试题库在线考试题库-历年真题模拟试题及答案-考博英语在线试题测试中心-希赛网

湘潭大学

For years, studies have found that first-generation college students-those who do not have a parent with a college degree-lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit lore of them. This has created ’’a paradox" in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has "continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close” achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students.The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree.Their thesis-that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact—was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap.Many first-generation students struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the "rules of the game," and "take advantage of college resources," they write. And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don’t talk about the class advantage and disadvantages of different groups of students. Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students’ educational experience, many first-generation students lack insight about why they are struggling and do not understand how students like them can improve.1.Recruiting more first-generation students has（）.2.The author of the paper believes that first-generation students （）. 3.We may infer from the last paragraph that（）.

One of the most alarming things about the crisis in the global financial system is that the warning signs have been out there for some time, yet no one heeded them. Exactly 10 years ago, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) failed to convince investors that it could repay its debts, thereby bringing the world to the brink of a similar “liquidity crisis” to the one we now see. Disaster was averted then only because regulators managed to put together a multi-billion-dollar bailout package.LTCM’s collapse was particularly notable because its founders had set great store by their use of statistical models designed to keep tabs on the risks inherent in their investments. Its fall should have been a wake-up call to banks and their regulatory supervisors that the models were not working as well as hoped-in particular that they were ignoring the risks of extreme events and the connections that send such events reverberating around the financial system. Instead, they carried on using them?Now that disaster has struck again, some financial risk modelers-the "quant’s" who have wielded so much influence over modern banking-are saying they know where the gaps in their knowledge are and are promising to fill them. Should we trust them?Their track record does not inspire confidence. Statistical models have proved almost useless at predicting the killer risks for individual banks, and worse than useless when it comes to risks to the financial system as a whole. The models encouraged bankers to think they were playing a high-stakes card game, when what they were actually doing was more akin to lining up a row of dominoes.How could so many smart people have gotten it so wrong? One reason is that their faith in their model’s predictive power led them to ignore what was happening in the real world. Finance offers enormous scope for dissembling: almost any failure can be explained away by a judicious choice of language and data. When investors do not behave like the self-interested homo economics that economists suppose them to be, they are described as being "irrationally exuberant" or blinded by panic. An alternative view-that investors are reacting logically in the face of uncertainty-is rarely considered. Similarly, extreme events are described as happening only "once in a century"-even though there is insufficient data on which to base such an assessment.The quant’s' models might successfully predict the movement of markets most of the time, but the bankers who rely on them have failed to realize that the occasions on which the markets deviate from normality are much more important than those when they comply. The events of the past year have driven this home in a spectacular fashion: by some estimates, the banking industry has lost more money in the current crisis than it has made in its entire history.1.What happened a decade ago in the financial world（）.2.The statistical models used by LTCM （）. 3.What does the author think is the major cause of the current financial crisis?4.It can be inferred from the passage that risk control of the financial market（）.

With so much focus on children's use of screens, it's easy for parents to forget about their own screen use. “Tech is designed to really suck on you in,”says Jenny Radesky in her study of digital play, "and digital products are there to promote maximal engagement. It makes it hard to disengage, and leads to a lot of bleed-over into the family routine."Radesky has studied the use of mobile phones and tablets at mealtimes by giving mother-child pairs a food-testing exercise. She found that mothers who used devices during the exercise started 20 percent fewer verbal and 39 percent fewer nonverbal interactions with their children. During a separate observation, she saw that phones became a source of tension in the family. Parents would be looking at their emails while the children would be making excited bids for their attention.Infants are wired to look at parents' faces to try to understand their world, and if those faces are blank and unresponsive-as they often are when absorbed in a device-it can be extremely disconcerting for the children. Radesky cites the "still face experiment" devised by developmental psychologist Ed Tronick in the 1970s. In it, a mother is asked to interact with her child in a normal way before putting on a blank expression and not giving them any visual social feedback: The child becomes increasingly distressed as she tries to capture her mother’s attention. "Parents don’t have to be exquisitely present at all times, but there needs to be a balance and parents need to be responsive and sensitive to a child's verbal or nonverbal expressions of an emotional need," says Radesky.On the other hand, Tronick himself is concerned that the worries about kids ' use of screens are born out of an "oppressive ideology that demands that parents should always be interacting" with their children: "It’s based on a somewhat fantasized, very white, very upper-middle-class ideology that says if you’re failing to expose your child to 30,000 words you are neglecting them." Tronick believes that just because a child isn't learning from the screen doesn't mean there’s no value to it-particularly if it gives parents time to have a shower, do housework or simply have a break from their child. Parents, he says, can get a lot out of using their devices to speak to a friend or get some work out of the way. This can make them feel happier, which lets them be more available to their child the rest of the time.1.Radesky cites the "still face experiment" to show that（）.2.The oppressive ideology mentioned by Tronick requires parents to （）. 3.According to Tronick, kid's use of screens may（）.

