大学英语六级分类模拟题372_真题-无答案

大学英语六级分类模拟题372

(总分100,考试时间90分钟)

Reading Comprehension

Largely for "spiritual reasons," Nancy Manos started home-schooling her children five years ago

and has studiously avoided public schools ever since. Yet last week, she was enthusiastically

enrolling her 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, in sign language and modern dance classes at Eagleridge

Enrichment—a program run by the Mesa, Ariz, public schools are taught by district teachers.

Manos still wants to handle the basics, but likes that Eagleridge offers the extras, "things I

couldn"t teach." One doubt, though, lingers in her mind: why would the public school system want

to offer home-school families anything?

A big part of the answer is economics. The number of home-schooled kids nationwide has risen to

as many as 1.9 million from an estimated 345,000 in 1994, and school districts that get state and

local dollars per child are beginning to suffer. In Maricopa County, which includes Mesa, the

number of home-schooled kids has more than doubled during that period to 7,526; at about $4,500

a child, that"s nearly $34 million a year in lost revenue.

Not everyone"s happy with these innovations. Some states have taken the opposite tack. Like

about half of the states, West Virginia refuses to allow home-schooled kids to play public-school

sports. And in Arizona, **plain that their tax dollars are being used to create programs for families

who, essentially, eschew participation in public life. "That makes my teeth grit," says Daphne

Atkeson, whose 10-year-old son attends public school in Paradise Valley. Even **mitted

home-schoolers question the new programs, given their central irony: they turn home-schoolers

into public-school students, says Bob Parsons, president of the Alaska Private and Home

Educators Association. "We"ve lost about one third of our members to those programs. They"re so

enticing,"

Mesa started Eagleridge four years ago, when it saw how much money it was losing from

home-schoolers, and how unprepared some students were when they re-entered the schools. Since

it began, the program"s enrolment has nearly doubled to 397, and last year the district moved

Eagleridge to a strip mall (between a pizza joint and a laser-tag arcade). Parents typically drop off

their kids once a week; because most of the children qualify as quarter-time students, the district

collects $911 per child. "It"s like getting a taste of what real school is like," says 10-year-old Chad

Lucas, who"s **puter animation and creative writing.

Other school districts are also experimenting with novel ways to court home schoolers. The town

of Galena, Alaska, (pop. 600) has just 178 students. But in 1997, its school administrators figured

they could reach beyond their borders. Under the program, the district gives home-schooling

families **puters and Internet service for correspondence classes. In return, the district gets

$3,100 per student enrolled in the program—S9.6 million a year, which it has used partly for a

new vocational school. Such alternatives just might appeal to other districts. Ernest Felty, head of

Hardin County schools in southern Illinois, has 10 home-schooled pupils. That may not sound like

much—except that he has a staff of 68, and at $4,500 a child, "that"s probably a teacher"s salary,"

Felty says. With the right robotics or art class, though, he could take the home out of home

schooling.

1. What changes will Olivia face in the future?

A. She will face her mother"s punishment.

B. She will start to learn some knowledge in the public school.

C. Her mother Nancy Manos are likely to teach in the school.

D. Her home-learning is forbidden by government.

2. What can we infer from the statistics in paragraph 2?

A. It is a great loss for the public school system to have so many home-schoolers.

B. The number of the home-schoolers is steadily increasing.

C. Economics is greatly influenced by so many home-schoolers.

D. Home-schooling has an incomparable advantage over the public school system.

3. The statement "That makes my teeth grit" in paragraph 3 implies that ______.

A. I was in favour of what the public school had done

B. I wanted to eat something

C. I was angry and dissatisfied

D. I was indifferent to the policy

4. The reason why Mesa began Eagleridge is that ______.

A. the public school system has an incomparable advantage over home-schooling

B. she can obtain more money from those home-schoolers by helping them do some preparation

C. more and more people are wealthy enough to pay for intuition

D. parents are too busy to take care of their children

5. Which one of the following classes is not mentioned in the passage?

A. Art class.

B. Computer animation.

C. Sign language class.

D. Pizza making class.

There was a time when big-league university presidents really mattered. TheNew York

Timescovered their every move. Presidents, the realones, sought their counsel. For Woodrow

Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower, being head of Princeton and Columbia, respectively, was a

stepping-stone to the White House. Today, though, the job of college president is less and less

removed from that of the Avon lady (except the house calls are made to the doorsteps of wealthy

alums).

Ruth Simmons, the newly installed president of Brown University and the first African American

to lead an Ivy League school, is a throwback to the crusading campus leaders of the old. She

doesn"t merely marshal funds; she invests them in the great educational causes of our day. With

the more than $300 million she raised as president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001, Simmons

established an engineering program (the first at any women"s school) and added seminars focused

on public speaking to purge the ubiquitous "likes" and "urns" from the campus idiom. At a

meeting to discuss the future of Smith"s math department, one professor timidly requested two

more discussion sections for his course. Her response: "Dream bigger."

