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  3. Passage Three (1) If your teenager is talking about taking a year away

Passage Three (1) If your teenager is talking about taking a year away

游客2024-11-03  12
问题     Passage Three
    (1)   If your teenager is talking about taking a year away from the classroom between high school and college, you may have Malia Obama to thank for that. But if they’re not yet talking about whether to follow her lead, they should be.
    (2)  Taking time off between high school and college or sometime during the undergraduate years, as Malia Obama is doing before she attends Harvard University, has plenty of appeal for high school graduates who don’t know what they want out of college or seek to work, travel or volunteer on the sort of schedule that an academic calendar does not allow.
    (3)  Parents, however, often worry themselves sick over such talk. While no one wants to drop a six-figure sum on a teenager who doesn’t want to be in school, there are often nagging doubts over whether students who stop for a bit will ultimately get back on track.
    (4)  Twenty-five years ago, my friend Colin Hall and I tried to dispel those concerns by finding and interviewing as many students who took gap years as we could. We profiled 33 of them in a book called Taking Time Off, which was published 20 years ago.
    (5)  This summer, after news of Malia Obama’s choice, I tracked down everyone from the book to see what had become of them. Was their gap year ultimately incidental to their lives, or did it help them grow into the person they were meant to become? And for those who now had children, how would they react if their offspring wanted to take a gap year?
    (6)  Families seeking data on gap years won’t find much. Part of the problem is that federal data on college delay and completion don’t measure all the reasons people started college late. While some people make a deliberate choice to delay college to serve in the military, work or travel, others meander for a few years before deciding to try college after all.
    (7)  A number of researchers have shown a connection between a deliberate choice to take some time off and getting better grades upon return to the classroom. Dr Devin G Pope, a professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, saw the link among people who had served at a Mormon mission. Dr Bob Clagett, a former dean of admissions at Middlebury College in Vermont, saw similar results when he helped inspire number-crunching among students there and at the University of North Carolina.
    (8)  Once college is over, however, we enter the realm of anecdotal evidence when it comes to first jobs. Parents worry that if their children take a gap year, they will appear wayward to employers, which may have more to do with the term than how that year was spent.
    (9)  "It suggests a hole," said Ms Abigail Falik, founder of Global Citizen Year, which has 115 people working in four countries. She prefers the term bridge year, with its implication of a deliberate connection between one stage of life and the next.
    (10)  In fact, logic would suggest that many people who take a gap year get better jobs after college than people who don’t. If you were hiring entry-level employees, wouldn’t you rather employ the risk-taking 23-year-olds who found their way in the world for a while than the 22-year-olds who have not done much besides going to school?
    (11)  There is no way to know for sure except by asking some of the people who have had the experience. Ms Susie Steele took time off from the University of Vermont to teach disabled people to ski and eventually landed a plum full-time job at the Keystone Science School in Keystone, Colorado. Now a middle-school biology teacher in Louisville, Colorado, Ms Steele, 44, figures her odds would have been quite long without the gap year.
    (12)  Ms Akiima Price took a break from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore to work with the Student Conservation Association in Nevada. The organisation eventually hired her full time, and she has forged a career in and around environmental education and community work.
    (13)   "Now, looking back on my resume, all of the dots ended up connecting," said Ms Price, 44, who lives in Washington.   "I would tell younger Akiima to trust the process. "
    (14)  Parents would be wise to adopt that mantra, too, and not just because tens of thousands of tuition dollars may go to waste if a college student has a burning desire to be elsewhere. Even if a gap year does not lead to a job offer and an obvious career track, it can light a spark that ends up burning in a different way many years later.
    (15)  Mr. Cory Mason spent his gap year as a project manager for Habitat for Humanity in Savannah, Georgia. Today, he’s a Wisconsin state representative who calls on his experience quite often, even if he doesn’t pick up a hammer much these days. "It wasn’t just about housing but more about poverty and how hard it is for working people who still make poverty wages to move into the middle class," he said. "It gave me as much of a lesson on that as it did on how to frame a house or put shingles on a roof. "
    (16)  Mr. Mason earned room, board and a tiny stipend during his gap year. And plenty of revenue-neutral or moneymaking gap year experiences are available, despite the phenomenon’s reputation as a sort of rich kid’s layabout.  Still, some educators question whether there isn’t some class privilege at work here.
    (17)  Mr. Chad Hammett, who took three semesters off from the University of Texas, now teaches English at Texas State University. He figures that maybe a quarter of the students he encounters would have been better served by a gap year, but he worries about the momentum of the students he sees who are the first in their families to go to college. "This may be their one chance, and any kind of delay would be admitting that they’re not ready and don’t belong," he said.
    (18)  For others, however, a year in between was just the thing they needed. Ms Celia Quezada was a first-generation college student and spent a year in Belgium in a Rotary program before beginning her freshman year at Williams College.   "Had I not done the exchange program, I would have dropped out just from the culture shock," she said. [br] When it comes to taking a gap year, parents worry that________.
选项 A、the costly tuition they have paid may go to waste
B、their children may get into some bad habits during the period
C、their children’s academic performance may be affected
D、their children’s interrupted study cannot be continued normally
答案 D
解析 细节题。文章第三段第一句提到，这样的谈话往往令父母担心得要死。表明父母不大愿意自己的孩子中断学业。紧接着由连词while引导的句子进一步说明：十几岁的子女不想上学，尽管没人会希望在他们身上投八六位数的求学费用，很多人还是怀疑，如果学生暂停学业一段时间，最终还会不会回到求学的轨道上来。此处连词while表让步。由此可见，父母担忧的原因应该是后者，故[D]为答案。虽然句中也提到了昂贵的学费，但并不是父母担忧的原因所在，故排除[A]；[B]为干扰项，句中get back on track意为“回到求学的轨道上来”，由此可知，父母担忧的并非“怕孩子们养成坏习惯”，故排除[B]；文中并未提及孩子们的学习成绩，故排除[C]。
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