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  3. For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn ha

For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn ha

admin2010-05-09  37
问题     For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university’s popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic (田园风味的) campuses and raucous (沙哑的) parties (it doesn’t even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.
    A primary draw at CUNY is a program for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1,100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY’s five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges: free education. Those accepted by CUNY’s honors program pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend (生活津贴) of $ 7,500 (to help with general expenses) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year’s program are up 70%.
    Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alumnus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group--criteria that are increasingly important at America’s elite colleges. Most of the students who apply to the honors program come from relatively poor families, many of them immigrant ones. All that CUNY demands is that these students be diligent and clever.
    Last year, the average standardized test score of this group was in the top 7% in the country. Among the rest of CUNY’s students averages are lower, but they are now just breaking into the top third (compared with the bottom third in 1997). CUNY does not appear alongside Harvard and Stanford on lists of America’s top colleges, but its recent transformation offers a neat parable (寓言) of meritocracy (知识界精华) revisited.
    Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. City’s golden era came in the last century, when America’s best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants.
    What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddle (糊涂的)-headedness. In the 1960s, universities across the country faced intense pressure to admit more minority students. Although City was open to all races, only a small number of black and Hispanic students passed the strict tests.
Which of the following factor is less favored in the enrollment of America’s elite colleges?
选项 A、Athletes.
B、Alumnus or influential persons.
C、A certain ethnic group.
D、Being diligent and clever.
答案D
解析 参见文章第3段：Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alumnus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group--criteria that are increasingly important at America’s elite colleges... All
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