1、大学英语四级阅读-32 及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、BReading Compreh(总题数：5，分数：100.00)Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived.
2、You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the question by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.Small Schools RisingThis years list of the top 100 high schools shows that today, those with fewer students are flourishing.A. Fifty years ago,
3、 they were the latest thing in educational reform: big, modem, suburban high schools with students counted in the thousands. As baby boomers (二战后婴儿潮时期出生的人) came of high-school age, big schools promised economic efficiency, a greater choice of courses, and, of course, better football teams. Only year
4、s later did we understand the trade-offs this involved: the creation of excessive bureaucracies (官僚机构), the difficulty of forging personal connections between teachers and students. SAT scores began dropping in 1963; today, on average, 30% of students do not complete high school in four years, a fig
5、ure that rises to 50% in poor urban neighbourhoods. While the emphasis on teaching to higher test-driven standards as set in “No Child Left Behind“ resulted in significantly better performance in elementary (and some middle) schools, high schools for a variety of reasons seemed to have made little p
6、rogress.B. Size isnt everything, but it does matter, and the past decade has seen a noticeable countertrend toward smaller schools. This has been due, in part, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested $1.8 billion in American high schools, helping to open about 1,000 small school
7、smost of them with about 400 kids each with an average enrollment of only 150 per grade. About 500 more are on the drawing board. Districts all over the country are taking notice, along with mayors in cities like New York, Chicago and San Diego. The movement includes independent public charter schoo
8、ls, such as No. 1 BASIS in Tucson, with only 120 high-schoolers and 18 graduates this year. It embraces district-sanctioned magnet schools, such as the Talented and Gifted School, with 198 students, and the Science and Engineering Magnet, with 383, which share a building in Dallas, as well as the Ci
9、ty Honors School in Buffalo, N.Y., which grew out of volunteer evening seminars for students. And it includes alternative schools with students selected by lottery (抽签), such as H-B Woodlawn in Arlington, Va. And most noticeable of all, there is the phenomenon of large urban and suburban high school
10、s that have split up into smaller units of a few hundred, generally housed in the same grounds that once boasted thousands of students all marching to the same band.C. Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, Calif., is one of those, ranking No. 423among the top 2% in the countryon Newsweeks annual ranki
11、ng of Americas top high schools. The success of small schools is apparent in the listings. Ten years ago, when the first Newsweek list based on college-level test participation was published, only three of the top 100 schools had graduating classes smaller than 100 students. This year there are 22.
12、Nearly 250 schools on the full Newsweek list of the top 5% of schools nationally had fewer than 200 graduates in 2007.D. Although many of Hillsdales students came from wealthy households, by the late 1990s average test scores were sliding and it had earned the unaffectionate nickname (绰号) “Hillsjail
13、.“ Jeff Gilbert, a Hillsdale teacher who became principal last year, remembers sitting with other teachers watching students file out of a graduation ceremony and asking one another in astonishment, “How did that student graduate?“E. So in 2003 Hillsdale remade itself into three “houses,“ romantical
14、ly named Florence, Marrakech and Kyoto. Each of the 300 arriving ninth graders are randomly (随机地) assigned to one of the houses, where they will keep the same four core subject teachers for two years, before moving on to another for 11th and 12th grades. The closeness this system cultivates is reinf
15、orced by the institution of “advisory“ classes. Teachers meet with students in groups of 25, five mornings a week, for open-ended discussions of everything from homework problems to bad Saturday-night dates. The advisers also meet with students privately and stay in touch with parents, so they are d
16、eeply invested in the students success. “Were constantly talking about one anothers advisees,“ says English teacher Chris Crockett. “If you hear that yours isnt doing well in math, or see them sitting outside the deans office, its like a personal failure.“ Along with the new structure came a more de
17、manding academic program; the percentage of freshmen taking biology jumped from 17 to 95. “It was rough for some, but by senior year, two-thirds have moved up to physics,“ says Gilbert. “Our kids are coming to school in part because they know there are adults here who know them and care for them.“ B
18、ut not all schools show advances after downsizing, and it remains to be seen whether smaller schools will be a cure-all solution.F. The Newsweek list of top US high schools was made this year, as in years past, according to a single metric, the proportion of students taking college-level exams. Over
19、 the years this system has come in for its share of criticism for its simplicity. But that is also its strength: its easy for readers to understand, and to do the arithmetic for their own schools if theyd like.G. Ranking schools is always controversial, and this year a group of 38 superintendents (地
20、区育主管) from five states wrote to ask that their schools be excluded from the calculation. “It is impossible to know which high schools are the best in the nation,“ their letter read, in part. “Determining whether different schools do or dont offer a high quality of education requires a look at many d
21、ifferent measures, including students overall academic accomplishments and their subsequent performance in cortege, and taking into consideration the unique needs of their communities.“H. In the end, the superintendents agreed to provide the data we sought, which is, after all, public information. T
22、here is, in our view, no real dispute here; we are all seeking the same thing, which is schools that better serve our children and our nation by encouraging students to tackle tough subjects under the guidance of gifted teachers. And if we keep working toward that goal, someday, perhaps, a list wont
23、 be necessary.（分数：20.00）(1).Schools funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are mostly small in size.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(2).Newsweek ranked high schools according to their college-level test participation.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(3).Fifty years ago, big, modem, suburban high schools were established in
24、 the hope of providing good education for baby boomers.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(4).The most noticeable trend in high school education is that some large schools have split up into smaller ones.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(5).As a result of setting up big schools, students performance declined.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(6).Simpli
25、city is still considered a strength of Newsweeks school ranking system in spite of the criticism it receives.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(7).The establishment of “advisory“ classes at Hillsdale enhances closer relationships between students and their teachers.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(8).In the late 1990s, Hillsdales st
