The methods of testing a person’ s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. After all these years, education

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问题    The methods of testing a person’ s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. After all these years, educationists have still failed to device anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the skill of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’ s true ability and aptitude.
   As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are markers of success or of failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured.
   A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
   The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’ s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person ’ s true abilities.
   Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: I were a teenage drop-out and now I am a teenage millionaire.
What is the meaning of the underlined sentence in the second paragraph?

选项 A、Examinations leave so great pressure to the students.
B、Anxiety-makers attach much importance to the examination.
C、The makers of examinations are more likely to be anxious.
D、Examinations are the first in importance.

答案A

解析 根据题干关键词定位到文章第二段第一句。该句中的second to none为固定搭配,意为“不亚于任何事物”,整句话可理解为“考试最能让学生产生焦虑的情绪”。故A项 “考试给学生带来巨大的压力”符合题意。B项“焦虑者对考试非常重视”、C项“考试的制造者更有可能焦虑”和D项“考试是最重要的事情”均不符合题意,故选A。
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