E
We might be surprised at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to design anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For the claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack(窍门) of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and attitude.
As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the marks of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of various competitions where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of ‘drop-outs’: young people who are written off as failures before they have even started a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students?
A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus(教学大纲), so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive(剥夺) the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under pressure.
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark piles of hastily scrawled (潦草的)
scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities.
56.The main idea of this passage is _______.
A. examinations produce a harmful influence on education
B. examinations are ineffective
C. examinations are important to students’ development
D. examinations are a burden on students
57.The author’s attitude toward examinations is _______.
A. supportive       B. neutral          C. critical         D. indifferent
58.The fate of students is decided by _______.
A. education        B. examiners       C. examinations    D. students themselves
59.According to the author, the most important of a good education is _______.
A. to encourage students to read widely        B. to train students to think on their own
C. to teach students how to deal with exams        D. to master his fate
60.What does the author mean by saying “After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s”(Para 4, Line 6) ?
A. Judges are not important.
B. The examiner has the final say concerning the result of the examination.
C. Prisoners are more powerful than students.
D. The court decisions are often inaccurate.

E

We might be surprised at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to design anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For the claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack(窍门 ) of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and attitude.

As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the marks of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of various competitions where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of ‘drop-outs’: young people who are written off as failures before they have even started a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students?

A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus(教学大纲), so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive(剥夺) the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under pressure.

The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark piles of hastily scrawled (潦草的)

scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities.

56.The main idea of this passage is _______.

A. examinations produce a harmful influence on education

B. examinations are ineffective

C. examinations are important to students’ development

D. examinations are a burden on students

57.The author’s attitude toward examinations is _______.

A. supportive       B. neutral          C. critical         D. indifferent

58.The fate of students is decided by _______.

A. education        B. examiners       C. examinations    D. students themselves

59.According to the author, the most important of a good education is _______.

A. to encourage students to read widely        B. to train students to think on their own

C. to teach students how to deal with exams        D. to master his fate

60.What does the author mean by saying “After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s”(Para 4, Line 6) ?

A. Judges are not important.

B. The examiner has the final say concerning the result of the examination.

C. Prisoners are more powerful than students.

D. The court decisions are often inaccurate.

We might be surprised at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to design anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For the claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack(窍门高☆考♂资♀源?网) of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and attitude.

As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the marks of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of various competitions where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of ‘drop-outs’: young people who are written off as failures before they have even started a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students?

A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus(教学大纲), so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive(剥夺) the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under pressure.

The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark piles of hastily scrawled (潦草的) scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities.

56. The main idea of this passage is _______.

A. examinations produce a harmful influence on education

B. examinations are ineffective

C. examinations are important to students’ development

D. examinations are a burden on students

57. The author’s attitude toward examinations is _______.

A. supportive       B. neutral          C. critical         D. indifferent

58. The fate of students is decided by _______.

A. education        B. examiners       C. examinations    D. students themselves

59. According to the author, the most important of a good education is _______.

A. to encourage students to read widely        B. to train students to think on their own

C. to teach students how to deal with exams                   D. to master his fate

60. What does the author mean by saying “After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s”(Para 4, Line 6) ?

A. Judges are not important.

B. The examiner has the final say concerning the result of the examination.

C. Prisoners are more powerful than students.

D. The court decisions are often inaccurate.

第二节：英国卫报就教育问题在其网站上组织了一次讨论，其中Jesica、Bernal、Stevens、Carlos与lnersoll的观点颇具代表性。第61—65题是他们各自的观点。阅读下面发表在the Guardians网站上的6段留言（A、B、C、D、E和F），选择与其观点一致的表述，并在答题纸上将该项标号涂黑。选项中有一项是多余选项。

61．Stevens blames the modern methods of teaching for the deafening noise in primary schools.

62．Jessica holds the view that it’s shameful that the investment in education has not achieved the expected results.

63．Ingersoll believes that education should be assessed from the students’ aspect and that how much they enjoy is what counts most.

64．Carlos thinks that in terms of education, students’ own willingness to learn really matters.

65．Bernal thinks the standard of education has made significant progress though we may not see plenty of obvious sings of it.

