单选题 Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently told the nation"s governors that American high school education is "obsolete. " He said, "When I compare our high schools to what I see when I"m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor"s degrees as the U. S. and has six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. America is failing behind."
Gates was describing a global economy in which the chance to move up into a better economic life is slipping overseas, along with jobs that can be performed anywhere—manufacturing in China, technology support in India, online order fulfillment across borders. The Internet brings Bhutan and Bangalore just as close to our offices and living rooms as Boise. Maybe closer.
Our children"s competitors are not the other schools in the district or the state or even the nation. They are the technologically literate young people in Taiwan, India, Korea, and other developing nations. For today"s American students, learning and retraining will be a lifelong experience.
In The World is Flat , a recent book analyzing the shift in the global economy, Thomas Friedman points out that the dot. com bubble inspired a massive outlay of capital to connect the continents. Undersea cable, universal software, high-tech imagery, and Google have erased geography. College graduates in Latin America, Central Asia, India, China, and Russia can do the information work Americans used to count on—in many cases better and in all cases cheaper.
We are burning through reliable careers for our young people at high speed as technology relieves us of the tedium of repetitive work. The robots that vacuum our floors today will be filling our teeth tomorrow. Even jobs at Wal-Mart are endangered. Have you seen the self-check-out lanes? No cashiers required.
To be competitive now, U. S. students must develop sophisticated critical thinking and analytical skills to manage the conceptual nature of the work they will do. They will need to be able to recognize patterns, create narrative, and imagine solutions to problems we have yet to discover. They will have to see the big picture and ask the big questions. How many high schools do you know that are nurturing minds like that?
Are we supplying the conditions in our schools to create a new crop of original thinkers? Are we making sure our curricula and instructional programs are not relegated for repetitive practice, gathering and organizing information, remediation, and test preparation? Are we requiring all students to use their learning?

单选题 Bill Gates believes that the American high schools are "obsolete" in ______.

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】此题为细节判断题。文章第一句指出：Bill Gates说美国的高校已经落伍了，接下来用具体的例子对其进行证明，即：India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor"s degrees as the U. S. and has six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. America is falling behind.数据说明美国国内学校培养出来的毕业生在数量上大大低于中国、印度等国家，因此A符合题意。

单选题 According to the author, the challenge on American schools comes from ______.

单选题 By saying that "Undersea cable, universal high-tech imagery, and Google have erased geography" (Line 3, Para. 4), the author means that ______.

单选题 In order to compete with overseas students, American children will probably have to ______.

单选题 What does the last paragraph tell us about the education in U. S. ?

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】此题为推理分析题。文章最后一段指出：Are we making sure our curricula and instructional programs are not relegated for repetitive practice, gathering and organizing information, remediation, and test preparation?作者暗示不能确保美国的课程和教学不降级到反复练习、收集和组织信息及纠正和备考上。由此可知美国教育注重训练学生机械地操作、收集和组织信息的能力，这些能力正符合社会技术工人的特点，因此D项符合题意。注意这里的test preparation说明美国学生存在应试教育的倾向，但并不是说帮助学生通过各种考试，A项错误。而B和C正是作者认为当前教育需要改进的地方，不符合题意。