Question

The reading skills of young male students may improve more when boys are tutored(辅导) by women, a Canadian study shows, contradicting some school policies to hire male teachers to improve boys’ literacy.（读写能力）

Herb Katz, an education professor at the University of Alberta, took 175 boys in the third and fourth grades, identified as struggling readers, and paired them with a research assistant who worked on their reading skills for 30 minutes a week over 10 weeks.

On average, the boys paired with female tutors felt better about their reading skills after the 10 weeks than those who were guided by a male research assistant, the study found.

Katz said the study, published in the US journal Sex Roles, may cause educational policy-makers in countries such as Australia and Britain to rethink policies that call for more male teachers to be hired to provide role models for boys whose reading skills fall behind their peers (同龄人). “It tells us that the way governments respond with policy is perhaps a little too quick and a little too simple,” Katz said.

Boys and girls enter kindergarten with similar reading skills, Katz said, but by the end of the third grade, boys have lower reading scores than girls. The reasons behind that difference are not entirely clear. “I don’t know that reading skills fade so much as teachers may not recognize what boys are doing,” he said. “We don’t really know a lot about boys, even in those early years.”

The boys involved in the study attended 12 schools in the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Most were from downtown neighborhoods. About a third were native Canadians and 55 percent came from ethnic minority groups.

1．What’s the purpose of this passage?

      A．To encourage boys to do more reading.

      B．To persuade schools to hire female teachers.

      C．To describe good ways to develop reading skills.

      D．It provides some information about a study of reading skills.

2．The underlined word “contradicting” in the first paragraph means ______.

      A．finding out         B．going against     C．standing by        D．bringing about

3．We know from the passage that            .

       A．women must be better at teaching than men

       B．girls do more reading than boys

       C．male teachers are preferred to help reading-troubled boys in Australia

       D．governments will change their policy on hiring teachers.

4．According to the last paragraph but one, we know            .

      A．girls born good at reading but boys are not

      B．the cause of boys’ low reading scores remains unknown

      C．teachers cannot make out what boys do

      D． Katz knows boys better than their teachers

Answer 1

DBCB