快速阅读练习2-4篇

---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------快速阅读练习2-4篇【答案请在下周一或二面授课时上交，谢谢！】快速阅读练习题 Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes) Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, mark Y (for YES) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage; N (for NO) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage; NG (for NOT GIVEN) if the information is not given in the passage. For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with information given in the passage. Passage 2 Secular and Religious Schools Are secular universities discriminating against religious schools? Or are they just setting high standards? In its opening pages, Biology for Christian Schools (Bob Jones University Press) comes straight to the point: The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the conclusions drawn from observable facts that are presented in this book agree with the Scriptures. If a mistake has been made (which is probable since this book was prepared by humans) and at any point God’s Word is not put first, the1 / 19author apologies. And that is precisely why a high-school science course using the 693-page book as a primary text does not meet the admission standards of the University of California (UC). It does not, argues the university, reflect knowledge generally accepted in the scientific and educational communities and with which a student at the university level should be conversant. The same, says the university, is tree of some other courses-in history, literature and government-offered by Calvary Chapel Christian Schools of Murrieta, a small town south-east of Los Angeles. These courses also rely on books from the Bob Jones University Press and from another Christian publisher, A Beka Books. The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the Calvary Chapel Schools and six Calvary Chapel students are suing the university, whose campuses include that traditional bastion of liberal thought, Berkeley, as well as the huge UCLA campus, for what they call viewpoint discrimination. The Christian schools add that the university is violating the students’ constitutional right to freedom of speech and religion. The university naturally denies the charges, and this week a federal judge in Los Angeles began considering the preliminary arguments of a contest which could eventually reach the Supreme---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ Court. So far the UC case has bad less publicity than the argument about whether high schools can teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution (currently being fought out in a courtroom in Pennsylvania) or even a ferocious disputeup in Cupertino, where a history teacher claims he was restrained from teaching about Christianity’s role in American history (parents had complained that he was acting more like an evangelical preacher). In fact, all these arguments are part of the same battleground, which pits an increasingly self-confident evangelical America against a secular education establishment. The ACSI, which represents almost 4, 000 Christian high schools in America, ‘ including some 800 in California, worries that if the Christians’ challenge fails, UCs intoleranc e might spread to other institutions and other states. Moreover, says a lawyerfor the plaintiffs, victory would be a major blow to the arrogance of the ivory towers and their attempt to say that kids from Christian schools can’t be well prepared for unive rsity. There is a lot at stake. California, with its ten-campus UC system and the 23-campus California State network, has America’s biggest- and best-system of public universities.3 / 19The case has arisen because of the way that UC, unlike other systems, intrudes into high-school education. Its Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools assesses high-school courses to see if they meet its standards (known as A-G requirements, and ranging from a two-year history syllabus toone-year elective courses in subjects such as the visual and performing arts). UC denies it practices secular intoleranceand viewpoint discrimination. It notes that it has approved plenty of courses at Christian schools and in the past four years has accepted 24 of the 32 applicants from the Murrieta school. And it says that if the courses had used these textbooksas supplementary, rather than primary, texts, it is likely they would have been approved. What is really being challenged, saysthe university, is its right to set its own academic standardsand admission requirements. In which case the question is what that right implies. The Christian plaintiffs say they have no objection to science students, for example, being taught conventional wisdom, but their constitutional rights are abridged or discriminated against when they are told that the current interpretation of scientific method must be taught dogmatically, and must be accepted by students, to be eligiblefor admission to University of California institutions. In---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ other words, what the case involves is not so much the now-familiar tussle over intelligent design, but a student’s freedom of speech and thought. All of which, counters the university, is bogus. As long as they satisfy the A-G requirements, students who are headed into the UC system can believe whatever they choose to and take whatever additional coursesincluding religious onesthey like. In any case, the university’s lawyers point out, there is plenty of precedent establishing a university’s right to control a student’s speech. In theory, the UC case stops at California’s borders: no other state’s public universities interfere so much in the high-school system, so their secular intolerance, real or imagined, is less potent. In practice, whatever happens in the current case, more such conflicts will follow. For instance, when home-schooled children or students from private Christian schools apply to a public university, they are typically judged by their examination scoresand, typically, they are required to perform much better than their counterparts from the public schools. By the reckoning of the Calvary Chapel plaintiffs, a student from a Christian school in California needs to score within the top 2-4%, whereas a public-school teenager with good5 / 19course-work could meet the required score almost by guesswork. Given the growth across America in both home-schooling and Christian schooling, there will surely be more viewpoint-discriminated students and their parents contacting their lawyers. And evangelical America will keep pushing. Christian universities such as Wheaton, in Illinois, are proof that decent scholarship can co-exist with evangelical faith; and, given the rise of horn-again Christianity across the nation, more evangelical scholars are now found in secular faculties. Fifty years ago there were only a handful of megachurches, drawing more than 2, 000 each Sunday; today, there are more than 1, 200 such churches, three of them with congregations of over 20, 000. Not only is the nation’s president a born-again Chr istian, but so are 54% of America’s Protestants, who are 30% of the population. Will America’s public universities take on a similar tinge? To the extent that educational establishments reflect cultural reality, it may be inevitable. After all, before the liberal era of the 1960s, there were no such things as courses in Women’s Studies or African-American Studies. Now, no prudent American university would be without them. It would be odd if conservative Christians did not leave similar footprints on the syllabus.