大学英语课件（全新版）Our Crazy College Crossroads.docxVIP

Our Crazy College Crossroads学历不能定义你的人生Over recent days the notices have gone out, an annual ritual of dashed hopes.最近几天，大学录取通知纷纷发出，每年都有希望破灭的人要面对这种局面。Brown University offered admission to the lowest fraction ever of the applicants it received: fewer than one in 10. The arithmetic was even more brutal at Stanford, Columbia, Yale. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a record number of students vying for its next freshman class — 31,321 — and accepted about one in six who applied from outside the state. Notre Dame took about one in five of all comers.布朗大学(Brown University)给申请者发放的录取通知达到了历史最低点：不到10%。斯坦福大学(Stanford)、哥伦比亚大学(Columbia)和耶鲁大学(Yale)的比例更低。申请就读北卡罗莱纳大学教堂山分校(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)的学生达到历史新高——共计31321人，而且它只接受了州外申请人数的六分之一左右。美国圣母大学(University of Notre Dame)接受了大约五分之一的申请者。And right now many young men and women who didn’t get in where they fervently longed to are worrying that it’s some grim harbinger of their future, some sweeping judgment of their worth.目前，许多未能如愿进入日思夜想的大学的年轻人担心这意味着他们前景堪忧，而且也担心这是对他们自身价值的总体判断。This is for them. And it’s intended less as a balm for the rejected than as a reality check for a society gone nuts over the whole overheated process.这篇文章就是为他们而写的。与其说它是被拒绝后的慰藉，不如说它只是披露了社会现实——这个社会过分关注大学录取的过程，已经失去了理智。If you were shut out of an elite school, that doesn’t mean you’re less gifted than all of the students who were welcomed there. It may mean only that you lacked the patronage that some of them had, or that you played the game less single-mindedly, taking fewer SAT courses and failing to massage your biography with the same zeal.如果某所精英学校把你拒之门外，这并不意味着你的才能比那些受到录取的学生差。这个事实或许只说明，你没有得到某些人所拥有的那种支持，或者你对待这件事情没有那么专注——你上的SAT课程比较少，而且也没有以同样的热忱来润色你的个人简介。A friend of mine in Africa told me recently about a center for orphans there that a rich American couple financed in part to give their own teenage children an exotic charity to visit occasionally and mine for college-application essays: admissions bait. That’s the degree of cunning th