II. Speed Reading. (10 points, 1 point for each)
Directions: Skim or scan the following passages. Decide on the best answers and then write
the corresponding letters on your Answer Sheet.
Passage Five
Questions 21-25 are based on the following passage.
You’re busy filling out the application form for a position you really need. Let’s assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn’t it tempting to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University? More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers, for personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university.
Registrars at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week. Personnel officers do check upon degrees listed on application forms, then. If it turns out that an applicant is lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them “impostors (骗子)”; another refers to them as “special cases”. One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by “no such people”. To avoid outright lies, some job-seekers claim that they “attended” or “were associated with” a college or university, After carefully checking, a personnel officer may discover that “attending” means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that “being associated with” a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century——that’s when they began keeping records, anyhow. If you don’t want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma.
One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of nonexistent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from “Smoot State University”. The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the “University of Purdue”. As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana is properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.
21. The main idea of this passage is that ______.
A. employers are checking more closely on applicants now
B. lying about college degrees has become a widespread problem
C. college degrees can now be purchased easily
D. employers are no longer interested in college degrees
22. According to the passage, “special cases” refer to cases that ______.
A. students attended a school only part-time
B. students never attended a school they listed on their application forms
C. students purchased false degrees from commercial firms
D. students attended a famous school
23. From the sentence “job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend” (Para.2), we can infer that _____.
A. the job-seeker is a student in that college
B. the job-seeker’s brother is a student in that college
C. neither the two are students in that college
D. the job-seeker lives in that college
24. We can infer from the passage that ______.
A. performance is a better judge of ability than a college degree
B. experience is the best teacher
C. past work histories influence personnel officers more than degrees do
D. a degree from a famous school enables an applicant to gain advantage over others in job competition
25. The underlined word “phony” (Para.2) means ______.
A. thorough
B. false
C. ultimate
D. decisive
