like cod and tuna--have been fished out of existence. Increasingly, fish and shrimp farms are filling the shortfall. Though touted as a solution to overfishing, many of them have--along with rampant coastal development, climate change and pollution devastated the reefs, mangroves and seagrass beds where many commercially valuable fish hatch.
Steven Murawski, chief scientist at the U. S. National Marine Fisheries Service, finds Worm's headlining prediction far too pessimistic, Industry experts are even more skeptical "There's now a global effort to reduce or eliminate fishing practices that aren't sustainable," says industry analyst Howard Johnson. "With that increased awareness, these projections just aren't realistic."
Perhaps. Still, the destructive fishing practices that have decimated tuna and cod have not declined worldwide, as Johnson suggests. Up to half the marine life caught by fishers is discarded, often dead, as bycatch, and vibrant coral forests are still being stripped bare by dragnets. Worm argues that fisheries based on ecosystems stripped of their biological diversity are especially prone to collapse. At least 29% of fished species have already collapsed, according to the study, and the trend is accelerating.
what's a fish eater to do？ "Vote with your wallet," says Michael Sutton, who runs the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program in California. Since 1999, the aquarium has handed out pocket guides listing sustainably harvested seafood. The Marine Stewardship Council has partnered with corporations to similarly certify wild and farm-raised seafood. Some 370 products in more than two dozen countries bear the British group's "Fish Forever" label of approval. Wal-Mart and Red Lobster, among others, have made commitments to sell sustainably harvested seafood.
But that's just a spit in the ocean unless consumers in Japan, India, China and Europe join the chorus for change. "If everyone in the U. S. started eating sustainable seafood," says Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Brian Halweil, "it would be wonderful, but it wouldn't address the global issues. We're at the very beginning of this."
It can be inferred from the first paragraph that ______.
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