【2010.06.08 英国每日电讯】Chinese university exam question: why do cats chase mice if f

seal

Chinese university exam question: why do cats chase mice if fish are plentiful?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7811146/Chinese-university-exam-question-why-do-cats-chase-mice-if-fish-are-plentiful.html
By Peter Foster in Beijing

Published: 9:00PM BST 08 Jun 2010

China's university entrance exams for 2010 contain a diverse range of essay questions - from the one-word topics like "morning" or "participation" to the more direct question "Why chase mice when there are fish to eat?"
Tuesday is the day that every Chinese teenager dreads, when some 9 million students file into examination halls across the country to compete for a limited number of coveted university places.
The experience, according to an old Chinese saying, is like "an army of ten thousand horses trying cross a single log bridge", with the successful candidates having to find answers to questions that would make the average British A-Level student blanche.
Most feared of all are the abstruse essay questions, redolent of the one-word essay prompt recently dropped from the All Soul's entrance exam, that are worth up to 40 per cent of the final marks and intended to sort the wheat from the chaff.
This year's national question showed a cartoon of three cats sitting at a table eating fish while disparaging a fourth cat trying to catch a rat. "Why chase mice when there are fish to eat?" asked the paper, inviting students to respond in an 800-character essay.
The elliptical nature of such questions attracts great interest on the Chinese internet, where every year furious debates rage about the true meaning of the questions, with leading bloggers and writers posting their own efforts at answering them.
Other prompts this year included "Looking at the stars with your feet on the ground", a line from a poem written by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in 2007; "The world I live in" and "recovering childhood".
Observers looking for themes in this year's tests noticed that sustainability and the environment recurred in several of the questions set by provincial examining boards.
In Shanghai, the essay question was titled "Danish Fisherman", accompanied by a quotation from the Chinese philosopher-sage Mencius: "If fine nets do not enter the pools, there will be more fish and turtles than can be eaten."
The numbers of Chinese graduates has risen sharply in recent years – from 1.5m in 2002 to an estimated 6m this year – as the country seeks to improve skills and technological innovation in a bid to move up the manufacturing value chain.
However, even those lucky enough to win places in higher education have no guarantee of success, with some 2 million new graduates failing to find jobs last year in an investment-driven economy that is growing fast but failing to create significant numbers of new jobs.
Even those that do find employment often find the pay disappointing after years in which their families have often invested a large proportion of life savings in their education.
According to a government survey in the manufacturing heartland of Guangdong, the average salary of university graduates in the province was 1,699 yuan (£170) a month, which is less than many unqualified factory workers can expect to earn with overtime.

seal

seal

自己认领...

seal

翻译完毕
http://bbs.m4.cn/thread-248412-1-1.html