单选题
"Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?" Rick Scott, the Florida governor, once asked. A leader of a prominent Internet company once told me that the firm regards admission to Harvard as a useful proof of talent, but a college education itself as useless. Parents and students themselves are acting on these principles, retreating from the humanities.
I"ve been thinking about this after reading Fareed Zakaria"s smart new book,
In Defense of a Liberal Education.
Like Mr. Zakaria, I think that the liberal arts teach critical thinking. So, to answer the skeptics, here are my three reasons the humanities enrich our souls and sometimes even our pocketbooks as well.
First, liberal arts equip students with communications and interpersonal skills that are valuable and genuinely rewarded in the labour force, especially when accompanied by technical abilities. "A broad liberal arts education is a key pathway to success in the 21st-century economy," says Lawrence Katz, a labour economist at Harvard. Professor Katz says that the economic return to pure technical skills has flattened, and the highest return now goes to those who combine soft skills—excellence at communicating and working with people—with technical skills.
My second reason: We need people conversant with the humanities to help reach wise public policy decisions, even about the sciences. Technology companies must constantly weigh ethical decisions. To weigh these issues, regulators should be informed by first-rate science, but also by first-rate humanism. When the President"s Council on Bioethics issued its report in 2002, "Human Cloning and Human Dignity," it depends upon the humanities to shape judgments about ethics, limits and values.
Third, wherever our careers lie, much of our happiness depends upon our interactions with those around us, and there"s some evidence that literature nurtures a richer emotional intelligence. Science magazine published five studies indicating that research subjects who read literary fiction did better at assessing the feelings of a person in a photo than those who read nonfiction or popular fiction. Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends. Literature also builds bridges of understanding.
In short, it makes eminent sense to study coding and statistics today, but also history and literature.
单选题
Lawrence Katz holds that broad liberal arts ______.
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。根据题干关键词定位到第三段。劳伦斯·卡茨首先提到“广泛的人文教育是通往成功的重要途径”，接着指出“……既具有软能力——善于与他人交流和协同工作——又具有技术能力的人获得的回报是最高的”，D项中的maximize your potential和coupled with是文中the highest return和combine...with的同义替换，故D项“当和技术能力结合时，会最大限度地开发你的潜能”为正确答案。A项和B项均不是劳伦斯·卡茨的观点，C项混淆了broad liberal arts和soft skills的包含关系。
单选题
Which of the following cannot be used as the example of the second sentence in Paragraph 4?
单选题
According to the Science magazine, compared with people reading literary fiction, those reading nonfiction ______.
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。根据题干关键词定位到第五段。第二句提到“比起阅读非虚构类作品或者通俗小说的研究对象，阅读文艺小说的研究对象能够更好地评估照片上的人处于何种情绪之中”，B项中的decode the emotional state与该句中的assessing the feeling of a person属于同义替换，由于题干中的主语与该句中正好相反，而B项中的poorly与文中的better意思也相反，故B项为正确答案。文中“评估”的对象是the feeling of a person，并不是work，故排除A项。C项和D项均指阅读文艺小说的人。
单选题
On the whole, the reasons that the humanities enrich our spiritual life include all the following EXCEPT ______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。根据题干关键词定位到第二、三、四、五段。第二段结尾指出“为了回应怀疑论者，我在此给出三点理由”，接下来三段的首句均给出了原因。A项中的improving emotional intelligence与第五段首句的a richer emotional intelligence相符，B项中的essential to the wise decisions与第四段首句的help reach wise public policy decisions相符，D项中的benefit students与第三段首句相符。humanities属于soft skills，C项混淆了概念，也不是题干所述原因，因此为正确答案。