单选题The made-for-TV movie about a tornado carrying man-eating sharks was a surprise hit in America. The preposterous plot of Sharknado may strike a chord with media bosses who have watched the Internet ravage their business over the past decade. Newspapers have lost readers and advertising to the Internet. Book and music shops have closed for good. Sales of DVDs and CDs have plummeted. The television industry has so far resisted big disruption but that has not stopped doomsayers predicting a flight of advertising and viewers. In 2008 Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBC Universal, a big entertainment group, lamented the trend of " trading analogue dollars for digital pennies ". But those pennies are starting to add up. And even Mr. Zucker, now boss of CNN Worldwide, a TV news channel, has changed his tune. "Old media is well, well beyond digital pennies." he says. What has changed his mind? The surge in smartphones, tablet computers and broadband speeds has encouraged more people to pay for content they can carry around with them. And all-access services, which give unlimited content on mobile devices for a monthly fee, are promoting people to spend more on digital products. After years of wreaking havoc, the Internet is helping media companies to grow. Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm, reckons online licensing was responsible for about a third of the growth in revenues at CBS, an American media firm, in 2012. The most obvious change in the past few years is the decline of "physical" products, such as CDs, DVDs and print newspapers. In 2008 nearly nine-tenths of consumer cash went on them; by 2017 it will be a little over half, with digital grabbing the rest. Newspapers are trying to peddle digital subscriptions; the New York Times has nearly 700,000 online subscribers, but few others have done so well. So there is still a big question. Some wonder whether the prices that can be charged for computerized products "can support the underlying industries if they are not also physical businesses". Some media firms need to get bigger and trim costs. But new technology does provide opportunities for media industry. The value of archives is growing in the Internet age; owners can profit from older programs that are rarely broadcast. The Internet can also help firms become cleverer. Concerts have become the lifeblood of the music industry and make up more than half of revenues. Acts used to go on tour to sell albums. Now they put out albums so they can make their living on the road. Publishers are releasing books electronically to test sales before putting them in print, and to adjust prices to drive demand. Experiments that were once impossibly expensive now cost peanuts. The trade of dollars for digital pennies doesn't always hurt.

单选题In the current immigration wave, something markedly different is happening here in the middle of the great American "melting pot". 【F1】 There is a sense that, especially as immigrant populations reach a critical mass in many communities, it is no longer the melting pot that is transforming them, but they who are transforming American society. American culture remains a powerful force—for better or worse—that influences people both here and around the world in countless ways. But several factors have combined in recent years to allow immigrants to resist, if they choose, the Americanization that had once been considered irresistible. In fact, the very concept of assimilation is being called into question as never before. 【F2】 Some sociologists argue that the melting pot often means little more than "Anglo conformity" and that assimilation is not always a positive experience for either society or the immigrants themselves. And with today's emphasis on diversity and ethnicity, it has become easier than ever for immigrants to avoid the melting pot entirely. Even the metaphor itself is changing, having fallen out of fashion completely with many immigration advocacy and ethnic groups. They prefer such terms as the "salad bowl" and the "mosaic" ,metaphors that convey more of a sense of separateness in describing this nation of immigrants. 【F3】 Among socially conservative families such as the Jacintos, who initially moved to California from their village in Mexico's Guanajuato state, then migrated here in 1988 to find jobs in the meatpacking industry, bad influences are a constant concern. They see their children assimilating, but often to the worst aspects of American culture. Their concerns reflect some of the complexities and ambivalence that mark the assimilation process these days. Immigrants such as the Jacintos are here to stay but remain wary of their adoptive country. According to sociologists, they are right to be concerned. "If assimilation is a learning process, it involves learning good things and bad things." said Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociology professor at Michigan State University. "It doesn't always lead to something better." The ambivalence of assimilation can cut both ways. Many native-born-Americans also seem to harbor mixed feelings about the process. 【F4】 As a nation, the United States increasingly promotes diversity, but there are underlying concerns that the more emphasis there is on the factors that set people apart, the more likely that society will end up divided. With Hispanics, especially Mexicans, accounting for an increasing proportion of U.S. population growth, it is this group, more than any other, that is redefining the melting pot. Hispanics now have overtaken blacks as the largest minority group in Nebraska and will become the biggest minority in the country within the next seven years, according to Census Bureau projections. 【F5】 The nation's 29 million Hispanics, the great majority of them from Mexico, have thus become the main focus for questions about how the United States today is assimilating immigrants, or how it is being transformed.