Her own dream was born in a sharecropper"s shack in East Texas where there was no money for

books or toys—she and her 11 siblings each got an apple, an orange and 10 nuts for Christmas.

Though she was called Negro on her walk to school, entering the classroom, she says, "was like

waking up." When Simmons won a scholarship to Dillard University, her high school teachers

took up a collection so she"d have a coat. She went on to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. in Romance

languages.

Simmons has made diversity her No. 1 campus crusade. She nearly doubled the enrolment of

black freshmen at Smith, largely by travelling to high schools in the nation"s poorest ZIP codes to

recruit. Concerned with the lives of minority students once they arrived at school, she has fought

to ease the racial standoffs that plague so many campuses. At Smith she turned down a request by

students to have race-specific dorms. In 1993, while vice provost at Princeton, she wrote a now

famous report recommending that the university establish an office of conflict resolution to defuse

racial misunderstandings before they boiled over.

Her first task at Brown will be to heal one such rupture last spring after the student paper

published an incendiary ad by conservative polemicist David Horowitz arguing that blacks

economically benefited from slavery. "There"s no safe ground for anybody in race relations, but

campuses, unlike any other institution in our society, provide the opportunity to cross racial lines,"

says Simmons. "And even if you"re hurt, you can"t walk away. You have to walk over that line."

6. What does the "ones" (Line 2, Para.1) refer to?

A. Counsellors in the White House

B. Famous people in a country

C. Presidents of universities

D. Presidents of nations

7. Which one of the following is NOT TRUE on how Simmons spend with the funds she had

raised?

A. She enlarged the number of those students who can win scholarship.

B. She paid more attention on public speaking by adding more seminars.

C. An engineering program was established by her.

D. She encouraged professors to practice their ideas.

8. What can we infer from "was like waking up" in paragraph 3?

A. Simmons is realistic.

B. Simmons is creative.

C. Simmons is coward.

D. Simmons is optimistic.

9. Why did Simmons reject the request to allow students with same race to live together in one

dormitory?

A. She intended to allow students to make more friends.

B. She expected students from different races to know more about each other, thus reducing racial

misunderstanding.

C. Students from the same race would be isolated.

D. She anticipated avoiding quarrels of students from diverse background.

10. What is a typical role played by colleges from the perspective of Simmons?

A. A safe ground for students.

B. A remote area for entertainment.

C. A place with less discrimination.

D. A small society for students to get prepared for the future.

Roger Rosenblatt"s bookBlack Fiction, in attempting to apply literary rather than sociopolitical

criteria to its subject, successfully alters the approach taken by most previous studies. As

Rosenblatt notes, criticism of Black writing has often served as a pretext for expounding on Black

history. Addison Gayle"s recent work, for example, judges the value of Black fiction by overtly

political standards, rating each work according to the notions of Black identity which it

propounds.

Although fiction assuredly springs from political circumstances, its authors react to those

circumstances in ways other than ideological, and talking about novels and stories primarily as

instruments of ideology circumvents much of the fictional enterprise. Rosenblatt"s literary

analysis disclosesaffinitiesand connections among works of Black fiction which solely political

studies have overlooked or ignored.

Writing acceptable criticism of Black fiction, however, presupposes giving satisfactory answers to

a number of questions. First of all, is there a sufficient reason, other than the facial identity of the

authors, to group together works by Black authors? Second, how does Black fiction make itself

distinct from other modern fictions, with which it is largely contemporaneous? Rosenblatt shows

that Black fiction constitutes a distinct body of writing that has an identifiable, coherent literary

tradition. Looking at novels written by Black over the last eighty years, he discovers recurring

concerns and designs independent of chronology. These structures are thematic, and they spring,

not surprisingly, from the central fact that the Black characters in these novels exist in a

predominantly white culture, whether they try to conform to that culture or rebel against it.

Black Fictiondoes leave some aesthetic questions open. Rosenblatt"s thematic analysis permits

considerable objectivity; he even explicitly states that it is not his intention to judge the merit of

the various works—yet his reluctance seems misplaced, especially since an attempt to appraise

might have led to interesting results. For instance, some of the novels appear to be structurally

diffuse. Is this a defect, or are the authors working out of, or trying to forge, a different kind of

aesthetic? In addition, the style of some Black novels, likeJean Toomer"s Cane, verges on

expressionism or surrealism; does this technique provide a counterpoint to the prevalent theme

that portrays the fate against which Black heroes are pitted, a theme usually conveyed by more

naturalistic modes of expression?

In spite of such omissions, what Rosenblatt does included in his discussion makes for an astute

and worthwhile study. Black Fiction surveys a wide variety of novels, bringing to our attention in

the process some fascinating and little-known works like James Weldon Johnson"sAutobiography

of an Ex-Colored Man. Its argument is tightly constructed, and its forthright, lucid style

exemplifies levelheaded and penetrating criticism.

11. In what ways is the book Black Fiction different from traditional ones?