Predictions about higher education’s future often result in two very different visions about what is next for colleges and universities. In one camp: those who paint a rosy picture of an economy that will continue to demand higher levels of education for an increasing share of the workforce. In the other: those who believe fewer people will enroll（入学）in college as tuition costs go out of control and alternatives to the traditional degree emerge.
“We are living in an age for learning, when there’s so much knowledge available, that one would think that this is good news for higher education,” Bryan Alexander told me recently. Alexander writes often about the future of higher education and is finishing a book on the subject for Johns Hopkins University Press. “Yet we’ve seen enrollment in higher education drop for six years.”
Alexander believes that for some colleges and universities to survive, they need to shift from their historical mission of serving one type of student (usually a teenager fresh out of high school) for a specific period of time. “We’re going to see many different ways through higher education in the future,” Alexander said, “from closer ties between secondary and postsecondary（中学后）schools to new options for adults. The question is, which institutions adopt new models and which try desperately to hang on to what they have.”
“The fact is that to maintain affordability, accessibility and excellence, something needs to change,” Rafael Bras, Georgia Tech’s provost (院长), told me when he unveiled the report at the Milken Institute Global Conference this past spring.
The commission’s report includes many impressive ideas, but three point to the possibility of a very different future for colleges and universities.
1) College for life, rather than just four years. The primary recommendation of the Georgia Tech report is that the university turns itself into a place for lifelong learning that allows students to “associate rather than enroll.”
“Students who we educate now are expected to have a dozen occupations,” Bras said. “So a system that receives students once in their lives and turns them out with the Good Housekeeping seal(印章) of approval to become alums (校友) and come back on occasion and give money is not the right model for the future.”
2) A network of advisers and coaches for a career. If education never ends, Georgia Tech predicts, neither should the critical advising function that colleges provide to students. The commission outlines a plan in which artificial intelligence and virtual tutors help advise students about selecting courses and finding the best career options. But even for a university focused on science and technology, Georgia Tech doesn’t suggest in its report that computers will replace humans for all advising.
3) A distributed presence around the world. Colleges and universities operate campuses and require students to come to them. In the past couple of decades, online education has grown greatly, but for the most part, higher education is still about face-to-face interactions.
Georgia Tech imagines a future in which the two worlds are blended in what it calls the “atrium” — a place that share space with entrepreneurs and become gathering places for students and alumni.
In some ways, as the report noted, the atrium idea is a nod to the past, when universities had agricultural and engineering experiment stations with services closer to where people in the state needed them.
Whether Georgia Tech’s ideas will become real is, of course, unclear. But as Alexander told me after reading it, “There is a strong emphasis on flexibility and transformation so they can meet emergent trends.” This is clear: colleges and universities are about to undergo a period of deep change — whether they want to or not — as the needs of students and the economy shift.
1.What can we learn from the two camps’ opinions about future colleges?
A. Future workforce will have high levels of education.
B. The expensive traditional degree is losing its appeal.
C. Traditional higher education is not practical.
D. Declining enrollment in college results from easy learning.
2.What should traditional colleges do according to Alexander?
A. They should provide new options for adults to enter colleges.
B. The should strengthen the ties between secondary and postsecondary schools.
C. They should abandon what they have and change their historical mission.
D. They should offer more freedom to students throughout their life.
3.What can we infer from the commission’s report?
A. Students can return for further study or make donations freely after graduation.
B. Artificial intelligence and virtual tutors will perform better in career guidance.
C. It focuses on how to make people enjoy good education without stress.
D. There is no point in requiring students to be present at school.
4.The underlined words “two worlds” refer to _______.
A. Basic education and higher education
B. entrepreneurs and students
C. present education and future education
D. virtual education and real classes
5.What does the author think of atrium idea?
A. It corresponds to the past idea in some way.
B. It is hard to realize despite its flexibility.
C. It makes some industries more accessible.
D. It is a practical solution to the declining enrollment.
6.The passage mainly talks about _________.
A. a reflection on the drawbacks of current higher education
B. the key factors which determine higher education’s future
C. two camps’ opposite opinions about higher education's future
D. a comparison between traditional and future higher education
I’m 47 years old. Two days ago, you sent me an email, which I did not answer. I didn’t answer it, in part, because I am 47 years old.
I almost answered your email after bedtime, which is when I have often answered emails. My laptop was put on my bedside table. My husband sat on his side of the bed, and he leaned back and asked me if I’d given any thought to whether the chickens would need to be kept away from the apple trees after he sprayed them with something to keep the bugs away.
We moved on to the children’s math grades, then to the way they just take their socks off and leave them, inside out, no matter where they are. I looked at the clock and saw that it was not as early as I’d thought, not for a lot of things, and so we turned off the light, and I did not answer your email.
