雅思阅读全真练习系列

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雅思阅读全真练习系列：How Private Universities Could Help to Improve Public Ones

How Private Universities Could Help to Improve Public Ones

A.　　There are many rich Germans. In 2003 private assets are estimated to have been worth €5 trillion ($5.6 trillion)， half of which belongs to the richest tenth of the population. But with money comes stinginess， especially when it comes to giving to higher education. America devotes twice as much of its income to universities and colleges as Germany (2.6% of GDP， against 1.1%) mainly because of higher private spending—and bigger donations.

B.　　Next year's figures should be less embarrassing. In November Klaus Jacobs， a German-born billionaire living abroad， announced that he would donate €200m to the International University Bremen ( IUB )—the biggest such gift ever. It saved the IUB ， Germany's only fully fledged private and international university (with 30 programmes and 1，000 students from 86 countries) from bankruptcy. It may also soften the country's still rigid approach to higher education.

C.　　German higher education has long been almost entirely a state-run affair， not least because universities were meant to produce top civil servants. After 1945 the German states were put in charge， deciding on such details as examination and admission rules. Reforms in the 1970s made things worse by strengthening， in the name of democracy， a layer of bureaucracy in the form of committees of self-governance.

D.　　Tuition fees were scrapped in the name of access for all. But ever-rising student numbers then met ever-shrinking budgets， so the reforms backfired. Today the number of college drop-outs is among the highest in the rich world， making tertiary education an elite activity： only 22% of young Germans obtain a degree， compared with 31% in Britain and 39% in America. German universities come low in world rankings， so good students often go abroad.

E.　　In the 1980s it was hoped that private universities might make a difference. Witten-Herdecke University， founded in 1980， was the first. Teaching at IUB， which will change its name to Jacobs University soon， began in 2001. Today， there are 69 (non-faith-based) private institutions of higher learning， up from 24 a decade ago. There is growing competition， particularly among business schools.

F.　　At the same time the states have been introducing private enterprise into higher education. In 2003 Lower Saxony turned five universities into foundations， with more autonomy. Others have won more control over their own budgets. Some states have also started to charge tuition fees. And in October a jury announced the winners of the first round of the “excellence initiative”—a national competition among universities for extra cash.

G.　　Yet all this has led to only small improvements. Private universities educate only 3% of Germany's 2m-odd students， which may be why they find it hard to raise money. It also explains why many focus on lucrative subjects， such as the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg. Others have come to depend on public money. Only recently have rich individuals' foundations made big investments， as at IUB or at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

H.　　Public universities， meanwhile， still have not been granted much autonomy. There is less direct control， but far more “administered competition”： a new bureaucracy to check the achievement of certain goals. This might all be avoided through price competition， but tuition fees， now €1，000 a year on average， are fixed centrally by each state. The excellence initiative is a mere drop in the bucket.

I.　　That is why Mr. Jacobs's donation matters. For the first time， Germany will have a private university worth the name and with a solid financial footing (if it keeps up its academic performance， that is： Mr Jacobs has promised to donate €15m annually over the next five years and another €125m in 2011 to boost the endowment， but only if things go well)。 If it works， other rich Germans may be tempted into investing in higher education too.

J.　　Even so， private universities will play a small part in German higher education for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that public universities should be privatised. But they need more autonomy and an incentive to compete with one another—whether for students， staff or donors. With luck， Mr Jacobs's gift will not only induce other German billionaires to follow suit， but also help to persuade the states to set their universities free.

Do the following statemets reflect the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1?

Write your answer in Boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

TRUE if the statement reflets the claims of the writer

FALSE if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is possbile to say what the writer thinks about this

1. Mr. Jacob‘s donation to the IUB is more likely to result in a firmer approach to the managemnt of German higher education.

2. German higher education is a mainly state-run affair primarily because universities were intended to train top civil servants.

3. The reforms in the sector of German tertiaray education in the 1970s produced the opposite result to the one which it intended.

4. The Bucerius Law School in Hamburg offers profitable business opprtunities for its students to make money for tuition fees.

5. Mr. Jacob would like to donate €125 million annually over the next five years to IUB on the condition that things go well .

6. Private universities will continue to play a small role in German higher education for quite a long period of time in the future.

Complet the following sentencces.

Choose A FIGURE (NUMBER OR PERCENTAGE) from Reading Passage 1 for each answer.

Write your answer in Boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.

7. German government spends ______of its GDP on the sectorof higher education.

8. ______ less of young people obtain a degree in Germany than in America.

9. There are ______more private insitutions of higher learning now than a decade ago.

10.Currently， there are over ______million German students studying in universities.

Choose the appropriate letters A-D and write them in boxes 11-13 on your answe sheet.

11. Which of the following features about German higher education is NOT true：

A. The number of studenst drop out in the tertiary educatoin is one of the highest among the rich countries in the world.

