英语高考时文阅读材料(七)

英语高考时文阅读材料（七）

编者：如今的英语高考、模拟考的阅读材料（完形填空、阅读理解、任务型阅读）大都选自中国、欧美等主流媒体的最新时鲜文章，与最新人文科技、政治文化接轨。作为一名考生，在接触阅读世界最新潮流的同时也应该积累素材，并培养相关英语文章的阅读能力。

下面摘取了最新的来自中国日报网（CHINA DAILY）的两篇文章，并做了必要的批注，且于文章末尾增添了几个小习题，可自行按照所附的参考答案检测阅读效果。

毕业后发现所学的知识与现实脱节？英国这所大学打算解决这个问题

A new UK university wants to teach students skills employers actually want

中国日报网2020-02-06 09:08

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

Getting a university degree has never seemed more important: college graduates earn more money, live longer, and are happier. But college degrees are expensive (especially in the US), narrowly focused (especially in the UK), and often fail to build the skills employers want (true in most countries).

A new university in the UK wants to change that.

The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), which will launch（开展）in 2021 with a target of 100 students, will scrap（摈弃）traditional academic subjects and offer a three-year bachelor of arts and sciences degree designed to tackle real-world issues. The curriculum（课程）is built around interdisciplinary（跨学科的）problems—knife crime, childhood obesity（肥胖）, palm oil（棕榈油）in supply chains, plastic pollution—as well as quantitative and qualitative research skills. Employers like the Met Police, Innocent, and Virgin will provide project ideas and offer five-week work experience for students.

The idea is similar to a US liberal arts degree (a rarity in the UK) but also more explicitly（显然地）focused on “interdisciplinarity,” or drawing on multiple（复杂的）subjects—economics, psychology, sociology, statistics—to solve complex problems like childhood obesity. In other words, the problem, not the subject, sits at the center of the curriculum. The skills students develop, the founders hope, will more closely align with what an AI-infused, automated world demands: collaboration between people and machines, critical thinking, speaking and writing skills, and data management, to name just a few things.

align[əˈlaɪn]: v. 使结盟；使成一行；匹配

Students will tackle problems through various disciplines（学科知识）: knife crime, for example, by understanding cultural and socioeconomic factors in different neighborhoods, data science, statistics, publicly available data, an economics or psychology lens（角度）.

In the UK, students apply through a central clearinghouse, and exam results are paramount. At LIS, students will instead apply directly and all will be

invited to a “selection day” which will include a face-to-face interview so that LIS can understand a student’s background, motivations, and passions. Interviews will be conducted by a panel to minimize bias. Conditional offers will be granted based on personal background, circumstances（情况）and, also, grades.