Question

You are busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let's assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn't it tempting to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma(毕业文凭) represents a Harvard degree or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University?

More and more people are turning to an utter deception(欺骗) like this to land their first jobs or to move ahead in their careers.For personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well­known university.Registrars(注册主任) at most well­known colleges say that they deal with dishonest claims like these at the rate of about one per week.

Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms. If it turns out that an applicant is lying, most colleges are unwilling to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school refers to them as “special cases”. One well­known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says these claims are made by “no such people”．

To avoid complete lies, some job seekers claim that they “attended” or “were associated with” a college or university.After careful checking, a personnel officer may discover that “attending” means being dismissed after one semester.It may be that “being associated with”a college means that the job seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century—that's when they began keeping records, anyhow.

If you don't want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a fake diploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of non­existent colleges.The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from “Smoot State University”．The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the “University of Purdue”．As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana is properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.

36．The writer mainly wants to tell us that ________．

A．college degrees can now be purchased easily

B．nowadays it is very hard for people to find jobs

C．lying about college degrees is becoming a widespread problem

D．employers are no longer interested in applicants' actual performances

37．The underlined word “utter” in the second paragraph means ________．

A．thorough  B．careful

C．incomplete  D．spoken

38．Once finding applicants with false diplomas, most colleges would ________．

A．keep the records of them

B．drive them out of college

C．avoid direct conflicts with them

D．accuse them of such behavior

39．We can learn from the passage that ________．

A．US employers value their job applicants with a degree from top universities

B．University of Purdue and Purdue University are the same school

C．people with fake diplomas can get their first jobs in the US easily

D．people pay the same price for a fake diploma from different universities

Answer 1

Ⅲ.现在随着就业的难度越来越大，很多大学毕业生会隐瞒或虚构自己的毕业学校，有些甚至会编造些虚无缥缈的信息来获得一份工作。

36．C　主旨大意题。从全文内容可知，作者主要向我们介绍了现在有越来越多的大学生对自己的毕业文凭等信息进行造假，故答案选C项。

37．A　词义猜测题。从文章第二段内容可知求职者认为拥有名牌大学的文凭，其被雇用的机会大，而且著名大学平均每周都会接到“造假文凭”这种案件，由此可推断，画线词所在句表示现在有越来越多的人开始了彻头彻尾的欺骗。由此可知utter在此处表示“彻底的，十足的”，同thorough，故选A项。

38．C　细节理解题。根据文章第三段中的“…most colleges are unwilling to accuse the applicant directly”可知，大多数大学都不愿意直截了当地指出这种文凭的欺骗和造假，答案选C项。

39．A　推理判断题。从第二段第二句可知在美国，雇主重视求职者的大学文凭，青睐那些有名牌大学文凭的人，故A项正确。