Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.
The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation. All high school graduates ought to go, says conventional wisdom and statistical evidence, because college will help them earn more money, become ’better’ people, and learn to be more 1 citizens than those who don’t go.
But college has never been able to work its 2 for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don’t fit the pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxies; college students 3 with each other’s experiments and write false letters of recommendation in the intense competition for admission to graduate school. Others find no 4 in their studies, and drop out—often encouraged by college administrators.
Some observers say that the fault is with the young people themselves—they are spoiled and they are 5 too much. But that’s a condemnation of the students as a whole, and don’t explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are 6 fight. We’ve been told that young people have to go to college because our economy can’t absorb an army of untrained eigh-year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-olds.
Some adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the 7 of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside down, it seems, and through the rosy glow of our own remembered college experience. Perhaps college doesn’t make people intelt, 8 , happy, liberal, or quick to learn things—maybe it’s just the other way around, and intelt, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are merely the ones who have been 9 to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. That is heresy (异端邪说) to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But 10 evidence is beginning to mount up.
A. partly F. contrary K. responsible
B. magic G. stimulation L. attracted
C. interrupt H. preferred M. efficiency
D. expecting I. completion N. interfere
E. indicating J. ambitious O. careful Directions: You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.