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Despite a cooling of the economy, high technology companies are still crying

游客2025-03-19  14
问题     Despite a cooling of the economy, high technology companies are still crying out for skilled workers. The Information Technology Association of America projects that more than 800 000 technology jobs will go unfilled next year. The lack of qualified workers poses a huge threat to the U. S. economy.
    The most commonly cited reason for this state of affairs is that the country’s agrarian-age education system, separated from the needs of the business world, fails to prepare students in the primary and secondary grades for twenty-first-century work. Yet an inadequate and outmoded education system is only part of the problem. A less tangible but equally powerful cause is an antique classification system that divides the workforce into two camps: white-collar knowledge workers and blue-collar manual laborers.
    Blue-collar workers emerged in the United States during the Industrial Age as work migrated from farms to factories. White-collar office workers became a significant class in the twentieth century, outnumbering their blue-collar brethren by mid-century. But the white or blue paradigm has clearly outlived its utility. Corporations increasingly require a new layer of knowledge workers a highly skilled multi-disciplinarian who combines the mind of the white-collar worker with the hands of the blue-collar employee. Armed with a solid grounding in mathematics and science (physics, chemistry and biology), these "gold-collar" workers—so named for their contributions to their companies and to the economy, as well as for their personal earning ability—apply that knowledge to technology. Of course, the gold-collar worker already exists in a wide range of jobs across a wide range of businesses; think of the maintenance technician who tests and repairs aircraft systems at American Airlines: the network administrator who manages systems and network operations at P&G: the advanced-manufacturing technician at Intel.
    But until American business recognizes these people as a new class of worker, one whose collar is neither blue nor white, demands that schools do a better job of preparing employees for the twenty-first-century workforce will be futile. Certainly, polytechnic high schools, colleges, and universities have made heroic efforts to teach workers new skills. But because many people see these initiatives as primarily training blue-collar workers, adequate funds are not invested in such programs, leaving them short of state-of-the-art tools and experienced teachers. And because gold-collar workers need to constantly update their skills to stay current with emerging technology, learning must be a continuous process, one that is funded by companies as well as by taxpayers. [br] To increase the number of gold-collar workers, ______.
选项 A、the schools should assume the major responsibilities
B、experienced teachers should not be short of current tools
C、the society should consider them as new layer of working classes
D、the taxpayer should pay more money to afford the continuous training
答案 C
解析 文章第四段讲述了提高金领工人数量面临的困难，所以反向推断，如果要增加其数目，这些困难就不存在。最后一段指出：除了学校之外，公司和纳税人也应为培训金领工人出力，所以A中的学校承担主要的责任是错误的。根据B答案中的关键词experienced teachers和be short of current tools，查找到相关信息，原文leaving them short of state-of-the-art tools，其中的them指代的是programs，也就是基础培训缺乏工具，而不是教师缺乏工具，偷换了主语，所以B也错误。第四段第一句话指出：除非美国商业界承认这些人是一个新的工人阶层，学校才能更有效地为21世纪的劳动力培养合格人才多做工作，所以C答案就是增加金领工人数量的条件之一。D答案错在原文最后一句说的是纳税人的钱需用于资助这些培训，而不是让纳税人缴纳更多的钱。
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