单选题 .  SECTION A  MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    PASSAGE ONE
    (1)Of all the lessons taught by the financial crisis, the most personal one has been that Americans aren't too slick with money. We take out home loans we can't afford. We run up sky-high credit-card debt. We don't save nearly enough for retirement.
    (2)In response, proponents of financial-literacy education are stumping with renewed zeal. School districts in states such as New Jersey and Illinois are adding money-management courses to their curriculums. The Treasury and Education departments are sending lesson plans to high schools and encouraging students to compete in the National Financial Capability Challenge that begins in March.
    (3)Students with top scores on that exam will receive certificates—but chances for long-term benefits are slim. As it turns out, there is little evidence that traditional efforts to boost financial know-how help students make better decisions outside the classroom. Even as the financial-literacy movement has gained steam over the past decade, scores have been falling on tests that measure how informed students are about things such as budgeting, credit cards, insurance and investments. A survey of college students conducted for the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy found that students who'd had a personal-finance or money-management course in high school scored no better than those who hadn't.
    (4)"We need to figure out how to do this in the right way," says Lewis Mandell, a professor at the University of Washington who after 15 years of studying financial-literacy programs has come to the conclusion that current methods don't work. A growing number of researchers and educators agree that a more radical approach is needed. They advocate starting financial education a lot earlier than high school, putting real money and spending decisions into kids' hands and talking openly about the emotions and social influences tied to how we spend.
    (5)One promising example of new thinking is found on Chicago's South Side. At the Ariel Community Academy, financial education starts in kindergarten with books like A Chair for My Mother (the moral: if you want to buy something, save money first) and quickly becomes hands-on. Each entering class at Ariel is entrusted with a $20,000 investment portfolio, and by seventh grade, kids are deciding what to buy and sell  (profits help pay for college). Last year, for the first time, the eighth-grade class graduated with less than the original $20,000. Talk about a teachable moment: stocks don't always go up.
    (6)Other initiatives are tackling such real-world issues as the commercial and social pressures that affect purchasing decisions. Why exactly do you want those expensive name-brand sneakers so badly? "It takes confidence to take a stand and to think differently," says Jeroo Billimoria, founder of Aflatoun, a nonprofit whose curriculum, used in more than 30 countries, aims to help kids get a leg up in their financial lives. "This goes beyond money and savings."
    (7)That approach might have helped in the recent housing bubble. Buyers didn't just need to know how different sorts of mortgages worked; they also needed the fortitude to choose a 30-year fixed rate when everyone around them was buying a bigger house with a riskier loan.
    (8)Amid such a complicated landscape, some experts question whether there could ever be enough education to adequately prepare Americans for financial life. A better solution, these critics contend, is to reform the system. "What works is creating institutions that make it easy to do the right thing," says David Laibson, a Harvard economics professor who, like Mandell, has decided after years of research that education isn't a silver bullet. One idea being discussed in Washington is the automatic IRA. Employers would have to enroll each worker in a personal retirement-savings account unless that worker decided to opt out.
    (9)Yet even the skeptics are slow to write off financial education completely. More than anything, they say, we need to rigorously study the financial decisions of alumni of programs like Ariel and Aflatoun and compare them with those of peers who didn't get the same sort of education. "Until you have experimental evidence, it's all a little speculative," says Michael Sherraden, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who is conducting a seven-year, randomized, controlled study on whether giving children bank accounts inculcates the habit of saving—a program already being tried on a large scale in the U.K. Yes, good, solid research like this takes a lot of time and resources. But if what we're doing right now isn't working, it's in our own best interest to figure out what does.
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1)Boundaries have underpinned pretty much every aspect of my life, both past and present. From the profound lack of them in early childhood right through to growing up and discovering ways to create ones clear enough and strong enough to be able to stay off drugs, out of prison and create healthy relationships with friends, family and colleagues.
    (2)The emotional and psychological free for all spiraling around me as a kid pretty much guaranteed that I'd develop a series of debilitating addictions, court potentially lethal violence and begin the slow inevitable slide toward prison. An early death was always on the cards. The profound lack of boundaries throughout my father's own life lead to his suicide. Seeing how his inability to create a safe boundary around his dysfunctional emotional life contributed to his early death, woke me up to what I needed to do to stay off drugs, out of prison and alive.
