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PART HI READING COMPREHENSION
Section A (60 minutes，30 points)
Directions: Below each of the following passages you will find some questions or incomplete statements.Each question or statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. Read each passage carefully, and then select the choice that best answers the question or completes the statement. Mark the letter of your choice with a single bar across the square brackets on your Machine-scoring ANSWER SHEET.
Passage One
Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but it is difficult to appreciate just how much trouble until you read the report from the Modem Language Association (MLA). The report is about Ph. D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track position.
The core of the problem is the job market. The MLA report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph. D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the MLA got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list with the number of new graduates. But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting.
Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don’t want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, “ adjunct” professors, rather than full-time, tenure-track professors, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper ; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire.
These trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly, bulking up on professors and graduate programs. When the boom ended and enrollments declined, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were seeking out new constituencies— among them, women and minorities—and creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of
students.
Those reforms worked: about twice as many people attend college per capita now as they did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges have had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university.
36. What does the word “appreciate” mean in Paragraph 1?
A. Enjoy. B. Overlook. C. Investigate. D. Understand.
37. What has made Ph. D. programs unpopular?
A. They no longer save your time.
B. They cannot guarantee a secure job.
C. They are competitive and time-consuming.
D. They are not subsidized by the government.
38. The MLA report about the employment rate is too optimistic because it .
A. overestimates the job market B. fails to account for former graduates
C. does not include all kinds of jobs D. excludes newly-graduated Ph. D.s
39. University job openings are diminishing due to the fact that .
A. the scale of universities is shrinking
B. adjunct professors are likely to take full-time jobs
C. fewer undergraduates want to major in humanities
D. some theoretical approaches have been proven wrong
40. According to Paragraph 5, the American educational institutions over the past decades.
A. have resulted in tenure-track professors
B. have attracted more male and elite students
C. have been expanding to overseas countries
D. have begun to offer a variety of vocational programs
41. The final paragraph suggests that current liberal arts majors .
A. are more desirable than ever before
B. will cater to middle-class students
C. are less appealing than business majors
D. are as competitive as business majors