Q: I'm taking a test and have to guess the right answer to the question after the article. Article: Since many of you are planning to study at a college or university in this country, you may be curious to know what you usually do in a typical week, how you can get along with your fellow students, and so on. These are the questions I want to discuss with you today. First, let's talk about  what your weekly schedule will look like. No matter what your major may be, you can expect to spend between four and six hours a week for each class attending lectures. Lectures are usually in very large rooms because some courses such as introduction to sociology or economics often have as many as two or three hundred students, especially at large universities. In lectures, it's very important for you to take notes on what the professor says because the information a lecture is often different from the information in your textbooks. Also, you can expect to have exam questions based on the lectures. So it isn't enough to just read your textbooks; you have to attend lectures as well. In a typical week you will also have a couple of hours of discussion for every class you take. The discussion section is a small group meeting usually with fewer than thirty students where you can ask questions about the lectures, the reading, and the homework. In large universities, graduate students, called teaching assistants, usually direct discussion sections. If your major is chemistry, or physics, or another science, you'll also have to spend several hours a week in the lab, or laboratory, doing experiments. This means that science majors spend more time in the classroom than non science majors do. On the other hand, people who major in subjects like literature or history usually have to read and write more than science majors do. Question: The main purpose of this text is  _  . Options: A: to persuade the students to attend lectures B: to encourage the students to take part in discussions C: to advise the students to choose proper majors D: to help the students to learn about university life.
A: D


Q: I'm taking a test and have to guess the right answer to the question after the article. Article: The Greeks had long kept certain more or less formal relations with the people of Macedonia . The Macedonians from their side had kept themselves well informed about conditions in Greece.  Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had finished their disastrous war, that Macedonia was ruled by an extraordinarily clever man named Philip. He admired the Greek spirit but he looked down on the Greek lack of self-control in political affairs. It angered him to see a perfectly good people waste its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and then he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he meant to pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes had paid the Greeks 150 years before.  Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start this well-prepared expedition . The task of avenging  the destruction of Athens was left to Philip's son Alexander, the beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest of all Greek teachers.  Alexander left Europe in the spring of 334 BC. Seven years later he reached India. In the meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia(,), the old rival of the Greek merchants. He had conquered Egypt and had been worshipped by the people of the Nile valley as the son and heir of the Pharaohs . He had defeated the last Persian king -- he had overthrown the Persian Empire, he had given orders to rebuild Babylon -- he had led his troops into the heart of the Himalayan mountains and had made the entire world a Macedonian province and dependency. Then he stopped and announced even more ambitious plans.  The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence of the Greek mind. The people must be taught the Greek language -- they must live in cities built after a Greek model. The Alexandrian soldier now turned school-master. The military camps of yesterday became the peaceful centres of the newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher did the flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly Alexander was... Question: We can guess that Alexander's most ambitious plan after 327 BC was_. Options: A: to bring the newly formed Empire under the Greek influence B: to distribute the territory among the generals C: to turn the soldiers into school teachers D: to build prosperous cities for Greeks
A: A


Q: I'm taking a test and have to guess the right answer to the question after the article. Article: But what is teacher quality? How can one measure it reliably? An analysis is issued on a sample of data from a Texas school district. Experts argue convincingly that teacher effectiveness should be measured by students' gains on standardized tests: Mr. Smith is probably a better teacher than Ms. Brown if his students consistently improve their test scores more than hers do. Though this approach is appealing, there are tricky issues. For example, what if Ms. Brown teaches in a school where students score so high there is little room for improvement? The authors try to correct for this problem, as well as other sorts of measurement issues, to generate a measurement of teacher effectiveness. The paper is primarily concerned with how this measure is related to other observable characteristics. The first finding is that there is a large variation in teacher effectiveness: some teachers consistently have a larger impact on their students' achievement than others. Second, easily observable characteristics like having a master's degree or a passing score on the teacher certification exam are not correlated with teacher effectiveness. Then what does matter? The most important single influence is experience: first-year teachers are much less effective than others. The second year is significantly better, and by the fourth year, _ . It is not entirely clear whether this experience effect is learning by doing (the more you teach, the more effective you become) or survival of the fittest (those who are not good at teaching tend to drop out early.) From my reading of the paper, both effects appear important and there is no simple answer. The data do suggest, however, that teacher effectiveness is pretty clear by the end of the second year, so the information to make an informed decision is available at that time. The authors also investigate the contentious issue of racial matching of students and teachers. Here they find strong evidence that minority teachers tend to be more effective with minority students. Again, it is... Question: Why do black teachers tend to be more effective with black students? Options: A: Students fell secure, so they respond better. B: Teachers sympathize with students of their own race. C: There are entirely some other identified reasons. D: The reasons are far from clear and definite.