    (3)It's no surprise to me then that the biggest problem we have when working with young people in prison is around boundaries. Implementing and holding them is key to the work we do in Write to Freedom (W2F). Young people from dysfunctional families who end up in custody seem to have a built-in biological default to test any form of boundary presented to them. If there's a weak boundary in our staff team the young prisoners make it their business to push it to breaking point.
    (4)Every weekend we've organized has had a problem with the security clearance needed to get the lads out and onto the moors. There are always a variety of reasons for this, not least of all the volatility of the young people themselves. Whatever the reason, each weekend we've set up we've found ourselves below the minimum number set to make a weekend happen. So we ended up walking onto the wings, going from cell to cell looking for rookies to come on a writing weekend on Dartmoor. Locked cell door or open Devon moor? The decision for them is clearly a no brainer. Doing this has lead to lads coming on the weekend who were far from ready to engage with what we were asking of them. As a result we faced chaos and stress that could easily have been avoided.
    (5)So I tightened up the criteria. Each participant had to complete three memoir based assignments before the weekend. All was good till the security board meeting two days before the March weekend. Out of the four lads who'd worked hard, completed the assignments and proved their understanding and commitment to W2F, only one was cleared to leave prison for the weekend. I could easily have done the same thing as last time, gone from wing to wing to build the numbers back up, I wanted to believe me, and Ashfield put pressure on me to do it. But we chose to stick to the assessment criteria. Right or wrong it had to be kept. The weekend has been postponed till May.
    (6)The psychology of boundaries, implicit and explicit, for the staff and participants in W2F is crucial to making the work we do safe. It builds trust, even if it means I do something I don't want to, like cancel a weekend after so much work has gone into its preparation. This is about self esteem; of the staff and the participants. Low self esteem crippled me in my early years and is still prone to erosion if I'm not careful. Boundaries inside and outside were the making of me. Lack of boundaries for these young people led them to prison. Everybody needs a line that must not be crossed. Boundaries create trust. This can and has lead to changed lives and changed relationships, and offers all of us hope in the darkest of times.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1)Divorce is one of those creations, like fast food and lite rock, that has more people willing to indulge in it than people willing to defend it. Back in the 1960s, easier divorce was hailed as a needed remedy for toxic relationships. But familiarity has bred contempt. In recent years, the divorce revolution has been blamed for worsening all sorts of problems without bringing happiness to people in unhappy marriages.
    (2)There's a lot of evidence that marital breakup does more social harm than good. In their 2000 book, The Case for Marriage, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher document that adults who are married do better than singles in wealth, health, and personal satisfaction. Children living with a divorced or unwed single parent are more likely to fall into poverty, sickness, and crime than other kids.
    (3)Marriage is a good thing, most people agree, while divorce is, at best, a necessary evil. So the laws that accompanied the divorce revolution have come under fire for destroying families and weakening safeguards for spouses who keep their vows.
    (4)Waite and Gallagher argue that loose divorce laws harm even intact households by fostering chronic uncertainty. Louisiana, in line with this criticism, has gone so far as to provide a "covenant marriage" option for couples who want the protection of stricter divorce rules.
    (5)It may seem obvious that easier divorce laws make for more divorce and more insecurity. But what is obvious is not necessarily true. What two scholars have found is that when you make divorce easier to get, you may actually produce better marriages.
    (6)In the old days, anyone who wanted to escape from the trials of wedlock had to get his or her spouse to agree to a split, or else go to court to prove the partner had done something terribly wrong. The 1960s and '70s brought "no-fault" divorce, which is also known as "unilateral divorce," since either party can bring it about without the consent of the other.
    (7)The first surprise is that looser divorce laws have actually had little effect on the number of marriages that fall apart. Economist Justin Wolfers of Stanford University, in a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), found that when California passed a no-fault divorce law in 1970, the divorce rate jumped, then fell back to its old level—and then fell some more.
