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  3. At Harvard College in September, a controversy erupted over the adoption of a "freshman pledge," which for the first time asked

At Harvard College in September, a controversy erupted over the adoption of a "freshman pledge," which for the first time asked

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问题     At Harvard College in September, a controversy erupted over the adoption of a "freshman pledge," which for the first time asked incoming students to sign a commitment to act with respect, integrity, and kindness in order to "promote understanding. " Libertarian commentator Virginia Postrel, wrote that "treating ’kindness’ as the way to civil discourse doesn’t show students how to argue with accuracy and respect. " Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College and someone with an excellent perspective on undergraduate education, warned that it intruded into freedom of thought and that "a student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind. "
    Has empathy become the new scapegoat in the long-standing concern about academic attainment in American schools? Books like Academically Adrift chart the decline in academic rigor on American college campuses, citing the plummeting hours that students spend on studying and critical thinking skills. But there’s also been a troubling, and concurrent, decrease in empathy over the past thirty years. Many people disgusted at calls to increase empathy in young people because they assume that the ability to empathize is incompatible with traits like logic, reason, and impartiality. We’ve now entered a debate about how nice we should be or, rather, how nice we can afford to be and still stay competitive as a society, clinging to the pernicious belief that anything beneficial to young people must be painful and that we are in a rat race that is a zero-sum game.
    In fact, there need be no tradeoff, at Harvard or anywhere else, between intellectual rigor and kindness. This is a false dichotomy, like the belief that a sick person must choose between a competent doctor and a humane one. Indeed, empathetic behavior — listening well, for example — actually makes a doctor better able to diagnose and treat illness, and studies show that when doctors are empathetic, their patients need less medication to relieve pain and less time to heal wounds.
    People often equate empathy with gentleness and passivity. But empathy is really just a cognitive walk in another person’s shoes. An empathetic person is, fundamentally, a curious and imaginative person. Empathy involves a search for understanding. And we need today’s students to understand the world better in order to respond to its seemingly stubborn problems.
    Of course, we can always find examples of world-class thinkers who are oblivious to people’s feelings. But that doesn’t negate the fact that the vast majority of students will need to assume the perspective of others in order to get ahead in life. We can call this empathy. Or we can call it 21st century learning. Empathy doesn’t always lead to more moral behavior, but it can lead to more intelligent behavior.
According to the author, empathy features______.
选项 A、gentleness
B、curiosity
C、understanding
D、intelligence
答案C
解析 第四段打破人们头脑中对empathy固有的观点，指出其是“在他人的立场是进行感知”，即感同身受的能力。接着指出这种能力有助于年轻人去理解这个复杂的世界。可见[C]选项正确，该选项是原文understanding的复现，是对a cognitive walk in another person’s shoes这一比喻用法的直接表述。
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