单选题For more than a decade, the prevailing view of innovation has been that little guys had the edge. Innovation bubbled up from the bottom, from upstarts and insurgents. Big companies didn't innovate, and government got in the way. In the dominant innovation narrative, venture-backed start-up companies were cast as the nimble winners and large corporations as the sluggish losers. There was a rich vein of business-school research supporting the notion that innovation comes most naturally from small-scale outsiders. That was the headline point that a generation of business people, venture investors and policy makers took away from Clayton M. Christensen's 1997 classic, The Innovator's Dilemma, which examined the process of disruptive change. But a shift in thinking is under way, driven by altered circumstances. In the United States and abroad, the biggest economic and social challenges—and potential business opportunities—are problems in multifaceted fields like the environment, energy and health care that rely on complex systems. Solutions won't come from the next new gadget or clever software, though such innovations will help. Instead, they must plug into a larger network of change shaped by economics, regulation and policy. Progress, experts say, will depend on people in a wide range of disciplines, and collaboration across the public and private sectors. "These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game," said John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations. In its economic recovery package, the Obama administration is financing programs to generate innovation with technology in health care and energy. The government will spend billions to accelerate the adoption of electronic patient records to help improve care and curb costs, and billions more to spur the installation of so called smart grids that use sensors and computerized meters to reduce electricity consumption. In other developed nations, where energy costs are higher than in the United States, government and corporate projects to cut fuel use and reduce carbon emissions are further along. But the Obama administration is pushing environmental and energy conservation policy more in the direction of Europe and Japan. The change will bolster demand for more efficient and more environmentally friendly systems for managing commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways. These systems are animated by inexpensive sensors and ever-increasing computing power but also require the skills to analyze, model and optimize complex networks, factoring in things as diverse as weather patterns and human behavior. Big companies like General Electric and IBM that employ scientists in many disciplines typically have the skills and scale to tackle such projects.

完形填空Trust is a tricky business

写作题Part ADirections：Write an email to all international experts on campus inviting them to attend the graduation ceremony

写作题PartBDirections：Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthepicturebelow.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethepicturesbriefly.2)interpretthemeaning,and3)giveyoucomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

问答题Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.

问答题You stayed at a friend's home during your visit in America. Write a letter of about 100 words to your friend to express your thanks for his or her hospitality.You should include the details you think necessary.You should write neatly on the ANSWER SHEET.Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead.Do not write the address.

问答题Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.

翻译题Shakespeares life time was coincident with a period of extraordinary activity and achievement in the drama

单选题The past year or two has tested the idea that all publicity is good publicity, at least when it comes to business. Undeserved bonuses, plunging share prices and government funding, among other ills, have aroused the anger of the media and public—and created unexpected gain for public-relations firms. The recession has increased corporate demand for PR, analysts say, and enhanced the industry's status. "We used to be the tail on the dog," says Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman. But now, he continues, PR is "the organizing principle" behind many business decisions. PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favorable reporting in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to expand into territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing influence. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and organize live events, web launches and the like. "When you look at advertising versus public relations, it's not going to be those clearly different," says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The declining of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists' attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and spread news by posting press releases on their websites, for example. The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, watched and directed by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative comments. Perhaps the best indication of PR's growing importance is the attention it is attracting from regulators. They are worried that PR firms do not make it clear enough that they are behind much seemingly independent comments on blogs and social networks. In October America's Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for bloggers, requiring them to disclose whether they had been paid by companies or received free merchandise. Further regulation is likely. But that will not hamper PR's growth. After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.

