绝密★启用前
英语模拟试题二
Questions 63 to 65 are based on the following passage:
Earlier this month, the universities admissions service revealed an increase in the numbers of full-time undergraduates starting degree courses, and the increase was entirely among women. There are fewer male students starting university this year than last.
If present trends were to continue, it is calculated, universities, the almost exclusive domain of white, middle-and upper-class males as little as 40 years ago, would be entirely female by the 2030s. Needless to say. That won’t come to pass, but the extrapolation（推断）illustrates the scale of what’s happening. Nor is the phenomenon confined to Britain: women are also now outdoing men in universities across the United States and Australia.
What accounts for this astonishing transformation? The answer depends on your academic subject, as well as on your political prejudices. Economists, as you’d expect, have a dry, economic explanation: women have more to gain financially from degrees because, among non-graduates, female earnings lag further behind male earnings than they do among graduates.
Scientists (some of them, at any rate) have genetic explanations to hand. Women, they say, are blessed with genes that make them more sociable at an early age, and better communicators than men. These traits stand them in good stead in educational competition. Further, the scientists say, women are more risk-averse than men. So while men continue to get more first-class degrees but often fall flat on their faces and drop out or get thirds, the women go for the safe second-class degree. Sociologists accept these ideas up to a point, but argue that the behavior of the two sexes is largely culturally rather than biologically determined.
Politicians and teachers have been worried for years about the growing gap between boys’ and girls’ achievements at school. Nobody has really come up with a satisfactory explanation. The best guess is that a combination of schools leaning over backwards to give girls equal opportunities, the paucity of male teachers in primary schools and the general laddishness of contemporary culture leads boys to think education is for sissies（胆小鬼）.
Whatever the truth, the implications for future job markets are huge. The advantages of being a graduate are greater than ever today: they secure better jobs and earn more money than those without degrees. But in 1994 women still earned on average 20 per cent less than men. And a recent study of graduates 18 months after they had left university revealed that more of the men were in professional occupations than the women. Female graduates still tend to fill the lower-paid and lower-status clerical and secretarial roles at work.
63. According to the passage, which of the following statements is NOT true?
A. Universities used to be attended mostly by males.
B. By 2030s, universities will be exclusively attended by females.
C. Sociologists would explain the increase of females attending universities in cultural terms.
D. Boys believe that education is female-oriented.
64. The word “paucity” (Para. 5) most probably means ______.
A. average B. many C. medium D. few.
65. The author’s main purpose is to ______.
A. explain why there are more females attending universities than males
B. analyze future job markets for women
C. contrast educational goals of men and women
D. forecast university attendance by men and women in the next century
参考答案：
63. B 64. D 65. A
(本试题属太奇内部资料，未经许可，不得转载。－待续)
