北京师范大学研究生读译课程资料

Enrichment English

would otherwise be: __________________________________ 2. In paragraph 3 find the equivalent of the word

disappointment: ________________________________ 3. In paragraph 4 find the word which means a difficult and unpleasant experience or situation:

______________________

4. In paragraph 4 find the word which means more or less the same as unfavorable: ________________________________ 5. In paragraph 5 find the word which means

not completely: ______________________________ 6. In paragraph 9 find a word that means

a grand and impressive event or performance: ___________________________ 7. In paragraph 9 find a word that means

respected and admired by people: _____________________________________

III. Understanding the Discourse

A. Questions and answers

Read the article carefully and answer the following questions: 1. This is a myth, but ...... (paragraph. 1) What is this?

2. Their ordeal is over. (para. 4) Whose ordeal?

3. ……unlike most social problems, this one could actually be fixed. (para. 8) What could actually be fixed?

4. If a dozen or more top schools denounced and dropped the practice …… (para. 8) What practice is it?

5. All this expediency comes at a growing moral cost. (para. 7) What does this expediency refer to?

6. This is hypocritical and indifferent to any larger social good. (para. 9) What does ?this‘ refer to ?

7. They have subordinated students‘ interests to their own. (para. 9) Who have?

8. Get used to it; this is the way the world works. (para. 9) The world works in what kind of way?

B. Recognizing sources

When an article combines information from many sources, it is necessary to determine the source of each individual piece of information. The Following is a list of statements made in the article. Indicate if each one has been made by the author or one of his sources. Example:

James Fallows The percentage of colleges resorting to early admission is

increasing like a ―racket‖.

Enrichment English

1. __________ Early admission has adverse effects on high school students.

2. __________ Early admission improves colleges‘ percentage of students

accepted who actually attend.

3. __________ Early admission is a social problem which could be fixed. 4. __________ Early admission could worsen the academic letdown.

5. __________ Nowadays, the majority of students at Penn are admitted through

early decision.

6. __________ Colleges‘ early-admissions policies can be described as

anti-social.

C.. Diagram of text organization

Complete the following tree diagram with the information you learn from your reading.

As for College admissions, discussed in the text we have learned that there are two types of admissions: College admissions Regular admission It is regarded as ________ Colleges have made this admission somewhat ________________________ drawback1_______ drawback2_______ drawback3 _______ Consequence of such practice Admission rate: drawback 4_______ Misleading: Reasons for colleges using early admissions The author concludes that

Enrichment English

Unit 3 A Culture of Plagiarism?

M.G. Piety

1. It's often said that plagiarism is subjective— that what is plagiarism to one person is not necessarily plagiarism to another. This seems confused. Philosophers distinguish between what they identify as ontological and epistemological issues. Ontology (本体论) is concerned with what is and epistemology (认识论) is concerned with what we know. There is nearly always a fact about whether a particular passage of text was plagiarized. Regardless of whether the plagiarism was conscious or unconscious, there is a fact about whether it has been taken from another author. The difficulty is that our judgments on that score are not always correct. Plagiarism can thus appear subjective in that different people will identify it differently. That does not mean, however, that it is subjective. It is context sensitive at best, which means it is unnecessary, in certain contexts, to cite the source of an idea because the audience is familiar with the source. The absence of a citation, in such an instance would not therefore encourage a reader to take the author as the origin of the idea.

2. Plagiarism requires no nefarious motivation. To plagiarize is simply %use without due credit the ideas, expressions, or productions of (another),\and this is remarkably easy to do unintentionally. Ignorance of the author, however is no excuse. We've all done it, at some point or other, without meaning to; just as we've all lost our tempers or exercised poor judgment. We will never be able to eliminate plagiarism entirely, either our own or others. However, that does not mean we should be unconcerned with authorial integrity.

Why Students Plagiarize

3. Citing sources would seem precisely the practice we need in this \Age.\appreciate that we are all grappling with the same sorts of questions and that there is even accumulated human wisdom which can help us navigate the rough waters of our own existence. Citing sources can even begin to look like a panacea for the spiritual isolation and alienation of postmodern man. So why does it appear it is becoming increasingly rare? Here are some possible reasons I have come up with after approximately eight years of teaching: ignorance, fear and moral bankruptcy.

Ignorance

4. It is often difficult for students to distinguish the myriad of views they are bombarded with in the environment of the university from ones they have come to on their own. This, in any case, appears to have been the situation of the young Max Weber. When an older cousin suggested that some of Weber's views were not his own,

Enrichment English

Weber responded that, as far as he knew, he had not taken any of his views from books, but added somewhat defensively that \everything stemmed from books.\

5. The young Helen Keller faced similar, graver charges when accused of plagiarizing an entire story, \exposed to the latter story but admitted in her biography that much of her earliest writing included material taken from other authors.

6. \as all young and inexperienced persons learn, by assimilation and imitation, to put ideas into words. Everything I found in books that pleased me I retained in my memory, consciously or unconsciously, and adapted it.

7. Students are often rewarded in grade school, and some even in high school, for such \and imitation.\Some understand that they can't appropriate text verbatim but assume this problem is addressed if they simply rephrase the bits they borrow.

8. Ignorance is not the most serious cause of plagiarism. It is perhaps the most problematic in that when text is paraphrased out of ignorance, the original is often impossible to find. What makes ignorance fairly innocuous is that no matter how widespread, it is also fairly easily corrected. Instructors can briefly explain what constitutes plagiarism in their syllabi, discuss the topic early in the semester and distribute examples of plagiarism. If every instructor did this in every course, ignorance would soon be eliminated.

Fear

9. Knowledge will not eliminate plagiarism, however, because there is a more serious cause — fear. This fear takes several forms:

? Fear of doing poorly because of a poor command of English. ? Fear of disappointing parents or teachers. ? Fear of being exposed to peers as less smart. ? Fear of simply not being smart enough. ? Fear of reducing a GPA.

One can get the impression that foreign students are particularly prone to plagiarism due to poor English skills. They may be tempted to \material from native speakers. I have had a least one of my many foreign students plagiarize for this reason and I cannot rule out that others have done it for the same reason. The good news is that the gap between the command of English exhibited by foreign students and by American students is narrowing. The bad news is that it is narrowing in the wrong direction. Americans are increasingly tempted to plagiarize out of fear that their language skills are inadequate to the assignment.

10. Academics sometimes suggest that we should be \of foreign students, because they may come from cultures where plagiarism is viewed less seriously than in ours. I am suspicious that there is any culture that views plagiarism in general as morally acceptable. Different cultures do appear, however, to take a more or less lenient view of it. Yet this problem is easily addressed. We can address it