---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ 1. Biology for Christian Schools thinks God is more important than science. 2. Berkeley used to be popular but now has lost its glamour. 3. The UC case is actually a battle between religion and secular education system. 4. The Christian schools believe if a science student is forced to learn scientific method in order to enter a university, his constitutional rights are threatened. 5. Many other state’s universities interfere as much in the high-school system as UC does. 6. A public high school student has to do much better in the exam than a home-educated student for the admission to universities.7. Whatever the result of the case is, more conflicts between secular and religious schools will be expected. 8. As educational establishments reflect cultural reality, they are very likely to be influenced by . 9. What has made UC really mad is that its authority to set its own is being challenged. 10. Christian schools sued UC for what they call . Passage 3 College Pressures I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villainsto blame the colleges for charging too much7 / 19money, the professors for assigning too much work, the patents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains, only victims. In the late 1960s, one dean told me, the typical question that I got from students was Why is there so much suffering in the world? or How can I make a contribution? Today it’s Do you thinkit would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majoredin one of them? Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the balance of advantage is harsh. The pressure on students who just want to graduate is almost as heavy as that on students who want to get a job. Long gone are the days when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of coursesmusic, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religionthat---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds excite me. I like to hear the play of their ideas.I don’t know if they are getting As or Cs, and I don’t care.I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satis fying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can’t. Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at college and full time during the summer, to accrue ([利息等]自然增长) $5, 000 in loans after graduation: Strongly encouraged at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used he, incidentally, only for brevity. Women are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn’t yet caught up with9 / 19this fact. Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined. I see many students taking premedical courses with joyless determination. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people. Do you want to go to medical school? I ask them. I guess so, they say, without conviction, or Not really. Then why are you going? Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They’ re paying all this money and Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean well: they are trying to steer their sons and daughters toward a secure future. But the sons and daughters want to major in history or classics or philosophysubjects with no practical value. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classicsan ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspectiveare just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession courses that are pre-law,---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ pre-medical, pre-business, or as I sometimes heard it put, pre-rich. But the pressure on students is severe. They obligated to fulfill their parents’ expectations: after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them. Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year. I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda, one dean told me, who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn’t tell her that Barbara had come in two hour earlier to say the same thing about Linda. The story is almost funny except that it’s not. It’s symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are11 / 19due: Will I get everything done? Part of the problem is that they do more than they are expected to do. A professor will assign five-page papers. Several students will start writing ten-page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten-page papers, and a few will raise the ante ( 赌注) to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment. Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting, one dean points out, it’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more efforts from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic works, psychologically. Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classma tes’ fears. They must be jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future. Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience. College should be open-ended: at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, studentsit into the best-paying slot. They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity (平凡). They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing. If---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the cheerful spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the point is. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so I tell students that there is no one right way to get ahead that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians a mixed bag of achievers.I ask them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are13 / 19startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not preplanned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of Godor chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail. 1.College students know the better law firms and better medicalpractices will make them get more money. 2. The pressure onstudents who want to graduate is much heavier than that onstudents who want to get a Job. 3. A student will not work sohard if he or she has entered a good school. 4. The authorinvited many achievers to make reports to his students on howthey acquired success. 5. Barbara and Linda, who both had thesame problem, came to the dean for help together. 6. Somestudents do something because they fear to let down theirparents. 