2009年12月大学英语四级真题试卷

College taking another look at values of merit-based aid

Good grades and high test scores still matter — a lot — to many colleges as they award financial aid.

But with low-income students projected to make up an ever-larger share of the college-bound population in coming years, some schools are re-examining whether that aid, typically known as “merit aid”, is the most effective use of precious institutional dollars.

George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for example, said last week that it would cut the value of its average merit scholarships by about one-third and reduce the number of recipients(接受者), pouring the savings, about $2.5 million, into need-based aid. Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., made a similar decision three years ago.

Now, Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., says it will phase out merit scholarships altogether. No current merit-aid recipients will lose their scholarships, but need-based aids alone will be awarded beginning with students entering in fall 2008.

Not all colleges offer merit aid; generally, the more selective a school, the less likely it is to do so. Harvard and Princeton, for example, offer generous need-based packages, but many families who don’t meet need eligibility(资格) have been willing to pay whatever they must for a big-name school.

For small regional colleges that struggle just to fill seats, merit aid can be an important revenue-builder because many recipients still pay enough tuition dollars over and above the scholarship amount to keep the institution running.

But for rankings-conscious schools in between, merit aid has served primarily as a tool to recruit top students and to improve their academic profile. “They’re trying to buy students”, says Skidmore College economist Sandy Baum.

Studies show merit aid also tends to benefit disproportionately students who could afford to enroll without it.

“As we look to the future, we see a more pressing need to invest in need-based aid”, says Monica Inzer, dean of admission and financial aid at Hamilton, which has offered merit scholarships for 10 years. During that time, it rose in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of the best liberal arts colleges, from 25 to 17.

Merit aid, which benefited about 75 students a year, or about 4% of its student body, at a cost of about $1 million a year, “served us well”, Inzer says, but “to be discounting the price for families that don’t need financial aid doesn’t feel right any more”.

Need-based aid remains by far the largest share if all student aid, which includes state, federal and institutional grants. But merit aid, offered primarily by school and states, is growing faster, both overall and at the institutional level.

Between 1995—1996 and 2003—2004, institutional merit aid alone increased 212%, compared with 47% for need-based grants. At least 15 states also offer merit aid, typically in a bid to enroll top students in the state’s public institutions.

But in recent years, a growing chorus(异口同声) of critics has begun pressuring schools to drop the practice. Recent decisions by Hamilton and others may be “a sign that people are starting to realize that there’s this destructive competition going on”, says Baum, co-author of a recent College Report that raises concerns about the role of institutional aid not based on need.

David Laird, president of the Minnesota Private College Council, says many of his schools would like to reduce their merit aid but fear that in doing so, they would lose top students to their competitors.

“No one can take one-sided action”, says Laird, who is exploring whether to seek an exemption(豁免) from federal anti-trust laws so member colleges can discuss how they could jointly reduce merit aid. “This is a merry-go-round that’s going very fast, and none of the institutions believe they can sustain the risks of trying to break away by themselves”.

A complicating factor is that merit aid has become so popular with middle-income families, who don’t qualify for need-based aid, that many have come to depend on it. And, as tuitions continue to increase, the line between merit and need blurs.

That is one reason Allegheny College doesn’t plan to drop merit aid entirely.

“We still believe in rewarding superior achievements and know that these top students truly value the scholarship”, says Scott Friedhiff, Allegheny’s vice president for enrollment.

Emory University in Atlanta, which boasts a $4.7 billion endowment(捐赠), meanwhile, is taking another approach. This year, it announced it would eliminate loans for needy students and cap them for middle-income families. At the same time, it would expand its 28-year-old merit program.

“Yeah, we’re playing the merit game”, acknowledges Tom Lancaster, associate dean for undergraduate education. But it has its strong points, too, he says. “The fact of the matter is, it’s not just about the lowest-income people. It’s the average American middle-class family who’s being priced out of the market”.

A few words about merit-based aid:

Merit-based aid is aid offered to students who achieve excellence in a given area, and is generally known as academic, athletic and artistic merit scholarships.