26、udents school performance was getting worse.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(9).To better serve the children and our nation, schools should hire gifted teachers and encourage students to take tough subjects.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(10).According to the 38 superintendents, to rank schools scientifically, it is necessary to
27、use many different measures.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_The MagicianThe revolution that Steve Jobs led is only just beginning.A. When it came to putting on a show, nobody else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could match Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand a
28、lone on a black stage and produce as if by magic an “incredible“ new electronic gadget (小器具) in front of an amazed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and work with numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic.“ Mr. Job
29、s, who died recently aged 56, spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy-to-use products.B. The reaction to his death, with people leaving candles and flowers outside Apple stores and politicians singing praises on the Internet, is proof that Mr. Jobs had become something much
30、 more significant than just a clever money-maker. He stood out in three waysas a technologist, as a corporate (公司的) leader and as somebody who was able to make people love what had previously been impersonal, functional gadgets. Strangely, it is this last quality that may have the deepest effect on
31、the way people live. The era of personal technology is in many ways just beginning.C. As a technologist, Mr. Jobs was different because he was not an engineerand that was his great strength. Instead he was keenly interested in product design and aesthetics (美学), and in making advanced technology sim
32、ple to use. He repeatedly took an existing but half-formed ideathe mouse-driven computer, the digital music player, the smartphone, the tablet computer (平板电脑)and showed the rest of the industry how to do it properly. Rival firms competed with each other to follow where he led. In the process he brou
33、ght about great changes in computing, music, telecoms and the news business that were painful for existing firms but welcomed by millions of consumers.D. Within the wider business world, a man who liked to see himself as a hippy (嬉皮士), permanently in revolt against big companies, ended up being hail
34、ed by many of those corporate giants as one of the greatest chief executives of his time. That was partly due to his talents: showmanship, strategic vision, an astonishing attention to detail and a dictatorial management style which many bosses must have envied. But most of all it was the extraordin
35、ary trajectory (轨迹) of his life. His fall from grace in the 1980s, followed by his return to Apple in 1996 after a period in the wilderness, is an inspiration to any businessperson whose career has taken a turn for the worse. The way in which Mr. Jobs revived the failing company he had co-founded an
36、d turned it into the worlds biggest tech firm (bigger even than Bill Gatess Microsoft, the company that had outsmarted Apple so dramatically in the 1980s), sounds like something from a Hollywood movie.E. But what was perhaps most astonishing about Mr. Jobs was the absolute loyalty he managed to insp
37、ire in customers. Many Apple users feel themselves to be part of a community, with Mr. Jobs as its leader. And there was indeed a personal link. Apples products were designed to accord with the bosss tastes and to meet his extremely high standards. Every iPhone or MacBook has his finger-prints all o
38、ver it. His great achievement was to combine an emotional spark with computer technology, and make the resulting product feel personal. And that is what put Mr. Jobs on the right side of history, as technological innovation (创新) has moved into consumer electronics over the past decade.F. As our spec
39、ial report in this issue (printed before Mr. Jobss death) explains, innovation used to spill over from military and corporate laboratories to the consumer market, but lately this process has gone into reverse. Many peoples homes now have more powerful, and more flexible, devices than their offices d
40、o; consumer gadgets and online services are smarter and easier to use than most companies systems. Familiar consumer products are being adopted by businesses, government and the armed forces. Companies are employing in-house versions of Facebook and creating their own “app stores“ to deliver softwar
41、e to employees. Doctors use tablet computers for their work in hospitals. Meanwhile, the number of consumers hungry for such gadgets continues to swell. Apples products are now being snapped up in Delhi and Dalian just as in Dublin and Dallas.G. Mr. Jobs had a reputation as a control freak (怪人), and
42、 his critics complained that the products and systems he designed were closed and inflexible, in the name of greater ease of use. Yet he also empowered millions of people by giving them access to cutting-edge technology. His insistence on putting users first, and focusing on elegance and simplicity,
43、 has become deep-rooted in his own company, and is spreading to rival firms too. It is no longer just at Apple that designers ask: “What would Steve Jobs do?“H. The gap between Apple and other tech firms is now likely to narrow. This weeks announcement of a new iPhone by a management team led by Tim
44、 Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive in August, was generally regarded as competent but uninspiring. Without Mr. Jobs to shower his star dust on the event, it felt like just another product launch from just another technology firm. At the recent unveiling of a tablet computer by Jeff Bezo
45、s of Amazon, whose company is doing the best job of following Apples lead in combining hardware, software, content and services in an easy-to-use bundle, there were several attacks at Apple. But by doing his best to imitate Mr. Jobs, Mr. Bezos also flattered (抬举) him. With Mr. Jobs gone, Apple is ju
46、st one of many technology firms trying to arouse his uncontrollable spirit in new products.I. Mr. Jobs was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a “reality distortion (扭曲) field,“ such were his powers of persuasion. But in the end he created a reality of his own, channelling the ma
47、gic of computing into products that reshaped entire industries. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe“ did just that.（分数：20.00）(1).Steve Jobs started the era of personal technology that most deeply affected peoples way of life.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(2).This issues spe
48、cial report mentions that innovation nowadays originates in the consumer market.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(3).Mr. Jobs brought about great changes in computing, music, telecoms and the news business, which was hated by existing companies but loved by consumers.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(4).Amazon, by having hardware, software, content and services combined in an easy-to-use bundle, did the best job in following Apples lead.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(5).Many corporate giants saw Mr. Jobs as one of the greatest chief executives of his time.（分数：2.00）填空项 1:_(6).The most astonishing part of Mr. Jobss success was that he comma