单选题"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers," Mahatma Gandhi once said. Journalist-haters like him might not care about the agony of America's news firms, but many Americans do. Nearly a third of them say they have abandoned a news source because they thought the quality of its information was declining. According to "The State of the News Media 2013", a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Centre, the deteriorating financial state of news organizations has hurt their output. Newspaper staffs have shrunk by around 30% since their peak in 1989, and newspapers collectively now employ fewer than 40,000 full-time professionals, the lowest number since the mid-1970s. Americans who think media firms are putting out fewer original, thoughtful stories are probably right. Weather, traffic and sport now account for around 40% of local television newscasts. The average length of a story keeps falling. Only 20% of local TV stories exceed a minute, and half take less than 30 seconds. On cable-news channels, live reports, which require camera crews and journalists actually to show up somewhere, have fallen by a third in daytime programs in the past five years. Interview segments, which are cheap, have risen. Americans may also prefer talking heads because they increasingly prefer to hear opinion rather than fact. This trend is highlighted by the popularity of Fox, a conservative news network, and of MSNBC, its left-leaning counterpart. CNN, which tends to toe the middle line, continues to struggle with its ratings unless there is a big news event. Where is the good news? Last year local TV stations, especially those in swing states like Florida and Ohio, got a welcome boost from the $3 billion spent on TV advertising during the election. And newspapers are now starting in large numbers to demand payment for their digital content. Pew reckons that around a third of America's 1,380 dailies have started (or will soon launch) paywalls, inspired by the success of the New York Times, where 640,000 subscribers get the digital edition and circulation now accounts for a larger portion of revenues than advertising. Boosting circulation revenue will help stem losses from print advertising, since it has become clear that digital advertising will not be enough. For every $16 lost in print advertising last year, newspapers made only around $1 from digital ads. The bulk of the $37.3 billion spent on digital advertising in 2012 went to five firms: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL. Not much Gandhian equality there.

单选题Nearly all cultures have a version of the arrow of time, a process by which they move towards the future and away from the past. According to a paper to be published in Psychological Science this has an interesting psychological effect. A group of researchers, led by Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago, found that people judge the distance of events differently, depending on whether they are in the past or future. The paper calls this the "Temporal Doppler Effect". In physics, the Doppler effect describes the way that waves change frequency depending on whether their source is traveling towards or away from you. Mr Caruso argues that something similar happens with people's perception of time. Because future events are associated with diminishing distance, while those in the past are thought of as receding, something happening in one month feels psychologically closer than something that happened a month ago. This idea was tested in a series of experiments. In one, researchers asked 323 volunteers and divided them into two groups. A week before Valentine's day, members of the first were asked how they planned to celebrate it. A week after February 14th the second group reported how they had celebrated it. Both groups also had to describe how near the day felt on a scale of one to seven. Those describing forthcoming plans were more likely to report it as feeling "a short time from now", while those who had already experienced it tended to cluster at the "a long time from now" end of the scale. To account for the risk that recalling actual events requires different cognitive functions than imagining ones that have not yet happened, they also asked participants to rate the distance of hypothetical events a month in the past or future. The asymmetry remained. Interestingly, the effect can be reversed by manipulating time's arrow. In another experiment, participants were plugged into a virtual reality machine, with some moving forwards along a tree-lined street others backwards. Those who were moving backwards reported that past events began to feel closer. Mr Caruso speculates that his research has implications for psychological well-being. He suspects that people who do not show this bias—those who feel the past as being closer—might be more subject to depression, because they are more likely to dwell on past events. There may also be lessons for politicians and business leaders. Talking of future plans may be more effective than boasting about past successes. "People want to know what are you going to do for me next, not what have you done for me lately," suggests Mr Caruso.

