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Questions 7～10 College rankings are dead! Long live college rankings! At a meeting of the country’s leading liberal arts schools this week in Annapolis, Md., a majority of the 80 or so college presidents in attendance said they would no longer participate in the popular annual rankings conducted by US News and World Report. Instead, the Annapolis Group announced it will help develop an alternative set of data to aid students and their families in the bewildering quest to figure out how one school differs from the next. College presidents have long been critical of the US News rankings, in part because 25% of a school’s score is based on a survey filled in by roughly half of college presidents and other top administrators, who rate schools based on reputation but often only selectively, leaving most of the list blank and unjudged. The peer survey strikes many in higher education as silly. But they believe the rankings have an additional and more nefarious component. Several college presidents have publicly complained that the rankings’ emphasis on the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen has led colleges to fight over high-achieving (and often wealthy) students by offering them merit scholarships and thus leaving fewer financial-aid dollars available to low-income students. But now the Annapolis Group, whose 124 members take up most of the slots in U. S. News’s list of the top 100 liberal arts schools, is putting its collective weight behind a web-based alternative to the rankings that is being spearheaded by the 900-member National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU). NAICU’s easy-to-read template, which is expected to be rolled out by hundreds of schools in September, allows students and their families to pull up extensive information organized in an objective format that includes such data as what percentage of students graduate in four years compared to those who graduate in five or six years. It plans to provide a level of detail that is not included in the US News rankings, but that could be very important to parents’ checkbooks. The NAICU template also lists the four most common majors at each school and gives a complete breakdown on class sizes, revealing how many classes have fewer than 20 students, fewer than 40, fewer than 100 or more than 100. NAICU is trying to provide a more complete picture than US News, and the new format doesn’t gloss over unpleasant details. For example, it will list a school’s current tuition alongside the sticker price from each of the previous four years (Parents, get ready to watch those bar charts keep climbing upwards over time!). It will also include the percentage of students who receive financial aid as well as what the average net tuition is for financial aid recipients. The new set of ratings also contains links to such sought-after details as a school’s campus safety report, internship and career-placement services and information about how many of its graduates go on to graduate school or are employed in the field of their choice within a certain amount of time after graduation. However, NAICU stops short of ranking schools in numerical order and although the association will serve as a central repository for all the new data, which can also be accessed through an individual school’s site, students and their families will have to print out the two-page profiles if they want to see how one institution stacks up against another. "We’re letting consumers rank the institutions based on their needs," says NAICU spokesman Tony Pals. Of course, there’s nothing to keep US News or anyone else from plugging all this new data into a rankings formula. And more than a few college presidents think that isn’t such a bad thing. "Some of my colleagues are ethical purists, and I applaud them," Millsaps College President Dr. Frances Lucas says of the US News rankings’ most strident critics at the Annapolis meeting. "But many of us live in the real world." And since the US News rankings are likely here to stay, Lucas and other presidents are hoping that if schools provide more data in a more meaningful, transparent manner, the rankings will become more meaningful, too.1.Why are people criticizing the annual college rankings conducted by US News and World Report

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There are two ways of thinking of history. There is, first, history regarded as (1) , really the (2) , from the universe to this nib with which I am writing. (3) There is the history of the universe, (4) --and we know something of it, if we do not. know much. Nor is (5) , when you come to think of it, between (6) . A mere pen-nib has quite (7) There is, to begin with, (8) with it, and that might be (9) After all it was probably only (10) that wrote Hamlet. Whatever has been written with the pen-nib is part of its history. (11) there is the history (12) : this particular nib is a "Relief" nib, No. 314, made by R. Esterbrook ＆ Co. in England, who supply the Midland Bank with pen-nibs, (13) —a gift, I may say, but behind this nib there is (14) In fact a pen nib (15) , and the history of it implies its history. We may regard this way of looking at it—history—as (16) of all things: a pen-nib, (17) before me as I write, as a (18) There is, secondly, what we may call (19) , what we usually mean by it, history proper as (20) .

Questions 1～3 The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic. "A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart. Of all the "old" media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Questions 4～6 Marriage really is good for you, with a major international study finding it reduces the risks of depression and anxiety, but these disorders are more likely to plague people once the relationship is over. The study of 34,493 people across 15 countries was led by clinical psychologist Kate Scott from New Zealand’s University of Otago, and is based on the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) surveys conducted over the past decade. It found that ending marriage through separation, divorce or death is linked to an increased risk of mental health disorders, with women more likely to resort to substance abuse and men more likely to become depressed. "What makes this investigation unique and more robust is the sample that is so large and across so many countries and the fact that we have data not only on depression... but also on anxiety and substance use disorders," Scott said in a statement. "In addition, we were able to look at what happens to mental health in marriage, both in comparison with never getting married, and with ending marriage." Scott said that the study found that getting married, compared to not getting married, was good for the mental health of both genders, not just women, as previous studies had found. The study, however, did find that men are less likely to become depressed in their first marriage than women, a factor Scott said was probably linked to the traditional gender roles at home, as other WMH surveys have shown that as women get better educated, depression rates tend to fall. The other gender difference the study found is that getting married reduces risk of substance use disorders more for women than for men Scott said this may be explained by the fact that women are usually the primary caregiver for young children. However, the downside of marriage, the University of Otago study shows, is that ending it has a negative impact on both genders. "What our study points to is that the marital relationship offers a lot of mental health benefits for both men and women, and that the distress and disruption associated with ending marriage can make people vulnerable to developing mental disorders," Scott said. The study was recently published in the British journal Psychological Medicine. It was conducted in association with the World Health Organization, Harvard University and a number of other international organizations.1.What might be the different reactions of men and women towards the ending of marriage

没有一个人将小草叫做大力士，但它的力量之大，的确世界无比。这种力量是一般人看不见的生命力。只要生命存在，这种力就要显现，上面的石块丝毫不足以阻挡它，因为这是一种“长期抗战”的力，有弹性、能屈能伸的力，有韧性、不达目的不罢休的力。如果不落在肥土中而落在瓦砾中，有生命力的种子决不会悲观、叹气，它相信有了阻力才有磨炼。生命开始的一瞬间就带着斗志而来的草才是坚韧的草，也只有这种草，才可以傲然对那些玻璃棚中养育着的盆花嗤笑。