    (8)That was also the pattern in other states that loosened their laws. Over time, he estimates, the chance that a first marriage would break up rose by just one-fourth of one percentage point, which is next to nothing.
    (9)In short, nothing bad happened. But in another NBER paper, Wolfers and fellow economist Betsey Stevenson of the University of Pennsylvania report that in states that relaxed their divorce laws, some very good things happened: Fewer women committed suicide, and fewer were murdered by husbands or other "intimate" partners. In addition, both men and women suffered less domestic violence, compared to states that didn't change their laws.
    (10)We're not talking about tiny improvements here. Wolfers and Stevenson say that in no-fault states, there was a 10-percent drop in a woman's chance of being killed by her spouse or boyfriend. The rate of female suicide in new no-fault states fell by about 20 percent. The effect was more dramatic still for domestic violence—which "declined by somewhere between a quarter and a half between 1976 and 1985 in those states that reformed their divorce laws," according to Stevenson and Wolfers.
    (11)What could account for these surprising benefits? Something simple: A change in divorce laws alters the balance of power in a marriage, giving more leverage to the weaker or more vulnerable spouse.
    (12)If either partner can demand a divorce, each has a greater incentive to keep the other content If an abused spouse has an open exit, some abusers—and potential abusers—will find it possible to behave themselves.
    (13)By assuring both people in a marriage that they can get out ff things go badly, the looser laws can foster the sort of behavior needed to make sure things go well. Just as a driver in a small car will drive more cautiously than someone in an oversized SUV, couples faced with loose divorce laws may handle their family obligations with greater care.
    (14)No-fault divorce once looked like a remedy for bad marriages, in the same way that amputation is a remedy for a gangrenous limb. The good news is that it may prevent the disease in the first place.
    PASSAGE FOUR
    (1)They poison the mind and corrupt the morals of the young, who waste their time sitting on sofas immersed in dangerous fantasy worlds. That, at least, was the charge levelled against novels during the 18th century by critics worried about the impact of a new medium on young people. Today the idea that novels can harm people sounds daft. And that is surely how history will judge modern criticism of video games, which are accused of turning young people into violent criminals. This week European justice ministers met to discuss how best to restrict the sale of violent games to children. Some countries, such as Germany, believe the answer is to ban some games altogether. That is going too far.
    (2)Criticism of games is merely the latest example of a tendency to demonize new and unfamiliar forms of entertainment. In 1816 waltzing was condemned as a "fatal contagion" that encouraged promiscuity; in 1910 films were denounced as "an evil pure and simple, destructive of social interchange"; in the 1950s rock 'n' roll music was said to turn young people into "devil worshippers" and comic books were accused of turning children into drug addicts and criminals. In each case the pattern is the same: young people adopt a new form of entertainment, older people are spooked by its unfamiliarity and condemn it, but eventually the young grow up and the new medium becomes accepted—at which point another example appears and the cycle begins again.
    (3)The opposition to video games is founded on the mistaken belief that most garners are children. In fact, two thirds of garners are over 18 and the average garner is around 30. But the assumption that garners are mostly children leads to a double standard. Violent films are permitted and the notion that some films are unsuitable for children is generally understood. Yet different rules are applied to games.
    (4)Aren't games different because they are interactive? It is true that video games can make people feel excited or aggressive, but so do many sports. There is no evidence that video gaming causes long term aggression.
    (5)Games ought to be age-rated, just as films are, and retailers should not sell adult-rated games to children any more than they should sell them adult-rated films. Ratings schemes are already in place, and in some countries restrictions on the sale of adult-rated games to minors have the force of law.
    (6)Oddly enough, Hillary Clinton, one of the politicians who has led the criticism of the gaming industry in America, has recently come round to this view. Last month she emphasized the need for parents to pay more attention to game ratings and called on the industry, retailers and parents to work together. But this week some European politicians seemed to be moving in the other direction: the Netherlands may follow Germany, for example, in banning some games outright. Not all adults wish to play violent games, just as not all of them enjoy violent movies. But they should be free to do so if they wish.1.  What is Lewis Mandell's feeling toward the current financial-literacy movement?______PASSAGE ONE