2007年12月大学英语四级真题试卷

Universities Branch Out

As never before in their long history, universities have become instruments of national competition as well as instruments of peace. They are the place of the scientific discoveries that move economies forward, and the primary means of educating the talent required to obtain and maintain competitive advantage. But at the same time, the opening of national borders to the flow of goods, services, information and especially people has made universities a powerful force for global integration, mutual understanding and geopolitical stability.

In response to the same forces that have driven the world economy, universities have become more self-consciously global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire range of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses of study that address the challenges of an interconnected world and collaborative (合作的) research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity.

Of the forces shaping higher education none is more sweeping than the movement across borders. Over the past three decades the number of students leaving home each year to study abroad has grown at an annual rate of 3.9 percent, from 800,000 in 1975 to 2.5 million in 2004. Most travel from one developed nation to another, but the flow from developing to developed countries is growing rapidly. The reverse flow, from developed to developing countries, is on the rise, too. Today foreign students earn 30 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded in the United States and 38 percent of those in the United Kingdom. And the number crossing borders for undergraduate study is growing as well, to 8 percent of the undergraduates at America’s best institutions and 10 percent of all undergraduates in the U.K. In the United States, 20 percent of the newly hired professors in science and engineering are foreign-born, and in China many newly hired faculty members at the top research universities received their graduate education abroad.

Universities are also encouraging students to spend some of their undergraduate years in another country. In Europe, more than 140,000 students participate in the Erasmus program each year, taking courses for credit in one of 2,200 participating institutions across the continent. And in the United States, institutions are helping place students in summer internships (实习) abroad to prepare them for global careers. Yale and Harvard have led the way, offering every undergraduate at least one international study or internship opportunity – and providing the financial resources to make it possible.

Globalization is also reshaping the way research is done. One new trend involves sourcing portions of a research program to another country. Yale professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Tian Xu directs a research center focused on the genetics of human disease at Shanghai’s Fudan University, in collaboration with faculty colleagues from both schools. The Shanghai center has 95 employees and graduate students working in a 4,300-square-meter laboratory facility. Yale faculty， postdoctors and graduate students visit regularly and attend videoconference seminars with scientists from both campuses. The arrangement benefits both countries; Xu’s Yale lab is more productive, thanks to the lower costs of conducting research in China, and Chinese graduate students, postdoctors and faculty get on-the-job training from a world-class scientist and his U.S. team.

As a result of its strength in science, the United States has consistently led the world in the commercialization of major new technologies, from the mainframe computer and the integrated circuit of the 1960s to the Internet infrastructure (基础设施) and applications software of the 1990s. The link between university-based science and industrial application is often indirect but sometimes highly visible: Silicon Valley was intentionally created by Stanford University, and Route 128 outside Boston has long housed companies spun off from MIT and Harvard. Around the world, governments have encouraged copying of this model, perhaps most successfully in Cambridge, England, where Microsoft and scores of other leading software and biotechnology companies have set up shop around the university.

For all its success, the United States remains deeply hesitant about sustaining the research-university model. Most politicians recognize the link between investment in science and national economic strength, but support for research funding has been unsteady. The budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled between 1998 and 2003, but has risen more slowly than inflation since then. Support for the physical sciences and engineering barely kept pace with inflation during that same period. The attempt to make up lost ground is welcome, but the nation would be better served by steady, predictable increases in science funding at the rate of long-term GDP growth, which is on the order of inflation plus 3 percent per year.

American politicians have great difficulty recognizing that admitting more foreign students can greatly promote the national interest by increasing international understanding. Adjusted for inflation, public funding for international exchanges and foreign-language study is well below the levels of 40 years ago. In the wake of September 11, changes in the visa process caused a dramatic decline in the number of foreign students seeking admission to U.S. universities, and a corresponding surge in enrollments in Australia, Singapore and the U.K. Objections from American university and business leaders led to improvements in the process and a reversal of the decline, but the United States is still seen by many as unwelcoming to international students.

Most Americans recognize that universities contribute to the nation’s well-being through their scientific research, but many fear that foreign students threaten American competitiveness by taking their knowledge and skills back home. They fail to grasp the welcoming foreign students to the United States has two important positive effects: first, the very best of them stay in the States and – like immigrants throughout history – strengthen the nation; and second, foreign students who study in the United States become ambassadors for many of its most cherished (珍视) values when they return home. Or at least they understand them better. In America as elsewhere, few instruments of foreign policy are as effective in promoting peace and stability as welcoming international university students.

More and more of the world’s population are living in towns or cities. The speed at which cities are growing in the less developed countries is 【B1】______ . Between 1920 and 1960 big cities in developed countries 【B2】______ two and a half times in size, but in other parts of the world the growth was eight times their size.

