题目内容
（请给出正确答案）
Educationalists are still arguing about ______.
A．the importance of silent reading
B．the amount of information yielded by books and newspapers
C．the effects of reading on health
D．the value of different types of reading materials
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更多“Educationalists are still argu…”相关的问题
Instances of parental control provided in the passage are aimed at______.
A．justifying the educational use of control
B．informing educationalists of what is the fight thing to do in the education of children
C．persuading the public of the importance of ethics education
D．assessing whether parents or teachers are more important in the education of children
听力原文： Reading to oneself is a modem activity which was almost unknown to the scholars of the classical and mediaeval worlds, while during the fifteenth century the term "reading" undoubtedly meant reading aloud. Only during the nineteenth century did silent reading become commonplace.
One should be cautious, however, of assuming that silent reading came about simply because reading aloud is a distraction to others. Examination of factors related to the historical development of silent reading reveals that it became the usual mode of reading for most adult reading tasks mainly because the tasks themselves changed in character.
The last century saw a steady gradual increase in literacy and thus in the number of readers. As readers increased, so the number of potential listeners declined, and thus there was some reduction in the need to read aloud.
As reading for the benefit of listeners grew less common, so came the flourishing of reading as a private activity in such public places as libraries, railway carriages and offices, where reading aloud would cause distraction to other readers.
Towards the end of the century there was still considerable argument over whether books should be used for information or treated respectfully, and over whether the reading of material such as newspapers was in some way mentally weakening. Indeed this argument remains with us still in education. However, whatever its virtues, the old shared literacy culture had gone and was replaced by the printed mass media on the one hand and by books and periodicals for a specialized readership on the other.
By the end of the century students were being recommended to adopt attitudes to books and to use skills in reading them which were inappropriate, if not impossible, for the oral reader. The social, cultural, and technological changes in the century had greatly altered what the term "reading" implied.
Questions:
16. Why was reading aloud common before the nineteenth century？
17. What did the development of silent reading during the nineteenth century indicate？
18. What are educationalists still arguing about？
19. What did the emergence of the mass media and of specialized periodicals show？
20. What is the writer of this talk attempting to do？
(36)
A．Silent reading had not been discovered.
B．There were few places available for private reading.
C．Few people could read for themselves.
D．People retied on reading for entertainment.
England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge. To misquote Woody Allen, those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, run the schools.
Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.
Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question, what do the successful lot have in common？ Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.
Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold- McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things, get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly "first-of-its-kind": schools surely do all this already？ Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.
Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else.
Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm.
A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school