Academic merit scholarships are based on students’ grades, GPA and overall academic performance during high school. They are typically meant for students going straight to college right after high school. However, there are scholarships for current college students with exceptional grades as well. These merit scholarships usually help students pay tuition bills, and they can be renewed each year as long as the recipients continue to qualify. In some cases, students may need to be recommended by their school or a teacher as part of the qualification process.

Athletic merit scholarships are meant for students that excel(突出) in sports of any kind, from football to track and field events. Recommendation for these scholarships is required, since exceptional athletic performance has to be recognized by a coach or a referee(裁判). Applicants need to send in a tape containing their best performance.

Artistic merit scholarships require that applicants excel in a given artistic area. This generally includes any creative field such as art, design, fashion, music, dance or writing. Applying for artistic merit scholarships usually requires that students submit a port folio(选辑) of some sort, whether that includes a collection of artwork, a recording of a musical performance or a video of them dancing.

In the humanities, authors write to inform you in many ways. These methods can be 【B1】______into three types of informational writing- factual, descriptive, and process.

Factual writing provides 【B2】___information on an author, composer or artist, or on a type of music, literature, or art. Examples of factual writing include notes on a book jacket or 【B3】___ cover, and longer pieces such as an article describing a style of music, which you might read in a music 【B4】___course. This kind of writing provides a 【B5】___for your study of the humanities.

As its name 【B6】___, descriptive writing simply describes, or provides an 【B7】of a piece of music, art or literature. For example, descriptive writing might list the colors an artist used in a painting or the 【B8】a composer included in a musical composition, so as to make pictures or sounds in the reader’s mind by calling up specific details of the work. 【B9】_______________.

Process writing explains a series of actions that bring about a result. 【B10】_______________. This kind of writing is often found in art, where understanding how an artist created a certain effect is important. 【B11】_______________.

In families with two working parents, fathers may have more impact on a child’s language development than mothers, a new study suggests.

Researchers 【S1】______ 92 families from 11 child care centers before their children were a year old, interviewing each to establish income, level of education and child care arrangements. Overall, it was a group of well-educated middle-class families, with married parents both living in the home.

When the children were 2, researchers videotaped them at home in free-play sessions with both parents, 【S2】______ all of their speech. The study will appear in the November issue of The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

The scientists measured the 【S3】______ number of utterances(话语) of the parents, the number of different words they used, the complexity of their sentences and other 【S4】______ of their speech. On average, fathers spoke less than mothers did, but they did not differ in the length of utterances or proportion of questions asked.

Finally, the researchers 【S5】______ the children’s speech at age 3, using a standardized language test. The only predictors of high scores on the test were the mother’s level of education, the 【S6】______ of child care and the number of different words the father used.

The researchers are 【S7】______ why the father’s speech, and not the mother’s, had an effect.

“It’s well 【S8】______ that the mother’s language does have an impact”, said Nadya Pancsofar, the lead author of the study. It could be that the high-functioning mothers in the study had 【S9】______ had a strong influence on their children’s speech development, Ms. Pancsofar said, “ or it may be that mothers are 【S10】______ in a way we didn’t measure in the study”.

A) already B) analyzed C) aspects D) characters

E) contributing F) describing G) established H) quality

I) quoted J)recording K)recruited L) total

M)unconscious N)unsure O) yet

Throughout this long, tense election, everyone has focused on the presidential candidates and how they’ll change America. Rightly so. But selfishly, I’m more fascinated by Michelle Obama and what she might be able to do, not just for this country, but for me as an African-American woman. As the potential First Lady, she would have the world’s attention. And that means that for the first time people will have a chance to get up close and personal with the type of African-American woman they so rarely see.

Usually, the lives of black women go largely unexamined. The prevailing theory seems to be that we’re all hot-tempered single mothers who can’t keep a man. Even in the world of make-believe, black women still can’t escape the stereotype of being eye-rolling, oversexed females raised by our never-married, alcoholic(酗酒的) mothers.