Antarctica has actually become a kind of space station--- a unique observation post for detecting important changes in the world's environment. Remote from major sources of pollution and the complex geological and ecological systems that prevail elsewhere, Antarctica makes possible scientific measurements that are often sharper and easier to interpret than those made in other parts of the world.Growing numbers of scientists therefore see Antarctica as a unique observation distant-early-warning sensor, where potentially dangerous global trends may be spotted before they show up to the north. One promising field of investigation is glaciology. Scholars from the United States, Switzerland, and France are pursuing seven separate but related projects that reflect their concern for the health of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a concern they believe the world at large should share.The Transantarctic Mountain, some of them more than 14,000 feet high, divide the continent into two very different regions. The part of the continent to the "east” of the mountains is a high plateau covered by an ice sheet nearly two miles thick. "West" of the mountain, the half of the continent south of the Americas is also covered by an ice sheet, but there the ice rests on rock that is mostly well below sea level. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared, the western part of the continent would be reduced to a sparse cluster of island.While ice and snow are obviously central to many environmental experiments, others focus on the mysterious "dry valley" of Antarctica, valleys that contain little ice or snow even in the depths of winter. Slashed through the mountains of southern Victoria Land, these valleys once held enormous glaciers that descended 9,000 feet from the polar plateau to the Ross Sea. Now the glaciers are gone, perhaps a casualty of the global warming trend during the 10,000 years since the ice age. Even the snow that falls in the dry valleys is blasted out by vicious winds that roar down from the polar plateau to the sea. Left bare are spectacular gorges, rippled fields of sand dunes, clusters of boulders sculptured into fantastic shapes by 100-mile-an-hour winds, and an aura of extraterrestrial desolation.Despite the unearthly aspect of the dry valleys, some scientists believe they may carry a message of hope of the verdant parts of the earth. Some scientists believe that in some cases the dry valleys may soak up pollutants faster than pollutants enter them.1.What is the point the author made in Paragraph One?2.How are east and west of Transantarctic Mountain different from each other?3.What would the result be if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared?4.Which of the following about dry valleys is true?5.What is the best title for this passage?

Many people invest in the stock market hoping to find the next Microsoft and Dell. However, I know（1）personal experience how difficult this really is. For more than a year, I was （2） hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a day in investing in the market. It seemed so easy, I dreamed of （3）my job at the end of the year, of buying a small apartment in Paris, of traveling around the world. But these dreams （4）to a sudden and dramatic end when a stock I （5）,Texas cellular phone wholesaler, fell by more than 75 per cent （6）a one year period. On the（7）day, it plunged by more than $15 a share. There was a rumor the company was （8）sales figures. That was when I learned how quickly Wall street （9）companies that, in one way or another, misrepresent the（10） .In a （11）, I sold all my stocks in the company, paying （12）margin debt with cash advances from my （13）card. Because I owned so many shares, I （14）a small fortune, half of it from money I borrowed from the brokerage company. One month, I am a （15）, the next, a loser. This one big loss was my first lesson in the market.My father was a stockbroker, as way my grandfather （16）him (In fact, he founded one of Chicago's earliest brokerage firms.) But like so many things in life, we don’t learn anything, until we （17）for ourselves. The only way to really understand the inner（18）of the stock market is to invest your own hard-earned money. When all your stocks are doing （19）and you feel like a winner, you learn very little. It’s when all your stocks are losing and everyone is questioning your stock picking （20）that you find out if you have what it takes to invest in the market.

6 / 43