单选题Seven years ago, when I was visiting Germany, I met with an official who explained to me that the country had a perfect solution to its economic problems. Watching the U.S. economy【C1】______during the '90s, the Germans had decided that they, too, needed to go the high-technology【C2】______. But how? In the late '90s, the answer seemed obvious: Indians. After all, Indian entrepreneurs【C3】______one of every three Silicon Valley start-ups. So the German government decided that it would【C4】______Indians to Germany just as America does: by【C5】______green cards. Officials created something called the German Green Card and【C6】______that they would issue 20,000 in the first year.【C7】______, the Germans expected that tens of thousands more Indians would soon be begging to come, and perhaps the【C8】______would have to be increased. But the program was a failure. A year later【C9】______half of the 20,000 cards had been issued. After a few extensions, the program was【C10】______. I told the German official at the time that I was sure the【C11】______would fail. It's not that I had any particular expertise in immigration policy,【C12】______I understood something about green cards, because I had one (the American【C13】______). The German Green Card was misnamed, I argued,【C14】______it never, under any circumstances, translated into German citizenship. The U.S. green card, by contrast, is an almost【C15】______path to becoming American (after five years and a clean record). The official【C16】______my objection, saying that there was no way Germany was going to offer these people citizenship. "We need young tech workers," he said. "That's what this program is all【C17】______." So Germany was asking bright young【C18】______to leave their country, culture and families, move thousands of miles away, learn a new language and work in a strange land—but without any【C19】______of ever being part of their new home. Germany was sending a signal, one that was【C20】______received in India and other countries, and also by Germany's own immigrant community.

单选题Chances are your friends are more popular than you are. It is a basic feature of social networks that has been known about for some time. Consider both an enthusiastic party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and an ill-tempered guy, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the "friendship paradox": the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself. Now researchers think this seemingly depressing fact can be made to work as an early warning system to detect outbreaks of contagious diseases. By studying the friends of a randomly selected group of individuals, epidemic disease experts can isolate those people who are more connected to one another and are therefore more likely to catch diseases like the flu early. This could allow health authorities to spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current monitoring methods. In a report, Nicholas Christakis from Harvard University and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego put the friendship paradox to good use. In a trial carried out last autumn, they monitored the spread of flu through students and their friends at Harvard University, and found that their social links were indeed causing them to get infected sooner. As this result came after the outbreak, the researchers tried to come up with a real-time measure that could potentially provide an early warning sign of an outbreak as it began to spread. Currently, the conventional methods used to assess an infection lag an outbreak by a week or two. Google's Flu Trends is at best simultaneous with an outbreak. Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler suggest that a compound method might be developed in which the search inquiries of a group of highly connected individuals could be scanned for signs of the flu. Although the technique has so far only been demonstrated for the flu and in the social surroundings of a university, the researchers nevertheless think that it could help predict other infectious diseases and do so on a larger scale. Nor should it be difficult to implement. Public-health officials already conduct random sampling, so getting the participants to name a few friends too should not be troublesome. When it comes to infectious diseases, your friends really do say a lot about you.

单选题Encouragement and praise can come in many forms, and some ways are better for child development than others. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford University who studied mother-child interactions over the course of several years found that the type of praise children receive affects their attitudes toward challenges later in life. Specifically, praise that came with feedback about their behavior and the choices that toddlers made helped them to cope better with difficult experiences five years later, compared with compliments that focused more on the child himself, like "You're a good boy." The study, which appears in the journal Child Development, is the first major study of praise and childhood development done outside of a lab setting. In the study, researches found that the children who grew up with more process praise (comments such as "You worked really hard" or "You're doing a great job," which emphasize the child's actions.) were more open to challenge, and were able to identify more ways of overcoming difficult problems. They were also more likely to say that they could improve their intelligence with hard work. While person praise (comments like "You're so smart" or "You're so good," which focus on a child's inherent qualities.) didn't seem to have any negative effect on the children, the study suggests that process praise teaches children that their talents and abilities can be developed and improved, while person praise sends the message that their abilities are fixed and therefore not easily altered. "This study is monumental," says Carol Dweck, a co-author of the study and a professor at Stanford University whose earlier research laid the foundation for understanding the role of praise in child development. Another revelation from the study involved how praise affects boys and girls differently. Parents gave boys and girls the same amount of praise, but of the encouragement boys received, 24% was process praise, while girls received only 10% of this type. Previous research suggested this pattern, but Gunderson, an assistant professor of psychology at Temple University, says she was surprised by how great the difference was. The inequality could have consequences for how girls evaluate their abilities as they progress in school and may play a role in aggravating some of the self-esteem issues that become more common among teens and adolescents. The findings send a clear message to parents. "The biggest takeaway is that parent praise matters," Dweck says. "The parents, even when the children are very young, are starting to shape the child's motivation, the children's attitudes toward themselves and their stance to the world." Not all praise, it seems, is equal.

