单选题 Given the lack of fit between gifted students and their schools, it is not surprising that such students often have little good to say about their school experience. In one study of 400 adults who had achieved distinction in all areas of life, researchers found that three-fifths of these individuals either did badly in school or were unhappy in school. Few MacArthur Prize fellows, winners of the MacArthur Award for creative accomplishment, had good things to say about their precollegiate schooling if they had not been placed in advanced programs.
Anecdotal reports support this. Pablo Picasso, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Butler Yeats all disliked school. So did Winston Churchill, who almost failed out of Harrow, an elite British school. About Oliver Goldsmith, one of his teachers remarked, "Never was so dull a boy." Often these children realize that they know more than their teachers, and their teachers often feel that these children are arrogant, inattentive, or unmotivated.
Some of these gifted people may have done poorly in school because their gifts were not scholastic. Maybe we can account for Picasso in this way. But most fared poorly in school not because they lacked ability but because they found school unchallenging and consequently lost interest. Yeats described the lack of fit between his mind and school: "Because I had found it difficult to attend to anything less interesting than my own thoughts, I was difficult to teach." As noted earlier, gifted children of all kinds tend to be strong-willed nonconformists. Nonconformity and stubbornness (and Yeats's level of arrogance and self-absorption) are likely to lead to conflicts with teachers.
When highly gifted students in any domain talk about what was important to the development of their abilities, they are far more likely to mention their families than their schools or teachers. A writing prodigy studied by David Feldman and Lynn Goldsmith was taught far more about writing by his journalist father than his English teacher. High-IQ children, in Australia studied by Miraca Gross had much more positive feelings about their families than their schools. About half of the mathematicians studied by Benjamin Bloom had little good to say about school. They all did well in school and took honors classes when available, and some skipped grades.

单选题 The major idea of the author concerning schools is that______.
A. they should teach students from different ethnic backgrounds in different ways
B. they are hopelessly deficient when it comes to those extraordinary prodigies
C. they should enlarge the number of students in one class as soon as possible
D. they should pay special attention to poorly-performing students

单选题 The phrase "attend to" in the third paragraph means______.
A. deal with B. participate in
C. join in D. take part in

单选题 Like Goldsmith and Yeats, Pablo Picasso is specially mentioned as one of those talents who______.
A. failed to heed the lectures for lack of the ability to concentrate for long spells
B. thought of themselves as too excellent, beyond any ordinary teachers who they despised greatly
C. could not get themselves interested in their studies, which failed to provide any challenges to their thinking minds
D. firmly believed in the sheer futility of any course they had taken in school

单选题 For many talents, the most important people tend to be______.
A. their schools B. their teachers
C. their friends D. their parents or partners

单选题 The most important reason for talented people's poor feelings about school is that______.
A. they did not gain the due recognition from their discouraging teachers
B. school courses were far from being inspiring for their further development
C. the teaching policies of the school were often too harsh for them to put up with
D. their excellence often invite envies and hatred from their fellow students