注意：此部分試題請在答題卡2上作答。

 52. Why do Americans feel humiliated?

A) Their economy is plunging                      B) They can’t afford trips to Europe

C) Their currency has slumped                      D) They have lost half of their assets.

53.How does the current dollar affect the life of ordinary Americans?

They have to cancel their vacations in New England.

They find it unaffordable to dine in mom-and-pop restaurants.

They have to spend more money when buying imported goods.

They might lose their jobs due to potential economic problems.

54 How do many Europeans feel about the U.S with the devalued dollar?

They feel contemptuous of it

They are sympathetic with it.

They regard it as a superpower on the decline.

They think of it as a good tourist destination.

55 what is the author’s advice to Americans?

They treat the dollar with a little respect

They try to win in the weak-dollar gamble

They vacation at home rather than abroad

They treasure their marriages all the more.

56 What does the author imply by saying “currencies don’t turn on a dime” (Line 2,Para 7)?

The dollar’s value will not increase in the short term.

The value of a dollar will not be reduced to a dime

The dollar’s value will drop, but within a small margin.

Few Americans will change dollars into other currencies.

Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
     In the college-admissions wars, we parents are the true fights. We are pushing our kids to get good grades, take SAT preparatory courses and build resumes so they can get into the college of our first choice. I’ve twice been to the wars, and as I survey the battlefield, something different is happening. We see our kids’ college background as e prize demonstrating how well we’ve raised them. But we can’t acknowledge that our obsession(癡迷) is more about us than them. So we’ve contrived various justifications that turn out to be half-truths, prejudices or myths. It actually doesn’t matter much whether Aaron and Nicole go to Stanford.
     We have a full-blown prestige panic; we worry that there won’t be enough prizes to go around. Fearful parents urge their children to apply to more schools than ever. Underlying the hysteria(歇斯底里) is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All  that is plausible——and mostly wrong. We haven’t found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters. Selective schools don’t systematically employ better instructional approaches than less selective schools. On two measures——professors’ feedback and the number of essay exams——selective schools do slightly worse.
     By some studies, selective schools do enhance their graduates’ lifetime earnings. The gain is reckoned at 2-4% for every 100-poinnt increase in a school’s average SAT scores. But even this advantage is probably a statistical fluke(偶然). A well-known study examined students who got into highly selective schools and then went elsewhere. They earned just as much as graduates from higher-status schools.
 Kids count more than their colleges.Getting into yale may signify intellgence,talent and
Ambition. But it’s not the only indicator and,paradoxically,its significance is declining.The reason:so many similar people go elsewhere.Getting into college is not life only competiton.Old-boy networks are breaking down.princeton economist Alan Krueger studied admissions to one top Ph.D.program.High scores on the GRE helpd explain who got in;degrees of prestigious universities didn’t.
So,parents,lighten up.the stakes have been vastly exaggerated.up to a point,we can rationalize our pushiness.America is a competitive society;our kids need to adjust to that.but too much pushiness can be destructive.the very ambition we impose on our children may get some into Harvard but may also set them up for disappointment.one study found that,other things being equal,graduates of highly selective schools experienced more job dissatisfaction.They may have been so conditioned to deing on top that anything less disappoints.