单选题Entire cities and counties have banned them. McDonald's and KFC have declared to give them up—as have Starbucks, Ruby Tuesday, and a host of other former sources of sinful pleasures. In response to the 2006 Food and Drug Administration requirement that trans fats be listed on nutrition labels, makers of packaged goods have brought their totals down to zero. Last month, Frito-Lay even got the FDA's blessing to put a claim on products loaded with healthy, unsaturated fats that replacing bad fats with good ones may protect against heart disease. Does this mean that junk food is now the new health food? "No! " says Robert Eckel, immediate past president of the American Heart Association, whose "Face the Fats" education campaign points out that a "zero trans fats" label doesn't tell the whole story. "People know trans fats are not good for them," says Eckel. "But they do not understand that replacing them with saturated fat is not a good option." And that, in some cases, is what's happening. Yes, the food industry is experimenting with ways to keep the saturated fat content low—by using unsaturated options such as canola and sunflower oils, for example. But some manufacturers, unwilling to sacrifice taste and texture, are turning back to less-than-healthful choices such as palm oil and butter. Baked goods have proved particularly unwilling to change. The solid fats that provide their light texture, as well as the rich flavor typically are either highly saturated or are "partially hydrogenated" oils that contain trans fats. Makers of fried foods have had an easier task, since certain liquid unsaturated oils can do as tasty a job. Snack makers, too, have found the switch to be relatively manageable. Manufacturers are raising nutrition experts' eyebrows with other tricks, too. Walter Willett, a professor of nutrition at Harvard whose research showed that trans fats promote heart disease, says that some companies now are fully, rather than partially, hydrogenating vegetable oil. Full hydrogenation doesn't create trans fats as it solidifies the oil, but it does produce an acid, a saturated fat which seems in preliminary research to promote inflammation, thus contributing to heart disease. "I'm not in favor of using totally hy-drogenated oil until more is known," he says. A recent study by the International Food Information Council Foundation shows that about 42 percent of Americans—a 9 percent increase over last year—are trying to cut back on certain healthy fats along with trans fats. "All people hear is that fat is bad, bad, bad," says Susan Borra, president of the foundation. In fact, most people need more of the good kind.

单选题While the mission of public schools has expanded beyond education to include social support and extra-curricular activities, the academic schedule has changed little in more than a century. Reclaiming the school day for academic instruction and escaping the time-bound traditions of education are vital steps in the school-reform process, says a report released today by the National Education Commission on Time and Learning. The commission's report, titled "Prisoners of Time," calls the fixed clock and calendar in American education a "fundamental design flaw" in desperate need of change. "Time should serve children instead of children serving time," the report says. The two-year commission found that holding American students to "world-class standards," will require more time for classroom instruction. "We have been asking the impossible of our students—that they learn as much as their foreign peers while spending half as much as in core academic subjects," it states. The Commission compared the relationships between time and learning in Japan, Germany, and the United States and found that American students receive less than half the basic academic instruction that Japanese and German students are provided. On average, American students can earn a high school diploma if they spend only 41 percent of their school time on academics, says the report. American students spend an average of three hours a day on "core" academics such as English, math, science, and history, the commission found. Their report recommends offering a minimum of 5.5 hours of academics every school day. The nine-member commission also recommends lengthening the school day beyond the traditional six hours. "If schools want to continue offering important activities outside the academic core, as well as serving as a hub for family and community services, they should keep school doors open longer each day and each year," says John Hodge Jones, director of schools in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and chairman of the commission The typical school year in American public schools is 180 days. Eleven states allow school years of 175 days or less, and only one state requires more than 180 day. "For over a decade, education reform advocates have been working feverishly to improve our schools," says Milton Goldberg, executive director of the commission. "But... if reform is to truly take hold, the six-hour, 180-day school year should be put in museums—an exhibit from our education past."

