2017 年 12 月大学英语四级考试真题（第 3 套）

Questions __26__ to __35__ are based on the following passage.

We all know there exists a great void (空白) in the public educational system when it comes to __26__ to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses. One educator named Dori Roberts decided to do something to change this system. Dori taught high school engineering for 11 years. She noticed there was a real void in quality STEM education at all __27__ of the public educational system. She said, "I started Engineering For Kids (EFK) after noticing a real lack of math, science and engineering programs to __28__ my own kids in"

She decided to start an afterschool program where children __29__ in STEM-based competitions. The club grew quickly and when it reached 180 members and the kids in the program won several state __30__ , she decided to devote all her time to cultivating and __31__ it. The global business EFK was born.

Dori began operating EFK out of her Virginia home, which she then expanded to __32__ recreation centers. Today, the EFK program __33__ over 144 branches in __32__ states within the United States and in 21 countries. Sales have doubled from $5 million in 2014 to $10 million in 2015, with 25 new branches planned for 2016. The EFK website states, "Our nation is not __34__ enough engineers. Our philosophy is to inspire kids at a young age to understand that engineering is a great __35__ ."

Aging happens to all of us, and is generally thought of as a natural part of life. It would seem silly to call such a thing a "disease."

On the other hand, scientists are increasingly learning that aging and biological age are two different things, and that the former is a key risk factor for conditions such as heart disease, cancer and many more. In that light, aging itself might be seen as something treatable, the way you would treat high blood pressure or a vitamin deficiency.

Biophysicist Alex Zhavoronkov believes that aging should be considered a disease. He said that describing aging as a disease creates incentives to develop treatments.

"It unties the hands of the pharmaceutical (制药的) industry so that they can begin treating the disease and not just the side effects," he said.

"Right now, people think of aging as natural and something you can't control," he said. "In academic circles, people take aging research as just an interest area where they can try to develop interventions. The medical community also takes aging for granted, and can do nothing about it except keep people within a certain health range."

But if aging were recognized as a disease, he said, "It would attract funding and change the way we do health care. What matters is understanding that aging is curable."

"It was always known that the body accumulates damage," he added. "The only way to cure aging is to find ways to repair that damage. I think of it as preventive medicine for age-related conditions."

Leonard Hayflick, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said the idea that aging can be cured implies the human lifespan can be increased, which some researchers suggest is possible. Hayflick is not among them.

"There're many people who recover from cancer, stroke, or heart disease. But they continue to age, because aging is separate from their disease," Hayflick said. "Even if those causes of death were eliminated, life expectancy would still not go much beyond 92 years."

Female applicants to postdoctoral positions in geosciences were nearly half as likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, compared with their male counterparts. Christopher Intagliata reports. As in many other fields, gender bias is widespread in the sciences. Men score higher starting salaries, have more mentoring (指导), and have better odds of being hired. Studies show they're also perceived as more competent than women in STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. And new research reveals that men are more likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, too. "Say, you know, this is the best student I've ever had," says Kuheli Dutt, a social scientist and diversity officer at Columbia University's Lamont campus. "Compare those excellent letters with a merely good letter: 'The candidate was productive, or intelligent, or a solid scientist or something that's clearly solid praise,' but nothing that singles out the candidate as exceptional or one of a kind." Dutt and her colleagues studied more than 1,200 letters of recommendation for postdoctoral positions in geoscience. They were all edited for gender and other identifying information, so Dutt and her team could assign them a score without knowing the gender of the student. They found that female applicants were only half as likely to get outstanding letters, compared with their male counterparts. That includes letters of recommendation from all over the world, and written by, yes, men and women. The findings are in the journal Nature Geoscience. Dutt says they were not able to evaluate the actual scientific qualifications of the applicants using the data in the files. But she says the results still suggest women in geoscience are at a potential disadvantage from the very beginning of their careers starting with those less than outstanding letters of recommendation. "We're not trying to assign blame or criticize anyone or call anyone conscious sexist. Rather, the point is to use the results of this study to open up meaningful dialogues on implicit gender bias, be it at a departmental level or an institutional level or even a discipline level." Which may lead to some recommendations for the letter writers themselves.