These images have helped define the way all black women are viewed, including Michelle Obama. Before she ever gets the chance to commit to a cause, charity or foundation as First Lady, her most urgent and perhaps most complicated duty may be simply to be herself.

It won’t be easy. Because few mainstream publications have done in-depth features on regular African-American women, little is known about who we are, what we think and what we face on a regular basis. For better or worse, Michelle will represent us all.

Just as she will have her critics, she will also have millions of fans who usually have little interest in the First Lady. Many African-American blogs have written about what they’d like to see Michelle bring to the White House—mainly showing the world that a black woman can support her man and raise a strong black family. Michelle will have to work to please everyone—an impossible task. But for many African-American women like me, just a little of her poise(沉着) , confidence and intelligence will go a long way in changing an image that’s been around for far too long.

When next year’s crop of high-school graduates arrive at Oxford University in the fall of 2009, they’ll be joined by a new face: Andrew Hamilton, the 55-year-old provost(教务长)of Yale, who’ll become Oxford’s vice-chancellor- a position equivalent to university president in America.

Hamilton isn’t the only educator crossing the Atlantic. School in France, Egypt, Singapore, etc. have also recently made top-level hires from abroad. Higher education has become a big and competitive business nowadays, and like so many business, it’s gone global. Yet the talent flow isn’t universal. High-level personnel tend to head in only one direction: outward from America.

The chief reason is that American schools don’t tend to seriously consider looking abroad. For example, when the board of the University of Colorado searched for a new president, it wanted a leader familiar with the state government, a major source of the university’s budget, “We didn’t do any global consideration”, says Patricia Hayes, the board’s chair. The board ultimately picked Bruce Benson, a 69-year-old Colorado businessman and political activist(活动家) who is likely to do well in the main task of modern university presidents: fund raising. Fund raising is a distinctively American thing, since U.S. schools rely heavily on donations. The fund-raising ability is largely a product of experience and necessity.

Many European universities, meanwhile, are still mostly dependent on government funding. But government support has failed to keep pace with rising student numbers. The decline in government support has made fund-raising an increasingly necessary ability among administrators, and has hiring committees hungry for Americans.

In the past few years, prominent schools around the world have joined the trend. In 2003, when Cambridge University appointed Alison Richard, another former Yale provost, as its vice-chancellor, the university publicly stressed that in her previous job she had overseen(监督) “a major strengthening of Yale’s financial position”.

Of course, fund-raising isn’t the only skill outsiders offer. The globalization of education means more universities will be seeking heads with international experience of some kind to promote international programs and attract a global student body. Foreigners can offer a fresh perspective on established practices.

Older people must be given more chances to learn if they are to contribute to society rather than be a financial burden, according to a new study on population published recently.

The current approach which 【C1】______ on younger people and on skills for employment is not 【C2】______ to meet the challenges of demographic(人口结构的) change, it says. Only 1% of the education budget is 【C3】______ spent on the oldest third to the population.

The 【C4】______ include the fact that most people can expect to spend a third of their lives in 【C5】______ , that there are now more people 【C6】______ state pension age.

“【C7】______ needs to continue throughout life. Out historic concentration of policy attention and resources 【C8】______ young people cannot meet the new 【C9】______ “, says the report’s author, Professor Stephen Mcnair.

The major 【C10】______ of our education budget is spent on people below the age of 25. 【C11】______ people are changing their jobs, 【C12】______ , partners and lifestyles more often than 【C13】______ , they need opportunities to learn at every age. 【C14】______ , some people are starting new careers in their 50s and later.

People need opportunities to make a “midlife review” to 【C15】______ to the later stages of employed life and to plan for the transition(过渡) 【C16】______ retirement which may now happen 【C17】______ at any point from 50 to over 90, says McNair.

And there should be more money 【C18】______ to support people in establishing a 【C19】______ of identity and finding constructive 【C20】______ for the “third age”, the 20 or more years they will spend in healthy retired life.