7. In the late 1960s, college Students often asked Howcan I make a contribution? 8. Economic pressure and are wound deeply together. 9. Many students are joylesslydetermined in as if they were going to thedentist. 10. Poor students are caught in one of the oldest websof . Passage 4 Will We Run Out of Water?Picture a ghost ship sinking into the sand, left to rot on dryland by a receding sea. Then imagine dust storms sweeping uptoxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers from the dry seabedand spewing them across towns and villages. Seem like a scene---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ from a movie about the end of the world? For people living near the Aral sea (咸海) in Central Asia, its all too real. Thirty years ago, government planners diverted the rivers that flow into the sea in order to irrigate (provide water for) farmland. As a result, the sea has shrunk to half its original size, stranding (使搁浅) ships on dry land. The seawater has tripled in salt content and become polluted, killing all 24 native species of fish. Similar large-scale efforts to redirect water in other parts of the world have also ended in ecological crisis, according to numerous environmental groups. But many countries continue to build massive dams and irrigation systems, even though such projects can create more problems than they fix. Why? People in many parts of the world are desperate for water, and more people will need more water in the next century. Growing populations will worsen problems with water, says Peter H. Gleick, an environmental scientist at the Pacific Institute for studies in Development, Environment, and Security, a research organization in California. He fears that by the year 2025, as many as one-third of the worlds projected (预测的) 8.3 billion people will suffer from water shortages. WHERE WATER GOES Only 2.5 percent of all water on Earth is freshwater,15 / 19water suitable for drinking and growing food, says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Mass. Two-thirds of this freshwater is locked in glaciers (冰山) and ice caps (冰盖). In fact, only a tiny percentage of freshwater is part of the water cycle, in which water evaporates and rises into the atmosphere, then condenses and falls back to Earth as precipitation (rain or snow). Some precipitation runs off land to lakes and oceans, and some becomes groundwater, water that seeps into the earth. Much of this renewable freshwater ends up in remote places like the Amazon river basin in Brazil, where few people live. In fact, the worlds population has access to only 12,500 cubic kilometers of freshwaterabout the amount of water in Lake Superior (苏必利尔湖). And people use half of this amount already. If water demand continues to climb rapidly, says Postel, there will be severe shortages and damage to the aquatic (水的) environment. CLOSE TO HOME Water woes (灾难) may seem remote to people living in rich countries like the United States. But Americans could face serious water shortages, too especially in areas that rely on groundwater. Groundwater accumulates in aquifers (地下蓄水层)， layers of sand and gravel that lie between soil and bedrock. (For every liter of surface water, more than 90---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ liters are hidden underground.) Although the United States has large aquifers, farmers, ranchers, and cities are tapping many of them for water faster than nature can replenish (补充) it. In northwest Texas, for example, overpumping has shrunk groundwater supplies by 25 percent, according to Postel. Americans may face even more urgent problems from pollution. Drinking water in the United States is generally safe and meets high standards. Nevertheless, one in five Americans every day unknowingly drinks tap water contaminated with bacteria and chemical wastes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In Milwaukee, 400,000 people fell ill in 1993 after drinking tap water tainted with cryptosporidium (隐孢子虫)，a microbe (微生物) that causes fever, diarrhea (腹泻) and vomiting. THE SOURCE Where do contaminants come from? In developing countries, people dump raw (未经处理的) sewage(污水) into the same streams and rivers from which they draw water for drinking and cooking; about 250 million people a year get sick from water borne (饮水传染的) diseases. In developed countries, manufacturers use 100,000 chemical compounds to make a wide range of products. Toxic chemicals pollute water when released untreated into rivers and lakes. (Certain17 / 19compounds, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (多氯化联二苯)，or PCBs, have been banned in the United States.) But almost everyone contributes to water pollution. People often pour household cleaners, car antifreeze, and paint thinners (稀释剂) down the drain; all of these contain hazardous chemicals. Scientists studying water in the San Francisco Bay reported in 1996 that 70 percent of the pollutants could be traced to household waste. Farmers have been criticized for overusing herbicides and pesticides, chemicals that kill weeds and insects but that pollutes water as well. Farmers also use nitrates, nitrogen-rich fertilizer that helps plants grow but that can wreak havoc (大破坏) on the environment. Nitrates are swept away by surface runoff to lakes and seas. Too manybuildup of algae, or microscopic plants that live on the surface of the water. Algae deprive the water of oxygen that fish need to survive, at times choking off life in an entire body of water. WHAT S THE SOLUTION? Water expert Gleick advocates conservation and local solutions to water-related problems; governments, for instance, would be better off building small-scale dams rather than huge and disruptive projects like the one that ruined the Aral Sea. More than 1 billion people---------------------------------------------------------------最新资料推荐------------------------------------------------------ worldwide don t have access to basic clean drinking water, says Gleick. There has to be a strong push on the part of everyone governments and ordinary people to make sure we have a resource so fundamental to life. 1. That the huge water projects have diverted the rivers causes the Aral Sea to shrink.2. The construction of massive dams and irrigation projects does more good than harm.3. The chief causes of water shortage are population growth and water pollution.4. The problems Americans face concerning water are ground water shrinkage and tap water pollution.5. According to the passage all water pollutants come from household waste.6. The people living in the United States will not be faced with water shortages.7. Water expert Gleick has come up with the best solution to water-related problems.8. According to Peter H. Gleick, by the year 2025, as many as of the worlds people will suffer from water shortages.9. Two thirds of the freshwater on Earth is locked in . 10. In developed countries, before toxic chemicals are released into rivers and lakes, they should be treated in order to avoid .19 / 19。