B. The universities have a higher position in the scale of the world concerning the number of students obtaining a degree.

C. The public univerities exercise fairly less autonomy and they also experience more “administratered competition ”。

D. The competition among the private universities is becoming incresingly tough and it is espceially true of business schools.

12. The word “scrapped” in the first line of the fourth paragraph means___________.

A. raised

B. lowered

C. charged.

D. cancelled

13. What benefits will Jacob‘s donation bring about for German tertiaray education?

A. It will enable the International univerity Bremen to have a tight financial base.

B. It will cause the other wealthiest Gemans to save as much money as he does .

C. It will help the states grant more authority to their univerisites in the future.

D. It will tempt the good students studying abroad for a degree to return to Germany.

雅思阅读全真练习系列：Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

1 There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.

2 Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.

3 He took as his starting point the work of Attila Grandpierre of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Grandpierre and a collaborator, Gábor ágoston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature.

4 Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.

5 These two timescales are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Earth's ice ages: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.

6 Most scientists believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. One such cycle describes the way Earth's orbit gradually changes shape from a circle to a slight ellipse and back again roughly every 100,000 years. The theory says this alters the amount of solar radiation that Earth receives, triggering the ice ages. However, a persistent problem with this theory has been its inability to explain why the ice ages changed frequency a million years ago.

7 "In Milankovitch, there is certainly no good idea why the frequency should change from one to another," says Neil Edwards, a climatologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. Nor is the transition problem the only one the Milankovitch theory faces. Ehrlich and other critics claim that the temperature variations caused by Milankovitch cycles are simply not big enough to drive ice ages.

8 However, Edwards believes the small changes in solar heating produced by Milankovitch cycles are then amplified by feedback mechanisms on Earth. For example, if sea ice begins to form because of a slight cooling, carbon dioxide that would otherwise have found its way into the atmosphere as part of the carbon cycle is locked into the ice. That weakens the greenhouse effect and Earth grows even colder.

9 According to Edwards, there is no lack of such mechanisms. "If you add their effects together, there is more than enough feedback to make Milankovitch work," he says. "The problem now is identifying which mechanisms are at work." This is why scientists like Edwards are not yet ready to give up on the current theory. "Milankovitch cycles give us ice ages roughly when we observe them to happen. We can calculate where we are in the cycle and compare it with observation," he says. "I can't see any way of testing [Ehrlich's] idea to see where we are in the temperature oscillation."

10 Ehrlich concedes this. "If there is a way to test this theory on the sun, I can't think of one that is practical," he says. That's because variation over 41,000 to 100,000 years is too gradual to be observed. However, there may be a way to test it in other stars: red dwarfs. Their cores are much smaller than that of the sun, and so Ehrlich believes that the oscillation periods could be short enough to be observed. He has yet to calculate the precise period or the extent of variation in brightness to be expected.

11 Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge, is far from convinced. He describes Ehrlich's claims as "utterly implausible". Ehrlich counters that Weiss's opinion is based on the standard solar model, which fails to take into account the magnetic instabilities that cause the temperature fluctuations.

(716 words)

Questions 1-4　　Complete each of the following statements with One or Two names of the scientists from the box below.

Write the appropriate letters A-E in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

A. Attila Grandpierre

B. Gábor ágoston

C. Neil Edwards

D. Nigel Weiss

E. Robert Ehrlich

1. ...claims there抯 a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall in periods as long as those between ice ages on Earth.

2. ...calculated that the internal solar magnetic fields could produce instabilities in the solar plasma.

3. ...holds that Milankovitch cycles can induce changes in solar heating on Earth and the changes are amplified on Earth.

4. ...doesn't believe in Ehrlich's viewpoints at all.

Questions 5-9　　Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage?

In boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet write

TRUE if the statement is true according to the passage

FALSE if the statement is false according to the passage

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

5. The ice ages changed frequency from 100,000 to 41,000 years a million years ago.

6. The sole problem that the Milankovitch theory can not solve is to explain why the ice age frequency should shift from one to another.

7. Carbon dioxide can be locked artificially into sea ice to eliminate the greenhouse effect.

8. Some scientists are not ready to give up the Milankovitch theory though they haven't figured out which mechanisms amplify the changes in solar heating.

9. Both Edwards and Ehrlich believe that there is no practical way to test when the solar temperature oscillation begins and when ends.

Questions 10-14　　Complete the notes below.

Choose one suitable word from the Reading Passage above for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 10-14 on your answer sheet.

The standard view assumes that the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusions hold the temperature ...10...in the sun's interior, but the slight changes in the earth's ...11... alter the temperature on the earth and cause ice ages every 100,000 years. A British scientist, however, challenges this view by claiming that the internal solar magnetic ...12... can induce the temperature oscillations in the sun's interior. The sun's core temperature oscillates around its average temperature in ...13... lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. And the ...14... interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other, which explains why the ice ages changed frequency a million years ago.