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, pastoral campuses and boisterous parties (it doesn’t even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility. A primary draw at CUNY is a programmer 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 programmer pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend of $7, 500 (to help with general expenses) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year’s programme are up 70%. Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alunmus, 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 honours programme 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 standardised 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 of meritocracy 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. America’s first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its grueling standards. 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. In 1933—54 City produced nine future Nobel laureates, including the 2005 winner for economics, Robert Aumann (who graduated in 1950). What went wrong Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddle 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 (including a future secretary of state, Colin Powell). That, critics decided, could not be squared with City’s mission to "serve all the citizens of New York". At first the standards were tweaked, but this was not enough, and in 1969 massive student protests shut down City’s campus for two weeks. Faced with upheaval, City scrapped its admissions standards altogether. By 1970, almost any student who graduated from New York’s high schools could attend. The quality of education collapsed. At first, with no barrier to entry, enrolment climbed, but in 1976 the city of New York, which was then in effect bankrupt, forced CUNY to impose tuition fees. An era of free education was over, and a university which had once served such a distinct purpose joined the muddle of America’s lower-end education. By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or moths ( meaning that they had not learnt it to high-school standard). A report commissioned by the city in 1999 concluded that "Central to CUNY’s historic mission is a commitment to provide broad access, but its students’ high drop-out rates and low graduation rates raise the question: Access to what\ The paragraph that follows the text is probably about
A. CUNY’s reforms.
B. CUNY’s fate.
CUNY’s commitment.
D. CUNY’s mission.
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TapeStore: A NEW TAPE SIORAGE SYSTEMTapeStore is a new kind of tape storage system which can store up to 6,000 computer tapes. No other tape storage system can hold as many computer tapes as TapeStore. The tapes look exactly like video cassettes. Many hundreds of data files can be stored on each tape, up to a maximum of 500 million bytes of data. If you stored the same amount of information on paper, you would need nearly 4.5 billion printed pages.The machine is a tall black box with a mechanical arm. The machine is 2.5 metres high and 3.0 metres wide. This is how it works. Each tape has a code printed on it. YOU feed the code number into TapaStore, which then looks for the code. As soon as TapaStore locates the cede, the arm reaches in and pulls out the tape.The system is very fast. It takes the mechanical arm about 10 seconds to find the tape it is looking for. The machine then searches the tape to extract the required file, and this take less than a minute. A human technician would have to locate and remove the tape by hand; and could take at least an hour to find the right file on the tape.Some of the world’s biggest companies, including banks, insurance companies, airlines, telephone companies, utilities and computer centres, have bought the system. They like it particularly because the system guarantees the security of their data.TapeStore was originally developed in Canada and is now being marketed world-wide. In Europe alone, 750 have already been installed at a cost of 480,000 dollars each. The mechanical arm finds the tape by()
A. recording information on the tape.
B. identifying the printed code on the tape.
C. looking for the fil
12, 20, 30, 42, ( )
A. 54
B. 58
C. 52
D. 56
The past few years have been busy ones for human-rights organisations. In prosecuting the so-called war on terror, many governments in Western countries where freedoms seemed secure have been tempted to nibble away at them. Just as well, you might suppose, that doughty campaigners such as Amnesty International exist to leap to the defense. Yet Amnesty no longer makes the splash it used to in the rich world. This is not for want of speaking out. The organization is as vocal as it ever was. But some years ago it decided to follow intellectual fashion and dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category of what people now call social and economic rights. Rights being good things, you might suppose that the more of them you campaign for the better. Why not add pressing social and economic concerns to stuffy old political rights such as free speech, free elections and due process of law What use is a vote if you are starving Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too No: few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them. Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities. But no useful purpose is served by calling them "rights". When a government locks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic "rights". It is hard enough to determine whether such a right has been infringed, let alone who should provide a remedy, or how. Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers’ money is a political question Best settled at the ballot Box. So is how much to spend on what kind of health care. And no economic system known to man guarantees a proper job for everyone all the time: even the Soviet Union’s much-boasted full employment was based on the principle "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work". It is hardly an accident that the countries keenest to use the language of social and economic rights tend to be those that show least respect for rights of the traditional sort. The rulers of some countries habitually depict campaigns concentrating on individual freedoms as a conspiracy by the rich northern hemisphere to do down poor countries. It is mightily convenient, if you deprive your citizens of political liberties, to portray these as a bourgeois luxury. And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities is called politics. That is why the rights that make open politics possible—free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment—are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all. Many do-goading outfits suffer from baying too broad a focus and too narrow a base. Amnesty used to be the other way round, appealing to people of all political persuasions and none, and concentrating on a hard core of well-defined basic liberties. No longer. By trying in recent years to borrow moral authority from the campaigns and leaders of the past and lend it to the woollier cause of social reform, Amnesty has succeeded only in muffling what was once its central message, at the very moment when governments in the West need to hear it again. The mention of the Soviet Union’s much-boasted full employment is to
A. support his viewpoint.
B. refute the common view.
C. prove its ineffectiveness.
D. elicit the following text.
The past few years have been busy ones for human-rights organisations. In prosecuting the so-called war on terror, many governments in Western countries where freedoms seemed secure have been tempted to nibble away at them. Just as well, you might suppose, that doughty campaigners such as Amnesty International exist to leap to the defense. Yet Amnesty no longer makes the splash it used to in the rich world. This is not for want of speaking out. The organization is as vocal as it ever was. But some years ago it decided to follow intellectual fashion and dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category of what people now call social and economic rights. Rights being good things, you might suppose that the more of them you campaign for the better. Why not add pressing social and economic concerns to stuffy old political rights such as free speech, free elections and due process of law What use is a vote if you are starving Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too No: few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them. Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities. But no useful purpose is served by calling them "rights". When a government locks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic "rights". It is hard enough to determine whether such a right has been infringed, let alone who should provide a remedy, or how. Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers’ money is a political question Best settled at the ballot Box. So is how much to spend on what kind of health care. And no economic system known to man guarantees a proper job for everyone all the time: even the Soviet Union’s much-boasted full employment was based on the principle "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work". It is hardly an accident that the countries keenest to use the language of social and economic rights tend to be those that show least respect for rights of the traditional sort. The rulers of some countries habitually depict campaigns concentrating on individual freedoms as a conspiracy by the rich northern hemisphere to do down poor countries. It is mightily convenient, if you deprive your citizens of political liberties, to portray these as a bourgeois luxury. And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities is called politics. That is why the rights that make open politics possible—free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment—are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all. Many do-goading outfits suffer from baying too broad a focus and too narrow a base. Amnesty used to be the other way round, appealing to people of all political persuasions and none, and concentrating on a hard core of well-defined basic liberties. No longer. By trying in recent years to borrow moral authority from the campaigns and leaders of the past and lend it to the woollier cause of social reform, Amnesty has succeeded only in muffling what was once its central message, at the very moment when governments in the West need to hear it again. As to Amnesty, the author’s attitude is
A. nonchalant.
B. impartial.
C. repugnant.
D. compassionate.