Your email sat among emails from bosses and editors and orthodontists all through the next workday. My children were at school, and I had not yet managed to write 300 words nine more times. I thought about answering your email in the afternoon, while my older daughter and I waited outside the school for her sister to finish a piano lesson. My daughter probably would not have minded. She is almost 13, and sometimes, when she sits in the house texting while I try to talk to her, I sprayed her with the bottle I keep on the counter to spray the cats when they start scratching the back of the sofa. I could have answered your email then. I admit it. We could have sat there, in peaceful silence, each staring at our phone. I had time to answer your email, and I did not.
I snuggled(依偎) my youngest son at bedtime that night, because he asked. I snuggled him even though your email was calling, and some part of me wanted to pull away from the tedium of bedtime and reply. Replying would have felt fresh and new, while bedtime felt old and stale. I would like to say I snuggled my son and did not give your email one single thought, but that would not be true, and it would also be rude, even though it is a state of mind to which many of us aspire. Instead, I hovered(悬停) somewhere between presence in the bedtime moment and awareness of your email and many others. I spend a lot of time in that gap, sometimes drafting mental responses to emails, which I am later surprised and sad to find I have not actually sent.
It is possible that I will answer your email later, in a few hours, or in a few years, maybe when I am 57, and I will be so happy to have your email. We will trade words, and those words will again seem so real to me, a whole world in my laptop, where I live, sometimes, because there is so much that is attractive in there, where time moves fast and yet never moves at all. I will take my laptop outside and I will sit among the trees, listening for the voices of children who are no longer home, and I will answer your email.
It is also possible that I will not — that I, in fact, will never answer your email. If that is the case, if the people and the places and the things around me still press upon me with more urgency than your email and so many others, I hope that you will forgive me. I have already forgiven myself.
1.Why does the author mention chickens and the children’s math grades?
A. Because daily routines took up most of her time.
B. Because she was troubled by many unimportant things.
C. Because she was more concerned about her family.
D. Because she often put off answering email till bedtime.
2.What can be learnt from the author’s description of her daughter?
A. The author used to answer emails while waiting for her daughter.
B. The author would rather play with her daughter than answer emails.
C. The author and daughters liked to use their phone alone.
D. The author regretted the time spent on the phone.
3.What tone does the author use in answering emails after snuggling her son?
A. humor B. embarrassment
C. apology D. happiness
4.What do the last two paragraphs mainly tell us?
A. Learn to forgive yourself for not answering emails in time.
B. The world outside is so attractive that we should enjoy it now.
C. I will surely answer emails without children around.
D. Answering emails is a thing of little urgency.
The key to getting people to work together effectively could be giving them the freedom to choose their collaborators (合作者) and the comfort of working with established contacts, new research suggests.
In the study, David Melamed, an assistant professor of sociology at the Ohio State University and lead author of the study, and his co-authors found participants through the Amazon Mechanical Turk website — a service that allows researchers to hire people from around the world for a variety of purposes. For this study, all participants were from the United States.
Those who agreed to participate played online games in which each player started out with 1,000 monetary units that translated to $1 in real money they could pocket. If one player agreed to pay another player 50 monetary units, that second person would actually acquire 100 units. Each of the 16-round games included about 25 participants, some of whom participated in multiple games. In all, 810 people participated in the research.
Some of the games included random networks, where certain people could interact. Others included clustered (群集的) networks, in which a small group had multiple connections — an arrangement that was designed to mimic (模拟) real life, where humans often run their lives in packs. And the networks were either static (静态的) or dynamic (动态的). In static networks, a player could interact only with the appointed partners. In dynamic networks, participants could cut their ties with another player and form new connections. Furthermore, some of the games included reputation information. Participants were labeled based on their history of willingness to share money. The idea was to test whether those known to collaborate were favored by other players based on reputation — a factor shown in previous research to play a significant role in whether a person is likely to partner with another.
Melamed and his research partners were surprised to find that whether people are likely to partner with others had nothing to do with reputation in this study. The findings might have departed from previous studies because of the difference in size and study design, he said, explaining that much of the previous work in this area was conducted in groups of 100 or fewer and mostly involved student subjects. The Turk network used for the new study has been shown to be representative of the U.S. population in terms of age, race and other factors and the introduced players had no previous connections.
Cooperation rates overall were high — and highest when the participants were cooperating in clusters and had the ability to drop a partner in favor of another. “What really seems to matter is the ability to change the structure of a network,” Melamed said. “And the patterns of relationships also made a difference. Those in a known cluster with multiple connections cooperated more.”
1.What did David Melamed and his partners do for their study?
A. They hired 810 people globally.
B. They gave each participant $1,000.
C. They designed 16-round online games.
D. They asked each participant to take part in only one game.
2.Compared with previous research, the new study found that _____.
A. reputation played no role in cooperation
B. student subjects were more likely to partner with others
C. players having connections before were more cooperative
D. cooperation rates were influenced by age, race and other factors
3.It can be inferred that the purpose of the study led by David Melamed is to discover _____.
