biblio-memoirists, she loves network television and is un-nostalgic about print; in “The Shelf’ she says that she prefers her e-reader to certain moldy paperbacks.
The way most of us choose our reading today is simple. Someone posts a link, and we click on it. We set out to buy one book, and Amazon suggests that we might like another. Friends and retailers know our preferences, and urge recommendations on us. The bookstore and the library could assist you, too—the people who work there may even know you and track your habits—but they are organized in an impersonal way. Shelves and open stacks offer not only immediate access to books but strange juxtapositions. Arbitrary classification breeds surprises—Nikolai Gogol next to William Golding, Clarice Lispector next to Penelope Lively. The alphabet has no rationale, agenda, or preference.
20、What can be inferred from Paragraph 1 about the author’s opinion on reading?
A、What really matters is the fact that you read. B、An emphasis should be placed on what you read. C、The merchandising of reading can boost book sales.
D、Reading as a serious undertaking should not be merchandised.
21、Why does Phyllis Rose compare her reading to Ernest Shackleton’s explorations in the Antarctic?
A、To emphasize the adventurous and stirring experience of reading. B、To emphasize the role of reading in broadening people’s horizon. C、To emphasize the amusement in reading without specific guidance. D、To emphasize the challenges in reading books of varying categories.
22、Which of the following is closest in meaning to underlined phrase “human guinea pig”in Paragraph 3? A、A person used in experiments. B、An uneducated person. C、A lazy person. D、A vulnerable person.
23、Why is Rose considered a good instance to manifest “extreme reading”? A、People’s interest in reading needs to be inspired. B、Most people do not know what they should read. C、She knows how to relieve her mental suffering via reading. D、She has special personal traits needed for “extreme reading”.
24、In what sense is the arbitrary classification of books considered to be impersonal?
A、It brings about surprises. B、It fails to track readers’ habits.
C、It ignores the content of books. D、It fails to consider reader’s preferences. 试题答案：[['D'],['C'],['A'],['D'],['A']] 21、
If you have got kids, here is a nasty truth: they are probably not very special, that is, they are average, ordinary, and unremarkable. Consider the numbers of those applications your daughter is sending to Ivy League schools, for instance. There are more than a quarter of a million other kids aiming for the same eight colleges at the same time, and less than 9% of them will make the cut. And those hours you spend coaching Little League because you just know your son’s sweet swing will take him to the professionals. There are 2.4 million other Little Leaguers out there, and there are exactly 750 openings for major league ballplayers at the beginning of each season. That gives him a 0.0313% chance of reaching the big clubs. The odds are just as long for the other dreams you’ve had for your kids: your child the billionaire, the Broadway star, the Rhodes scholar. Most of those things are never going to happen.
The kids are paying the price for parents’ delusions. In public schools, some students are bringing home 17.5 hours of homework per week or 3.5 per school night and it’s hard to see how they have time to do it. From 2004 to 2014, the number of children participating in up to three hours of after-school activities on any given day rose from 6.5 million to 10.2 million. And all the while, the kids are
being fed a promise—that they can be tutored and coached, pushed and tested, hot- housed and advance placed until success is assured.
At last, a growing chorus of educators and psychologists is saying, “Enough!” Somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos there has to be a place where kids can breathe, where they can have the freedom to do what they love and where parents accustomed to pushing their children to excel can shake off the newly defined shame of having raised an ordinary child.
If the system is going to be fixed, it has to start, no surprise, with the parents. For them, the problem isn’t merely the expense of the tutors, the chore of the homework checking and the constant search for just the right summer program. It’s also the sweat equity that comes from agonizing over every exam, grieving over every disappointing grade—becoming less a guide in a child’s academic career than an intimate fellow traveler.
The first step for parents is accepting that they have less control over their children’s education than they think they do—a reality that can be both sobering and liberating. You can sign your kids up for ballet camp or violin immersion all you want, but if they’re simply doing what they’re told instead of doing what they love, they’ll take it only so far.
Ultimately, there’s a much larger national conversation that needs to be had about just what higher education means and when it’s needed at all. Four years