2007年12月22日大学英语四级考试AB卷 - 完整篇

 2007.12.22英语四级试卷 - 快速阅读
   
 Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
 Universities Branch Out

 As never before in their long history, universities have become
 instruments of national competition as well as instruments of peace.
 They are the place of the scientific discoveries that move economies forward, and the primary means of educating the talent required to obtain and
 maintain competitive advantage. But at the same time, the opening of
 national borders to the flow of goods.services, information and
 especially people has made universities a powerful force for global
 integration, mutual understanding and geopolitical stability.

 In response to the same forces that have driven the world economy,
 universities have become more self-consciously global: seeking
 students from around the world who represent the entire range of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global
 careers offering courses of study that address the challenges of an
 interconnected world and collaborative(合作的) research programs to
 advance science for rhc benefit 0f all humanity.

 Of the forces shaping higher education none is more sweeping than
 the movement across borders.Over the past three decades the number
 of students leaving home each year to study abroad has grown at art
 annual rate of 3.9 percent, from 800,000 in 1975 to 2.5 million in
 2004. Most travel from one developed nation to another, but the flow
 from developing to developed countries is growing rapidly. The
 reverse flow, from developed to developing countries, is on the
 rise, too.

 Today foreign students earn 30 percent of the doctoral degrees
 awarded in the United States and 38 percent of those m the United
 Kingdom. And the number crossing borders for undergraduate study is
 growing as well, to 8 percent of the undergraduates at America's
 best institutions and 10 percent of all undergraduates in ihc U.K.
 In the United States, 20 percent of the newly hired professors in
 science and engineering are foreign-born, and in China many newly
 hired faculty members at the top research universities received
 their graduate education abroad.

 Universities are also encouraging students to spend some of their
 undergraduate years in another country. In Europe, more than 140,000
 students participate in the Erasmus program each year, taking
 courses for credit in one of 2,200 participating institutions across
 the continent. And in the United States, institutions are helping
 place students in summer internships （实习） abroad to prepare them for
 global careers. Yale and Harvard have led the way, offering every
 undergraduate at least one international study or internship
 opportunity—and providing the financial resources to make it
 possible.

 Globalisation is also reshaping the way research is done. One new
 trend souring portions of a research program to another country.
 Yale professor and Howard Hunghes Medical institute investigator
 Tian Xu directs a research center focused on the genetics of human
 disease at Shanghai's Fudan University,in collaborate with faculty
 colleagues from both school ; The Shanghaicenter has 95 employees
 and graduate students working in a 4,300-square-meter laboratry
 facility. Yale faculty, postdoctors and graduate students visit
 regularly and attend videoconference seminars with scientists from
 both campuses. The arrangement benefits both countries;Xu's Yale lab
 is more productive, thanks to the lower costs Of conducting research
 in China,and Chinese graduate students, postdoctor and faculty get
 on-the-job training from a world-class scientist and his U.S.team.

As a result of its strength in science,the United States has consistently led the world in the commercialization of major new technologies,from the mainframe computer and the in thegrated circuit of the 1960s to the Internet infrastructure(基础设施)and applications softwareof the 1990s.The link between university based science and industrial application is often indire but sometimes highty visible;Sfficon Valley was intentionally created by Stanford University Route 128 outside Boston has long housed companies spun off from MIT and 1 larvard.Around th world,governments have encouraged copying of this model, perhaps most successfully in Cambrids England,where Microsoft and scores of other leading software and biotechnology companies have set up shop around the university.

 For all its success, the Untied States remendis deeply hesitant
 about sustaining the research-university model. Most politicians
 recognize the link between investment in science and national
 economic strength, but support for research funding has been
 unsteady. The budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled
 between 1998 and 2003. but has risen more slowly than inflation
 since then. Support for the physical sciences and engineering barely
 kept pace with inflation during that same period 1 h attempt to make
 up lost ground is welcome, but the nation would be better served by
 steady, predictable increases in science funding at the rate of
 long-term GDP growth, which is on the order of inflation plus 3
 percent per year.