孟凡升剑桥雅思真题5-阅读Test3（附答案）
Reading Passage 1
十二月英语怎么读You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are bad on Reading Passage 1 below.
Early Childhood Education
New Zealand's National Party spokesman on education, Dr Lockwood Smith, recently visited the US and Britain. Here he reports on the findings of his trip and what they could mean for New Zealand's education policy
A
'Education To Be More' was published last August. It was the report of the New Zealand Government's Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group. The report argued for enhanced equity of access and better funding for childcare and early childhood education in
stitutions. Unquestionably, that's a real need; but since parents don't normally nd children to pre-schools until the age of three, are we missing out on the most important years of all?普通的英语
B
A 13-year study of early childhood development at Harvard University has shown that, by the age of three, most children have the potential to understand about 1000 words — most of the language they will u in ordinary conversation for the rest of their lives.
Furthermore, rearch has shown that while every child is born with a natural curiosity, it can be suppresd dramatically during the cond and third years of life. Rearchers claim that the human personality is formed during the first two years of life, and during the first three years children learn the basic skills they will u in all their later learning both at home and at school. Once over the age of three, children continue to expand on existing knowledge of the world.
C
It is generally acknowledged that young people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds tend to do less well in our education system. That's obrved not just in New Zealand, but also in Australia, Britain and America. In an attempt to overcome that educational under-achievement, a nationwide programme called 'Headstart' was launched in the United States in 1965. A lot of money was poured into it. It took children into pre-school institutions at the age of three and was suppod to help the children of poorer families succeed in school.
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Despite substantial funding, results have been disappointing. It is thought that there are two explanations for this. First, the programme began too late. Many children who entered it at the age of three were already behind their peers in language and measurable intelligence. Second, the parents were not involved. At the end of each day, 'Headstart' children returned to the same disadvantaged home environment.
D
As a result of the growing rearch evidence of the importance of the first three years of
a child's life and the disappointing results from 'Headstart', a pilot programme was launched in Missouri in the US that focud on parents as the child's first teachers. The 'Missouri' programme was predicated on rearch showing that working with the family, rather than bypassing the parents, is the most effective way of helping children get off to the best possible start in life. The four-year pilot study included 380 families who were about to have their first child and who reprented a cross-ction of socio-economic status, age and family configurations. They included single-parent and two-parent families, families in which both parents worked, and families with either the mother or father at home.
The programme involved trained parent — educators visiting the parents' home and working with the parent, or parents, and the child. Information on child development, and guidance on things to look for and expect as the child grows were provided, plus guidance in fostering the child's intellectual, language, social and motor-skill development. Periodic check-ups of the child's educational and nsory development (hearing and vision) were made to detect possible handicaps that interfere with growth an
d development. Medical problems were referred to professionals.
Parent-educators made personal visits to homes and monthly group meetings were held with other new parents to share experience and discuss topics of interest. Parent resource centres, located in school buildings, offered learning materials for families and facilitators for child care.
E
At the age of three, the children who had been involved in the 'Missouri' programme were evaluated alongside a cross-ction of children lected from the same range of socio-economic backgrounds and family situations, and also a random sample of children that age. The results were phenomenal. By the age of three, the children in the programme were significantly more advanced in language development than their peers, had made greater strides in problem solving and other intellectual skills, and were further along in social development. In fact, the average child on the programme was performing at the level of the top 15 to 20 per cent of their peers in such things as auditory comprehe六一活动方案
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nsion, verbal ability and language ability.
Most important of all, the traditional measures of 'risk', such as parents' age and education, or whether they were a single parent, bore little or no relationship to the measures of achievement and language development. Children in the programme performed equally well regardless of socio-economic disadvantages. Child abu was virtually eliminated. The one factor that was found to affect the child's development was family stress leading to a poor quality of parent-child interaction. That interaction was not necessarily bad in poorer families.
