阅读理解

You’re busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let’s assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn’t it tempting to lie just a little， to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University?

More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers, for personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university. Registrars at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week.

Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then. If it turns out that an applicant’s lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them impostors; another refers to them as special cases. One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by no such people.

To avoid outright lies, some job-seekers claim that they attended or were associated with a college or university. After carefully checking, a personnel officer may discover that attending means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that being associated with a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century-that’s when they began keeping records, anyhow.

If you don’t want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of non-existent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from Smoot State University. The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the University of Purdue. As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.

单选题 The main idea of this passage is that _____.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】本文主要在讲职位申请者为了获得工作， 而在申请表中伪造虚假的学术背景的现象。 根据第二段第一句“More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers…”可知此类现象越来越多。
单选题 According to the passage, special cases refer to cases where _____.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】原句意为“这样的声明不是由这些人提出的。 ”即申请表上的这些学术信息或教育背景与这些人无关，即这些人并没有参加过在这些学校的学习。
单选题 We can infer from the passage that _____.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】根据第二段第二句“A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university.”可知拥有一个名牌大学的文凭能提高申请者获得工作的机会。 故选D。
单选题 This passage implies that _____.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】本文所陈述的事实都是给予当下美国社会形成的一股歪风邪气， 即职位申请者进行学术造假以博取工作机会， 招聘者更看重学术文凭而不是工作能力， 甚至有些公司专门为求职者提供伪造证书。 因此美国社会应该为这类现象负责。
单选题 As used in the first line of the second paragraph, the word “utter” means _____.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】utter意为“完全的”。 thorough彻底的。 address地址。 ultimate最终的。 decisive决定性的。 因此选B。