阅读理解 Part A
Text 1
文章选自不是很热门的一本杂志“Commentary” 2007年9月号，原文作者 TERRY TEACHOUT 题目为 Selling Classical Music。作者从纽约爱乐乐团任命Alan Gilbert为新音乐总监一事谈起，分析了交响乐团现在面临的困境，www.med126.com并给出了自己的解释和解决途径。文章难度一般，后面题目也比较简单
Text 2
文章选自Business Week 商业周刊 2009年11月5日，原文作者Jena McGregor 原文的题目是Top Managers Are Quitting, Without a New Job：顶级经理人在离职，新工作还没着落。讲在西方经济逐渐摆脱金融危机影响后，工作机会也渐渐多了起来，许多高级经理人不等和下家谈好，就先辞职，即现在所谓的“裸辞”或“裸跳”。作者分析了这种情况的利弊和产生的原因。文章难度一般，题目也不难
Text 3
文章选自麦肯锡季刊，讲的是媒体最新的变化，因为涉及到一些大众传播学的原理和理论知识，文章难度较难，题目也不容易
Text 4
文章选自2010年9月7日的新闻周刊，文章作者Jennie Yabroff 文章的题目是 Not On Board With Baby (孩子不能登机登船)，副标题是Parenthood—the condition, not the TV show—sucks. Or so everyone keeps saying。文章讨论的是美国社会中的一个热点话题，是否要孩子。作者直言不讳地指出，美国流行文化中对养育孩子的好处比较渲染，而养育孩子的艰苦则提的较少。这篇文章的难度主要体现在考生对作者的态度把握上比较困难。
阅读理解 Part B
文章自于2010年2月25日的Economist 经济学人杂志，原文题目为University education in America 美国的大学教育
The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. By Louis Menand. Norton; 174 pages; $24.95 and £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk
THIS subtle and intelligent little book should be read by every student thinking of applying to take a doctorate. They may then decide to go elsewhere. For something curious has been happening in American universities, and Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard University, captures it deftly。
His concern is mainly with the humanities: literature, languages, philosophy and so on. These are disciplines that are going out of style: 22% of American college graduates now major in business compared with only 2% in history and 4% in English. However, many leading American universities want their undergraduates to have a grounding in the basic canon of ideas that every educated person should possess. But most find it difficult to agree on what a “general education” should look like. At Harvard, Mr Menand notes, “The great books are read because they have been read”—they form a sort of social glue。
One reason why it is hard to design and teach such courses is that they cut across the insistence by top American universities that liberal-arts education and professional education should be kept separate, taught in different schools. Many students experience both varieties. Although more than half of Harvard undergraduates end up in law, medicine or business, future doctors and lawyers must study a non-specialist liberal-arts degree before embarking on a professional qualification。
Besides professionalising the professions by this separation, top American universities have professionalised the professor. The growth in public money for academic research has speeded the process: federal research grants rose fourfold between 1960 and 1990, but faculty teaching hours fell by half as research took its toll. Professionalism has turned the acquisition of a doctorate into a prerequisite for a successful academic career: as late as 1969 a third of American professors did not possess one. But the key idea behind professionalisation, argues Mr Menand, is that “the knowledge and skills needed for a particular specialisation are transmissible but not transferable。” So disciplines acquire a monopoly not just over the production of knowledge, but also over the production of the producers of knowledge。
No disciplines have seized on professionalism with as much enthusiasm as the humanities. You can, Mr Menand points out, become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four. But the median time—median!—to a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. (Advertising note to American students: you can get a perfectly good PhD at a top British university in under four years。) Not surprisingly, up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees。
Equally unsurprisingly, only about half end up with the jobs they entered graduate school to get: tenured professorships. There are simply too few posts. This is partly because universities continue to churn out ever more PhDs. But fewer students want to study humanities subjects: English departments awarded more bachelor’s degrees in 1970-71 than they did 20 years later. Fewer students require fewer teachers. So, at the end of a decade of thesis-writing, many humanities students leave the profession to do something for which they have not been trained。
The key to reforming higher education, concludes Mr Menand, is to alter the way in which “the producers of knowledge are produced”. Otherwise, academics will continue to think dangerously alike, increasingly detached from the societies which they study, investigate and criticise. “Academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic。” Yet quite how that happens, Mr Menand does not say. In reality, baby and bathwater may go out together. Public exasperation with academic introversion may lead to a loss of some independence, the most precious right of academics in a free society。
此部分的标准答案为
G → 41. B→42. D→ E →43.A →44.C →45. F
