【分析解答题】

on a cold and rainy day last February,BruceAlberts wore a grim expression as he stepped up to the microphones to make his statement at the National PressClub in Washington,

D、
C、1. {{U}}The final results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) had just been released, andAmerica’s high school seniors had placed near the back of the pack.{{/U}} "There is no excuse for this, "PresidentBillClinton had already chide
D、" These results are entirely unacceptable, "admonished the secretary of education. The head of the NationalEducationAssociation declared U. S. schools to be in a state of crisis.And nowAlberts, president of the NationalAcademy of Sciences, said that he, too, saw in this report "all the elements of an education tragedy". "Americans have always risen to a crisis," he adde
D、"We see clearly that the future is threatene
D、{{U}}2. Let us act now to heed this important wake-up call."And so, with editorial writers and educators across the country, obligingly sounding the alarm,American education lurched yet again into crisis mode.{{/U}} It is a cyclical ritual, repeated in every decade since the 1940s, observes Gregory William of the University of Toledo. {{U}}3. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 set off an orgy of anxiety culminating inAdmiral Hyman Rickover’s 1963 bookAmericanEducation,
A、National Failure, in which he famously predicted that "the Russians will bury us" thanks to their more rigorous science and math courses. {{/U}}4.{{U}}Beginning with the 1983 publication of
A、Nation at Risk, one blue-ribbon panel after another warned that massive educational failure had ceded the United State’s technological lead to Japan and other competitors--a conclusion that proved premature. {{U}}5.Although the particulars vary from one education crisis to the next, the episodes are connected by common threads.Each has surged into public discourse on an unrelenting torrent of angst flowing from the educational research profession, William says.{{/U}}Combing through the education literature of the past 30 years, he recently turned up more than 4, 000 articles and books in which scholars declared some sort of crisis in the schools--but rarely bothered to spell out what cataclysm was imminent.Each episode has also eaten away at public confidence in schools, which fell 38 percent from 1973 to 1996, according to surveys by the National Opinion ResearchCenter.{{/U}}