Homework has never been terribly popular with students and even many parents, but in recently years it has been particularly scorned. School districts across the country, most recently Los Angeles Unified, are revising their thinking on this educational ritual. Unfortunately, L.A. Unified has produced an inflexible policy which mandates that with the exception of some advanced courses, homework may no longer count for more than 10% of a student' s academic grade. This rule is meant to address the difficulty that students from impoverished or chaotic homes might have in completing their homework. But the policy is unclear and contradictory. Certainly, no homework should be assigned that students cannot complete on their own or that they cannot do without expensive equipment. But if the district is essentially giving a pass to students who do not do their homework because of complicated family lives, it is going riskily close to the implication that standards need to be lowered for poor children. District administrators say that homework will still be a part of schooling; teachers are allowed to assign as much of it as they want. But with homework counting for no more than 10% of their grades, students can easily skip half their homework and see very little difference on their report cards. Some students might do well on state tests without completing their homework, but what about the students who performed well on the tests and did their homework? It is quite possible that the homework helped. Yet rather than empowering teachers to find what works best for their students, the policy imposes a flat, across-the-board rule. At the same time, the policy addresses none of the truly thorny questions about homework. If the district finds homework to be unimportant to its students' academic achievement, it should move to reduce or eliminate the assignments, not make them count for almost nothing. Conversely, if homework matters, it should account for a significant portion of the grade. Meanwhile, this policy does nothing to ensure that the homework students receive is meaningful or appropriate to their age and the subject, or that teachers are not assigning more than they are willing to review and correct. The homework rules should be put on hold while the school board, which is responsible for setting educational policy, looks into the matter and conducts public hearings. It is not too late for L.A. Unified to do homework right.
单选题
It is implied in Paragraph 1 that nowadays homework
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】解析：推断题。文章首段首句指出“家庭作业从来就没受到学生和许多家长的欢迎，而最近几年 尤其遭到奚落。”后面的内容则是简单提出美国各学区对于家庭作业的作为，引出L．A．Unified 针对家庭作业所指定的政策。该题题干问的是“根据文章首段，目前家庭作业…”，关键词是家 庭作业，因此答案从首句就能判断出来，题干的nowadays对应原文中的inrecent years，所选答案 则是对“it has been particularly scorned”的解释，故答案是A项。
单选题
L.A. Unified has made the rule about homework mainly because poor students
单选题
As mentioned in Paragraph 4, a key question unanswered about homework is whether
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】解析：细节题。根据题干关键词对应第四段的首句“the policy addresses none of the truly thorny questions about homework。”而这个问题的具体内容则是从“if”开始说明，因此这道题要 解出正确答案，需要对后面的内容进行分析。“如果学区认为家庭作业对学生成绩不重要，那就 该删减或取消家庭作业，而不是让它所占比例极小。如果认为家庭作业重要，那么就应当让它在 成绩中占重大比例。”从这两句的内容中，我们可以简单归纳出，L.A．Unified所指定的这项政策到 目前为止还未对家庭作业对于学生学业是否有重要作用给出确定答案，只有B项符合题意。