A. how to change the patterns of relationships
B. what leads people to collaborate most willingly
C. what kind of person is the most popular in a team
D. whether it’s proper to drop a partner in favor of another
As is tradition, technology companies from around the world have flocked to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show. There are thousands of eye-catching items to swoon over, whether you’re a nerd or not. Here are a few of the most interesting, exciting and possibly life-changing products seen at the show, which runs from Tuesday to Friday.
Item 1 You thought your curved TV was cool? The LG Signature OLED TV R is a 65-inch 4K TV that is, unlike your lame and rigid screen, rollable, and can retract(收回) into its base when you’re not enjoying it. While you can control it using either Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, the TV R also supports Apple’s AirPlay 2 and HomeKit. |
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Item 2 Gaming laptops aren’t new, but they usually lack power compared to their beefier desktop counterparts. Nvidia’s latest announcement changes that, and brings the desktop-class power found in its RTX line of graphics cards to laptops. More than 40 laptop models will turn up by the end of the month with RTX graphics cards inside, which can produce more realistic graphics and boost performance for the most gamers. |
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Item 3 If sleeping is harder than it should be, the Dreem band might be able to help you figure out what you’re doing wrong. The Dreem band is a fabric-covered headband that wraps around your head and uses a combination of sensors like the ones in your Apple Watch to detect various biometrics like your heart rate and respiration activity. It also uses bone conduction to communicate audio cues to you privately. |
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Item 4 Samsung’s shown off its Micro LED technology in the past, using it to build The Wall, a 146-inch TV. The company’s now showing off a smaller Micro LED TV. Using Samsung’s Micro LED panels, you can create a variety of display sizes supporting different aspect ratios, going from an ultra-wide 21:9 screen to a perfectly square 1:1 display without losing image quality. |
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1.If one likes doing things by himself, which of the items suits him best?
A. Item 1. B. Item 2.
C. Item 3. D. Item 4.
2.Which of the following technologies appeared for the first time in the show?
A. The TV R User’s controlling the TV by Google Assistant
B. Nvidia’s laptops’ solving the problem of power
C. The Dreem band’s detect your heart rate
D. Samsung’s Micro LED technology making a 146-inch TV possible
For our family vacations when our children were younger, we often went river rafting. Rafting meant we could be together as a family,________with the beauty of nature, and meet other people. Plus, it was ________, and being on the river meant our family never had to ask that ________of questions: “What are we going to do today?” It was always clear — ________the boat and paddle downstream! This was our method for strengthening family bonds with less ________.
We also found that the river is always a great ________. For example, sometimes your boat goes through a particularly difficult rapid and you find yourself thrown out of the boat and into the water. When this happens, sometimes you get caught in a ________, where the water is churning（搅动）back upstream. What do you do? The natural tendency is to crazily attempt to swim ________, but in this situation, the water is circulating backward, ________you are actually swimming against the current. This is very dangerous; it is quite possible to ________yourself and be unable to get out of the hole. Unfortunately, people have ________this way. However, if you give up swimming and ________, the water pulls you in and for an instant takes you upstream. Usually, this is enough for you to be ________“spit out” of the hole.
A ________situation came up in a recent coaching meeting I had with a high-ranking engineer of a Fortune 100 company, who described his week as feeling as though he were “swimming upstream.” The more ________he felt, the harder he worked, and the less time he spent with his managers, and with his family. He was unaware that he had become so ________in fighting the daily battles that he had completely________the larger stream, the more vital ________of his leadership role.
Be aware of ________you place your attention. If you become distracted, keep returning to your point of ________.
1.A. interact B. go C. live D. breathe
2.A. inspiring B. cautious C. adventurous D. conscious
3.A. most curious B. deadliest C. most interesting D. greatest
4.A. get in B. get down to C. get off D. get round
5.A. time B. communication C. cooperation D. effort
6.A. teacher B. mother C. soldier D. leader
7.A. mess B. center C. hurry D. hole
8.A. safely B. downstream C. away D. past
9.A. or B. and C. but D. so
10.A. exhaust B. hurt C. justify D. refresh
11.A. disappeared B. fought C. died D. behaved
12.A. relax B. reflect C. lie D. watch
13.A. calmly B. quickly C. shockingly D. amazingly
14.A. positive B. strange C. similar D. confusing
15.A. anger B. pressure C. motivation D. attraction
16.A. involved B. trapped C. lost D. bathed
17.A. lost track of B. turned blind to C. lost sight of D. looked down upon
18.A. calls B. priorities C. appeals D. promises
19.A. where B. how C. why D. when
20.A. target B. achievement C. condition D. focus
It is unwise to disturb one who is devoted to his work. Just _____.
A. face the music B. fly off the handle
C. eat your words D. bite your tongue
