Section B
Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.
37、 根据以下内容，回答37-46题。
What You Really Need to Know
A. A paradox (悖论.of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a sample for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society's cutting edge.
B. And the world is changing very rapidly. Think social networking or stem cells. Most companies look nothing like they did 50 years ago. Think General Motors, AT&T or Goldman Sachs.
C. Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. My predecessor as Harvard President, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery (公墓). With few exceptions, just as in the middle of the 20th century, students take four courses a term, each meeting for about three hours a week, usually with a teacher standing in front of the room. Students are evaluated on the basis of examination essays handwritten in blue books and relatively short research papers. Instructors are organized into departments, most of whichbear the same names they did when the grandparents of today's students were undergraduates. A vastmajority of students still major in one or two disciplines centered on a particular department.
D. It may be that inertia (惯性.is appropriate. Part of universities' function is to keep alive man'sgreatest creations, passing them from generation to generation. Certainly anyone urging reform doeswell to remember that in higher education the United States remains an example to the world, and thatAmerican universities compete for foreign students more successfully than almost any other Americanindustry competes for foreign customers.
E.Nonetheless, it is interesting to speculate: Suppose the educational system is drastically altered torefleot the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will whatuniversities teach be different? Here are some guesses and hopes.
F.1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about instructing it. Thisis a consequence of both the explosion of knowledge--and how much of it any student can truly absorb--and changes in technology. Before the printing press, scholars might have had to memorize The Canterbury Tales to have continuing access to them. This seems a bit ridiculous to us today. Bu tin a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.
G.2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration. As just one example, the fraction of economics papers that are co-authored has more than doubled in the 30 years that I have been an economist. More significant, collaboration is a much greater par,. of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great superiority of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.
H.For most people, school is the last time they will be evaluated on indivividual effort. One leading investment bank has a hiring process in which a candidate must interview with upward of 60 senior members of the firm before receiving an offer. What is the most important specialty they're looking for? Not GMAT scores or college transcripts ( 成绩单), but the ability to work with others. As greater value is placed on collaboration, surely it should be practiced more in our nation's classrooms.
I.3. New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed. Electronic readers allow textbooks to be constantly revised, and to mix audio and visual effects. Think of a music text in which you can hear pieces of music as you read, or a history text in which you can see film clips about what you are reading. But there are more profound changes set in train. There was a time when professors had to prepare materials for their students. Then it became clear that it would be a better system if textbooks were written by just a few of the most able: faculty members would be freed up and materials would be improved, as competition drove up textbook quality.
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