【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】
[听力原文]Questions<1>-<5>
This week in the
magazine, in "Nerd Camp," Burkhard Bilger writes about a camp for gifted
teenagers. Here Bilger and The New Yorker's Daniel Cappello discuss the social,
educational, and recreational problems facing the very smartest students.
D:
Your article is about the Center for Talented Youth, a summer program for gifted
children--"nerd camp," as many participants called it--at Johns Hopkins
University. What is nerd camp?
B: Nerd camp is a lot like any other summer
camp, only the kids spend most of their time studying instead of playing, and
they have to be really, really smart to get in. There are nerd camps all over
the country these days--about fifteen thousand students attend them every year,
and thousands more attend day programs--in part because so many schools have
dismantled their gifted programs. Only about two cents of every hundred dollars
spent by the federal government is earmarked for the gifted, so a lot of these
kids have been stranded Most of them start the regular school year already
knowing nearly half of the things they're going to be taught. So these camps are
places where they can stretch their legs, intellectually--which is a pretty
astonishing thing to see. It's not unusual for a student at one of these camps
to cover a year of algebra in two weeks.
D: Do you think advancing or
skipping grades a good idea?
B: Most schools practice grade acceleration in a
fairly clumsy way. If a kid is bored in his class, and his parents complain
enough, he might be allowed to move up a year. The problem is, if he's as bright
as many of the kids at the Johns Hopkins camp, he'll soon be ready to move past
those older kids as well. And, of course, being the smallest, brightest kid in a
class has never been a recipe for popularity. When I talked to Camilla Benbow ,
the clean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University, she told
me that schools simply use the wrong Criterion--age--to divide students up.
Rather than lumping all the seven-year-olds in one group and all the
eight-year-olds in another, they should group all students by
ability--regardless of their age. "When they're ready to take Algebra I, let
them take Algebra I,' she told me. "We don't buy shoes or piano books for
children based on how old they are. Why is reading or math any different?"
D:
At the nerd camps you visited, what was the social life like? How do the kids
deal with normal adolescent rites of passage?
B: I went to camps at Johns
Hopkins and Vanderbilt, and both places were pretty lively. The kids went to
movies and excursions and weekly dances, and the dorms were predictably noisy.
Some psychologists have suggested that students who are intellectually gifted
also tend to mature faster than average, but I didn't see much evidence of that.
They had the same boy-girl problems, the same hormonal jitters. But there was a
re- al giddiness in the campers--a sense of relief at finally getting to hang
out with kids who were like them.
D: What about genius? How do we separate
high intelligence from real genius, and how rare is it?
B: It's hard to know
exactly what qualities are the most predictive of genius. Intelligence is
important, obvious- ly, but it's not nearly enough. In the nineteen--twenties,
the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman tried to find the most gifted kids in
California by having teachers nominate candidates and then giving them the Stan
ford--Binet I. Q. test, which Terman had helped develop. He ended up with more
than fifteen hundred exceptionally bright kids--people called them the
"Termites"--and spent the rest of his life tracking their careers. Not one of
them won a Nobel Prize. Ironically, though, two students who hadn't made the
cut--the physicists William Shockley and Luis Alvarez--did win it. So it's hard
to say if any of the prodigies at nerd camp will turn out to be the next
Einstein. But, judging from the performance of other camp alumni, who have been
tracked for more than twenty years, they're very likely to get advanced degrees
and to excel in their fields.
D: What's the importance of intelligence, in
the long run? Does it correlate with success?
B: It depends on your
definition of success. When Camilla Benbow and her husband, David Lubinski,
tracked the top scorers from the gifted camps, they found that the very cream of
the cream tended to become physicists, those in the middle gravitated toward
medicine, and those at the bottom became lawyers and business men. If they had
looked at their salaries, though, I suspect that the order would have been
reversed: the businessmen and lawyers would have come out on top, the physicists
on the bottom. Intelligence is a wonderful asset for any career, but the life of
the mind has never been all that well paid.
D: Thank you very much, Mr.
Bilger, for sharing your findings about intelligence. I find them very
enlightening, and hopefully, our audience will share my opinion. Thanks again
for coming.
B: My pleasure.