2015年考研英语二阅读 Text 2 原文翻译及答案解析

For years, studies have found that first-generation college students – those who do not have a parent with a college degree – lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created “a paradox” in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has “continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close” an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.

多年来，研究发现，第一代大学生——那些父母没有大学学位的学生——在一系列教育成就因素上落后于其他学生。他们的成绩较低，辍学率较高。但由于这类学生如果成功接受高等教育，最有可能实现经济提升，因此大学数十年来一直努力招收更多这样的学生。这造成了“一个悖论”，即招收第一代大学生，但随后目睹他们中的许多人失败，意味着高等教育“持续再生产和扩大，而不是缩小”基于社会阶层的成就差距，据即将发表在《心理科学》期刊上的一篇论文令人沮丧的开头所述。

But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students.

但这篇文章实际上相当乐观，因为它概述了一个潜在的问题解决方案，建议一种方法（涉及一个一小时、几乎零成本的项目）可以缩小63%的成就差距（以成绩等因素衡量），在第一代大学生和其他学生之间。

The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree. Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree.

这篇论文的作者来自不同大学，他们的发现基于一项研究，该研究涉及一所未具名私立大学的147名学生（完成了项目）。第一代被定义为父母没有四年制大学学位。大多数第一代大学生（59.1%）是佩尔助学金的获得者，这是一种针对有经济需要的本科生的联邦助学金，而对于至少有一名父母拥有四年学位的学生，这一比例仅为8.6%。

Their thesis – that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact – was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap.

他们的论点——即相对适度的干预可能产生巨大影响——是基于这样一种观点：第一代大学生最缺乏的可能不是潜力，而是关于如何应对大多数大学生面临的问题的实践知识。他们引用多位作者过去的研究，表明这是必须缩小的差距，以弥合成就差距。

Many first-generation students “struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the 'rules of the game,' and take advantage of college resources,” they write. And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don't talk about the class advantages and disadvantages of different groups of students. “Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students' educational experiences, many first-generation students lack insight about why they are struggling and do not understand how students 'like them' can improve.”

许多第一代大学生“在适应高等教育的中产阶级文化、学习‘游戏规则’和利用大学资源方面挣扎”，他们写道。当大学不谈论不同学生群体的阶层优势和劣势时，这就成为一个更大的问题。“因为美国大学很少承认社会阶层如何影响学生的教育经历，许多第一代大学生缺乏对他们为何挣扎的洞察力，并且不理解‘像他们一样’的学生如何能够改进。”