The 【B3】______ size of growth is bad enough, but there are now also very 【B4】______ signs of trouble in the 【B5】______ of percentages of people living in towns and percentages of people working in industry. During the nineteenth century cities grew as a result of the growth of industry. In Europe the 【B6】______ of people living in cities was always smaller than that of the 【B7】______ working in factories. Now, however, the 【B8】______ is almost always true in the newly industrialised world: 【B9】______ . Without a base of people working in industry, these cities cannot pay for their growth; 【B10】______ There has been little opportunity to build water supplies or other facilities. 【B11】______ , a growth in the number of hopeless and despairing parents and starving children.

As war spreads to many comers of the globe, children sadly have been drawn into the center of conflicts. In Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Colombia, however, groups of children have been taking part in peace education 【S1】______ The children, after learning to resolve conflicts, took on the 【S2】______ of peacemakers. The Children’s Movement for Peace in Colombia was even nominated (提名) for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998. Groups of children 【S3】______ as peacemakers studied human rights and poverty issues in Colombia, eventually forming a group with five other schools in Bogota known as The Schools of Peace.

The classroom 【S4】______ opportunities for children to replace angry, violent behaviors with 【S5】______ , peaceful ones. It is in the classroom that caring and respect for each person empowers children to take a step 【S6】______ toward becoming peacemakers. Fortunately, educators have access to many online resources that are 【S7】______ useful when helping children along the path to peace. The Young Peacemakers Club, started in 1992, provides a Website with resources for teachers and 【S8】______ on starting a Kindness Campaign. The World Centers of Compassion for Children International call attention to children’s rights and how to help the 【S9】______ of war. Starting a Peacemakers’ Club is a praiseworthy venture for a class and one that could spread to other classrooms and ideally affect the culture of the 【S10】______ school.

WORD BANK

A) acting I) information

B) assuming J) offers

C) comprehensive K) projects

D) cooperative L) respectively

E) entire M) role

F) especially N) technology

G) forward O) victims

H) images

By almost any measure, there is a boom in Internet-based instruction. In just a few years, 34 percent of American universities have begun offering some form of distance learning (DL), and among the larger schools, it’s closer to 90 percent. If you doubt the popularity of the trend, you probably haven’t heard of the University of Phoenix. It grants degrees entirely on the basis of online instruction. It enrolls 90,000 students, a statistic used to support its claim to be the largest private university in the country.

While the kinds of instruction offered in these programs will differ, DL usually signifies a course in which the instructors post syllabi (课程大纲), reading assignments, and schedules on Websites, and students send in their assignments by e-mail. Generally speaking, face-to-face communication with an instructor is minimized or eliminated altogether.

The attraction for students might at first seem obvious. Primarily, there’s the convenience promised by courses on the Net: you can do the work, as they say, in your pajamas (睡衣). But figures indicate that the reduced effort results in a reduced commitment to the course. While dropout rates for all freshmen at American universities is around 20 percent, the rate for online students is 35 percent. Students themselves seem to understand the weaknesses inherent in the setup. In a survey conducted for eCornell, the DL division of Cornell University, less than a third of the respondents expected the quality of the online course to be as good as the classroom course.

Clearly, from the schools’ perspective, there’s a lot of money to be saved. Although some of the more ambitious programs require new investments in servers and networks to support collaborative software, most DL courses can run on existing or minimally upgraded (升级) systems. The more students who enroll in a course but don’t come to campus, the more the school saves on keeping the lights on in the classrooms, paying doorkeepers, and maintaining parking lots. And, while there’s evidence that instructors must work harder to run a DL course for a variety of reasons, they won’t be paid any more, and might well be paid less.

In this age of Internet chat, videogames and reality television, there is no shortage of mindless activities to keep a child occupied. Yet, despite the competition, my 8-year-old daughter Rebecca wants to spend her leisure time writing short stories. She wants to enter one of her stories into a writing contest, a competition she won last year.

As a writer I know about winning contests, and about losing them. I know what it is like to work hard on a story only to receive a rejection slip from the publisher. I also know the pressures of trying to live up to a reputation created by previous victories. What if she doesn’t win the contest again? That’s the strange thing about being a parent. So many of our own past scars and dashed hopes can surface.

A revelation (启示) came last week when I asked her, “Don’t you want to win again?” “No,” she replied, “I just want to tell the story of an angel going to first grade.”

I had just spent weeks correcting her stories as she spontaneously (自发地) told them. Telling myself that I was merely an experienced writer guiding the young writer across the hall, I offered suggestions for characters, conflicts and endings for her tales. The story about a fearful angel starting first grade was quickly “guided” by me into the tale of a little girl with a wild imagination taking her first music lesson. I had turned her contest into my contest without even realizing it.

Staying back and giving kids space to grow is not as easy as it looks. Because I know very little about farm animals who use tools or angels who go to first grade, I had to accept the fact that I was co-opting (借用) my daughter’s experience.

While stepping back was difficult for me, it was certainly a good first step that I will quickly follow with more steps, putting myself far enough away to give her room but close enough to help if asked. All the while I will be reminding myself that children need room to experiment, grow and find their own voices.