题目
Ironically, the first evidence for this ides appeared in the United States. Not long ago, with the country entering a recession and Japan at its pre-bubble peak, the U.S. workforce was derided as poorly educated and one of the primary causes of the poor U.S. economic performance. Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotive-assembly productivity. Yet the research revealed that the U.S. factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts—a result of the training that U.S. workers received on the job.
More recently, while examining housing construction, the researchers discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry's work.
What is the real relationship between education and economic development? We have to suspect that continuing economic growth promotes the development of education even when governments don't force it. Alter all, that's how education got started. When our ancestors were hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, they didn't have time to wonder much about anything besides finding food. Only when humanity began to get its food in a more productive way was there time for other things.
As education improved, humanity's productivity potential increased as well. When the competitive environment pushed our ancestors to achieve that potential, they could in turn afford more education. This increasingly high level of education is probably a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the complex political systems required by advanced economic performance. Thus poor countries might not be able to escape their poverty traps without political changes that may be possible only with broader formal education. A lack of formal education, however, doesn't constrain the ability of the developing world's workforce to substantially improve productivity for the foreseeable future. On the contrary, constraints on improving productivity explain why education isn't developing more quickly there than it is.
The author holds in Paragraph 1 that the importance of education in poor countries ______.
A.is subject to groundless doubts
B.has fallen victim of bias
C.is conventionally downgraded
D.has been overestimated
第1题
Naturalists and casual observers alike have been struck by the special relationship
between squirrels and acorns (the seeds of oak trees). Ecologists, though, cannot observe
These energetic mammals scurrying up and down oak trees and eating and burying acorns
without wondering about their complex relationship with trees. Are squirrels dispersers
(5) and planters of oak forests or pesky seed predators? The answer is not simple. Squirrels
may devour many acorns, but by storing and failing to recover up to 74 percent of them
(as they do when seeds are abundant), these arboreal o\rodents can also aid regeneration
and dispersal of the oaks.
Their destructive powers are well documented. According to one report, squirrels
(10) destroyed tens of thousands of fallen acorns from an oak stand on the University of
Indiana campus. A professor there estimated that each of the large while oaks had.
Produced between two and eight thousand acorns, but within weeks of seed maturity,
Hardly an intact acorn could be found among the fallen leaves.
Deer, turkey, wild pigs, and bears also feed heavily on acorns, but do not store them,
(15) And are therefore of no benefit to the trees. Flying squirrels, chipmunks, and mice are
Also unlikely to promote tree dispersal---whose behavior. of caching (hiding) acorns below
The leaf litter often promotes successful germination of acorns---and perhaps blue jays,
Important long-distance dispersers, seem to help oaks spread and reproduce.
Among squirrels, though, there is a particularly puzzling behavior. pattern. Squirrels
(20) pry off the caps of acorns, bite through the shells to get at the nutritious inner kernels,
and then discard them half-eaten. The ground under towing oaks is often littered with
thousands of half-eaten acorns, each one only bitten from the top. Why would any animal
waste so much time and energy and risk exposure to such predators as red-tail hawks only
to leave a large part of each acorn uneaten? While research is not conclusive at this point,
(25) one thing that is certain is that squirrels do hide some of the uneaten portions, and these
acorn halves, many of which contain the seeds, may later germinate.
What does the passage mainly discuss?
A.The ecology of oak trees
B.Factors that determine the feeding habits of Squirrels
C.Various species of animals that promote the dispersal of tree seeds
D.The relationship between squirrels and oak trees
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