单选题There's no question that future leaders will need constant coaching. As the business environment becomes more complex, they will increasingly turn to coaches for help in understanding how to act. The kind of coaches I am talking about will do more than influence behaviors; they will be an essential part of the leader's learning process, providing knowledge, opinions, and judgment in critical areas. These coaches will be retired CEOs or other experts from universities, think tanks, and government. Clearly, this is not a description of what most coaches do today. What we think of as coaching is generally a service to middle managers provided by entrepreneurs with a background in consulting, psychology, or human resources. This kind of coaching became popular over the past five years because companies faced a shortage of talent and were concerned about turnover among key employees. Firms wanted to signal their commitment to developing their high-potential executives, so they hired coaches. Meanwhile, businesspeople needed to develop not just quantitative capabilities but also people-oriented skills, and many coaches are helpful for that As coaching has become more common, any disgrace attached to receiving it at the individual level has disappeared. Now, it is often considered a badge of honor. The coaching industry will remain fragmented until a few partnerships build a brand, collect excellent people, weed out those who are not so good, and create a reputation for outstanding work. Some coaching groups are evolving in this direction, but most are still small firms specializing in, for example, administering and interpreting 360-degree evaluations. To get beyond this level, the industry badly needs a leader who can define the profession and create a serious firm in the way that Marvin Bower did when he invented the modem professional management consultancy in the form of McKinsey most of the evidence around effectiveness remains unproved. My sense is that the positive stories outnumber the negative ones—but as the industry matures, coaching firms will need to be able to demonstrate how they bring about change, as well as offer a clear methodology for measuring results. Despite the recession, I agree with most survey respondents that the demand for coaching will not contract in the long term. The big developing economies are going to have a tremendous appetite for it because management there is very youthful. University graduates are coming into jobs at 23 years old and finding that their bosses are all of 25, with the experience to match.

单选题There was a time when women were considered smart if they played dumb to get a man, and women who went to college were more interested in getting a "Mrs. Degree" than a bachelor's. Even today, it's not unusual for a woman to get whispered and uninvited counsel from her grandmother that an advanced degree could hurt her in the marriage market. Despite the fact that more women than men now attend college, the idea that smart women finish last in love seems to hang on and on. "There were so many misperceptions out there about education and marriage that I decided to sort out the facts," said economist Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania So along with Wharton colleague Adam Isen, Stevenson analyzed national marriage data from 1950 to 2008 and found that the marriage penalty women once paid for being well educated has largely disappeared. "Marriage rates in the U.S. for college-educated women have risen enormously since the 1950s," Stevenson said. "In 1950, less than three quarters of white college-educated women went on to marry by age 40 (compared with 90 percent of high-school graduates). But today, 86 percent marry by age 40, compared with 88 percent of high-school graduates." "In other words, the difference in marriage rates between those with college degrees and those without is very small," said Stephanie Coontz, a family historian at Evergreen State College and author of Marriage: A History. The new analysis also found that while high-school dropouts had the highest marriage rates (93 percent) in the 1950s, today college-educated women are much more likely to marry than those who don't finish high school (86 percent versus 81 percent). Of course, expectations have changed dramatically in the last half century. In the 1950s, men didn't want a woman who was their equal; they needed and wanted someone who knew less, someone who looked up to them. And in fact 40 percent of college women admitted to playing dumb on dates. "These days, few women feel the need to play down their intelligence or achievements," Coontz said. The new research has more good news for college graduates. Stevenson said the data indicate that modern college-educated women are more likely than other groups of women to be married at age 40, are less likely to divorce, and are more likely to describe their marriages as "happy" compared with other women. The marriages of well-educated women tend to be more stable because the brides are usually older as well as wiser, Stevenson said.