Getting an Early Start Pine Jog Elementary School seems more like a green-themed educational resort than an attractive old s

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问题                         Getting an Early Start
    Pine Jog Elementary School seems more like a green-themed educational resort than an attractive old school house. The brand-new $ 30 million facility was planned with extreme sustainability in mind: classroom design maximizes fresh air and natural light; solar panels power much of the energy grid. "We really wanted the students to be excited about learning from the moment they walk on campus," says the school’s principal.
    More than two dozen U.S. primary schools have poured thousands of dollars into fancy facilities and shiny green curricula. There’s little doubt as to the value of green education—how trading outdated textbooks for the great outdoors lets developing minds wander more freely. But some teachers and parents wonder whether the same effects could be reached with far fewer resources, giving students in more ordinary schools the same chance to excel by interacting and solving problems with the world around them.
    Environmental learning isn’t always about climate change or the Earth’s plight. Rather, teachers with green lesson plans use the natural world as a tool, like leading a study on an ordinary stream, which can include language, math and social studies. "If you take kids outside, it typically engages them, especially ones who are struggling," says Jerry Lieberman, an educational researcher. A handful of studies show the same connection, that students exposed to a nature-based curriculum score higher more than 90 percent of the time than students taught the same subjects in the classroom out of a textbook.
    Some schools take that as a must, making sure that their students have immediate access to the natural world. Administrators at Sidwell Friends Middle School figured that the best way to acquaint kids with the water cycle would be to build a sewage-treatment plant in the middle of campus to recycle wastewater. But for much of the rest of the country, elementary schools—often stricken with inadequate funding and little room to deviate from state-standardized curricula— rarely find money or time for promoting real— world learning.
    Brian Day, director of the North American Association, says that incorporating sustainability into education is important, but it’s not an issue of money. Part of the answer could be Project Learning Tree (PLT) , an environmentally based curriculum that parallels federal standards. This program train educators in green-based teaching for about $15, which includes a teaching workshop and guidebook of lesson plans, like analyzing water samples from a nearby river or studying the history of local wildlife.
    That’s all Principal Thomas Irvin of Oil City Elementary in Louisiana had to hear. The school board threatened to shut down the campus a few years ago due to low performance and inconsistent enrollment. Suspecting that an environmentally based curriculum might turn things around, he trained his entire teaching staff in PLT other green-based curricula and raised a few thousand dollars of private funds to build three outdoor classrooms. As a result, enrollment rose nearly a third and test scores jumped, making the school one of the highest-achieving in the district.
Which of t he following can best summarize the text?

选项 A、Eco-education doesn’t have to be expensive.
B、Real world learning is emerging among primary schools.
C、Real world learning produces engaged students.
D、Eco-education is the last straw for poorly performing schools.

答案A

解析 本题考查文章主旨。正确概括文章主旨需要纵览全文内容。文章前两段引出问题:普通学校利用很少的设施进行绿色教育能否取得和高投入学校同样的效果?第四段指出普通学校面临的事实:没有足够的资金进行大量设施的建设。第五段指出钱不是绿色教育的障碍,并指出了资金缺少的情况下推行绿色教育的途径——PLT。第六段用具体事例证明:在投入很少的情况下,绿色教育照样能够取得很好的效果。由此可知,[A]为全文讨论的主题。[B]是第一段和第二段前半部分的内容。[C]只在第三段涉及。“绿色教育对于表现不佳的学校的作用”只在最后一段涉及,而且“救命稻草”这样的说法无从推知。因此其他三个选项都无法概括全文。
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