A

I think it’s a great shame that people don’t learn anything today. I mean, good heavens, when you think of all the millions of pounds the Government have spent on education—new schools, more teachers, new equipment. And yet still you find people who can’t read properly, can’t even write their names and don’t know what two and two is without a calculator. I think it’s downright disgraceful. I remember when I was young you went to school to learn. You did as you were told and respected your teachers. Nowadays you get long-haired kids who aren’t interested in anything. No wonder they don’t learn anything.

B

I can’t praise our educational system too much. Our universities provide internationally recognized qualifications and the teaching standards in our country are among the best in the world. The education system in our country is different from that in many other countries, and it greatly appeals to the foreign students. It has a long history of welcoming international students to study in its universities and colleges. Now over 300,000 international students from 180 different courtiers are currently studying in Britain. I think the government should invest more money into this field to maintain the competitiveness of the system and ensure the high quality of the education in the 21st century.

C

Well, there are a log of different views on this, but I think it is probably wrong to imagine that there was some golden age in the past when everything was perfect. It all depends, of course, on what you measure and how you measure it. It may surprise some people that there ha snot been an obvious and dramatic increase in the standard of educating, given the vast amounts of money spent in this area by successive governments in recent years. But of course you can’t expect to see a child grow into an adult overnight.

D

Well, if you asked me, it’s all these modern methods that is the problem. In the old days you sat in rows at desks and you did as you were told. You knew what you had to do and you did it—and you kept quiet. Nowadays, my god, the noise in most schools is deafening especially primary schools. The children wander around—do more or less what they want to as far as I can see. The teacher just sits there or wanders around with them, talking to them. Informal teaching they call it. discovery methods sounds more like a recipe for discovering disaster to me.

E

Many people talk about how to improve education and a lot suggest raising the salaries of teachers and professors. Of course, this is very important to education. Of course, this is very important to education. However, increasing the salary of teachers is just one way to improve education. It will not work without the cooperation of the other determining factors, such as students’ love of knowledge and reading. Even if the teachers are devoted, it will make no sense if the students are not willing to learn.

F

The criticism that what students learn today is not adapted to present-day society is completely wrong because education can never be seen only in terms of how useful the subjects are when students leave school. We ought to assess education in terms of how much the students enjoy those subjects and how much they mean to those students. Instead of being trained to be utilitarian, students should be encouraged to do things for their own sake, and study what they are interested in.

If you want to increase your vocabulary, the best way to do it might be to pick up a guitar, or learn the violin. A new study shows that learning to play a musical instrument makes the brain more able to remember words.

       “Grown-ups with music training in their childhood can have better memory for words,” said Dr Agnes Chan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who did the research. “They can remember things that you tell them better than those who did not have music training when they were young.”

       It seems that one can remember spoken words because his brain has a special part. “That part of the brain is larger in musicians than in non-musicians,” Dr Chan told BBC. “If that part of the brain is larger, it may be better developed and so this explains very nicely our results.”

       Dr Chan and her workmates came to their conclusion after studying students. Their research is reported in the latest edition of the journal(杂志) Nature. “We did the experiment with 60 girl college students from our university and 30 of them have at least six years training with one western musical instrument (such as the violin and the piano) before the age of 12. The other 30 had received no music training. We tested their memory by reading them some words and asking them to remember these words—a very common test for memory. We found that people who have had music training can remember about 70% more information than those who have not had any music training.”

       Dr Chan thinks the process(过程) of learning is more important than the actual instrument used. She also believes if one is able to remember words through learning to play instruments, he or she could have some very real benefits. Dr Chan thinks this could be developed into a medical way for patients who are suffering from memory loss.

According to the writer, learning to play a musical instrument helps to ______.

   A. get more knowledge

   B. live more happily

   C. remember more words

   D. make one become a musician

Which of the following is true according to the passage?

   A. Dr Chan thinks people should have music training when they grow up.

   B. Dr Chan thinks the special part of the brain doesn’t need developing.

   C. Dr Chan thinks people should have music training when they are young.

   D. Dr Chan thinks musicians have a larger brain than non-musicians.

How many students took part in Dr Chan’s research?

   A. 30 girl students.                   B. 60 girl students.

   C. 17% of his students.               D. 60 girl and boy students.