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In recent years, waves of Chinese families choose to send their children abr

游客2024-11-07  10
问题     In recent years, waves of Chinese families choose to send their children abroad to study. Is it a good idea? Read the excerpt carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should:
    1. summarize briefly the author’s opinion about this issue;
    2. give your comment.
    Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
                Georgia on Their Minds
    Millions of Chinese have dreamed of attending Harvard University. Harvard Girl, a how-to manual published in 2000 by the parents of one successful applicant, was a national bestseller. Georgia Institute of Technology, a prestigious university in Atlanta, has enjoyed less name-recognition. Yet this is fast changing: the number of Chinese applicants to Georgia Tech has surged, from 33 in 2007 to 2,309 last year. Some applicants are from the best schools in China, and all are ready to pay around $44,000 (for yearly fees and housing costs)—the equivalent of nearly ten times the average annual disposable income of urban households.
    The ambitions of Chinese students are shifting: no longer are they attracted just by the glittering names. Pursuit of education abroad is becoming an end in itself. Universities far less renowned than Georgia Tech are reaping the benefits. More than 800,000 Chinese went abroad to study at all levels in 2012 and 2013. At the end of 2013 nearly 1.1m Chinese were studying abroad. China has long been the largest source of foreign students enrolled in higher education globally, with its share rising steeply. Since at least 2009 China has provided the most foreign students not just to the English-speaking countries of the developed world but also to numerous others including France, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea.
    A fast-growing number of families are sending their children to America earlier to study as well. In 2013 about 32,000 Chinese received visas for study at secondary schools in America, up from just 639 in 2005. The growth has occurred despite a steep decline since 2010 in the number of Chinese aged between 18 and 22, from 121m to 89m this year.
    Several converging trends explain this. One is growing demand for education beyond the compulsory nine years. In 2011 nearly 25m Chinese were enrolled in senior secondary school, more than twice as many as in 2000. Helped by a rapid increase in recent years in university places, the number of undergraduates has soared. But the quality of instruction is poor at all but a handful of universities, where a total of just a few thousand places are available each year. As well as its Ivy League colleges, America has dozens of high-quality private universities and large colleges funded by states, such as Georgia Tech, which are world class.
    Another trend is growing middle-class wealth: many more Chinese families can now afford to send their children abroad. They prefer a well-rated university overseas to a second-tier option at home. Their choices are swayed by an educational system in China which many regard as too rigid. The world has also become more welcoming: visas to study have become easier for Chinese to obtain in many developed countries, especially America.
    The government, eager to nurture foreign-educated talent familiar with cutting-edge technology and Western ways of doing business, has reason to encourage the outflow. While the number heading overseas to study has been growing quickly, the number coming back has grown even faster; lured by good job prospects in a buoyant economy. More than 350,000 Chinese returned from overseas study in 2013, up from just 20,000 ten years earlier.
    The growth rate in the numbers going abroad to study may prove difficult to sustain at such high levels in the years ahead. The number of college-age Chinese has been shrinking since 2008, and will continue to do so until 2021, when there will be about 20 m fewer people aged between 18 and 22 than now.
    Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR.
选项
答案                 Why Is Studying Abroad so Welcome?
    "After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had built our houses and provided necessaries for our livelihood, one of the next things we longed for was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity." So ran the first university fundraising brochure, sent from Harvard College England in 1643 to drum up cash.
    Old as the statement seems, it still resonates an urgent call for advanced education in modern China where cutting-edge technology and Western way of doing business are desperately needed. To quench this thirst, waves of Chinese students rush abroad to study in universities not only with glittering names but with real teaching staff. To explain this outflow, several reasons are converged. First, with fierce competition for a handful of elite universities, many Chinese choose to go abroad for high-quality education. Second, the growing middle-class wealth contributes to their preference for universities overseas.
    In my opinion, instead of lamenting the pious dedication to foreign education, we may as well retrospect why our teaching system fails them. Despite the handsome sum we spend on introducing the advanced methodologies and the talented staff abroad, Chinese universities, in general, still rank low worldwide. This shameful pratfall owes much to our rigid educational system where emphasis is put on "quantity" rather than "quality". For students, ever since their childhood, their little heads are stuffed with extra lessons which may ensure their high scores but do no good to their reasoning ability and critical thinking. For teachers, when rigid academic achievement serves as the sole gold standard for their promotion, no wonder many of them either yield to scratch papers or resort to plagiarism.
    It is high time we stopped being consumed by meaningless fanfare and focused on real efforts that will do all good, or this well-intended system will trigger an ever more grueling backlash on every party involved and topple the whole nation into ever greater distress and disaster.
解析 本题探讨的是中国学生出国留学这一现象，属于校园学习类话题。题目要求简要概括所给材料中的观点，并发表自己的评论。在具体行文方面，考生可以开篇点题，然后在第二段简要概括材料中的观点；之后对这一现象的原因进行分析，并给出足够的论据支撑；最后总结全文，重述论点或者升华主题。
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