2013.12
The College Essay: Why Those 500 Words Drive Us Crazy
A) Meg is a lawyer-mom in suburban Washington, D.C., where lawyer-moms are thick on the ground. Her son Doug is one of several hundred thousand high-school seniors who had a painful fall. The deadline for applying to his favorite college was Nov. 1,and by early October he had yet to fill out the application. More to the point, he had yet to settle on a subject for the personal essay accompanying the application. According to college folklore, a well-turned essay has the power to seduce (诱惑) an admissions committee. “He wanted to do one thing at a time,” Meg says, explaining her son?s delay. “But really, my son is a huge procrastinator (拖延者). The essay is the hardest thing to do, so he?s put it off the longest.” Friends and other veterans of the process have warned Meg that the back and forth between editing parent and writing student can be traumatic (痛苦的).
B) Back in the good old days—say, two years ago, when the last of my children suffered the ordeal (折磨)—a high-school student applying to college could procrastinate all the way to New Year?s Day of their senior year, assuming they could withstand the parental pestering (烦扰).But things change fast in the nail-biting world of college admissions.The recent trend toward early decision and early action among selective colleges and universities has pushed the traditional deadline of January up to Nov. 1 or early December for many students.
C) If the time for heel-dragging has been shortened, the true source of the anxiety and panic remains what it has always been. And it?s not the application itself. A college application is a relatively straightforward questionnaire asking for the basics: name, address, family history employment history. It would all be innocent enough—20 minutes of busy work—except it comes attached to a personal essay.
D) “There are good reasons it causes such anxiety,” says Lisa Sohmer, director of college counseling at the Garden School in Jackson Heights, N.Y. “It?s not just the actual writing. By noweverything else is already set. Your course load is set, your grades are set, your test scores are set. But the essay is something you can still control, and it?s open-ended. So the temptation is to write and rewrite and rewrite.” Or stall and stall and stall.
E) The application essay, along with its mythical importance, is a recent invention. In the 1930s,when only one in 10 Americans had a degree from a four-year college, an admissionscommittee was content to ask for a sample of applicants? school papers to assess their writing ability. By the 1950s, most schools required a brief personal statement of why the student had chosen to apply to one school over another.
F) Today nearly 70 percent of graduating seniors go off to college, including two-year and four-year institutions. Even apart from the increased competition, the kids enter a process that has been utterly transformed from the one baby boomers knew. Nearly all application materials are submitted online, and the Common Application provides a one-size-fits form accepted by more than 400 schools, including the nation?s most selective.
G) Those schools usually require essays of their own, but the longest essay, 500 words maximum, is generally attached to the Common Application. Students choose one of six questions. Applicants are asked to describe an ethical dilemma they?ve faced and its impact on them, or discuss a public issue of special concern to them, or tell of a fictional character or creative work that has profoundly influenced them. Another question invites them to write about the
importance (to them, again) of diversity―a word that has assumed magic power in American higher education. The most popular option: write on a topic of your choice.
H) “Boys in particular look at the other questions and say, ?Oh, that?s too much work,?” says John Boshoven, a counselor in the Ann Arbor, Mich., public schools. “They think if they do a topic of their choice, “I?ll just go get that history paper I did last year on the Roman Empire and turn it into a first-person application essay!? And they end up producing something utterly ridiculous.”
I) Talking to admissions professionals like Boshoven, you realize that the list of “don?ts” in essay writing is much longer than the “dos.”“No book reports, no history papers, no character studies,”says Sohmer.
J) “It drives you crazy, how easily kids slip into clichés(老生常谈),”says Boshoven. “They don?t realize how typical their experiences arc. ?I scored the winning goal in soccer against our arch-rival.??My grandfather served in World War II, and I hope to be just like him someday.? That may mean a lot to that particular kid. But in the world of the application essay, it?s nothing. You?ll lose the reader in the first paragraph.”
K) “The greatest strength you bring to this essay,” says the College Board?s how-to book, “is 17 years or so of familiarity with the topic: YOU. The form and style are very familiar, and best of all, you are the world-class expert on the subject of YOU ... It has been the subject of your close scrutiny every morning since you were tall enough to see into the bathroom mirror.” Thekey word in the Common Application prompts is “you.”
L) The college admission essay contains the grandest American themes―status anxiety, parental piety (孝顺), intellectual standards—and so it is only a matter of time before it becomes infected by the country?s culture of excessive concern with self-esteem. Even if the question isostensibly (表面上) about something outside the self (describe a fictional character or solve a problem of geopolitics), the essay invariably returns to the favorite topic: what is its impact on YOU?
M)“For all the anxiety the essay causes,” says Bill McClintick of Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, “it?s a very small piece of the puzzle. I was in college admissions for 10 years. I saw kids and parents beat themselves up over this. And at the vast majority of places, it is simply not a big variable in the college?s decision-making process.”
N) Many admissions officers say they spend less than a couple of minutes on each application, including the essay. According to a recent survey of admissions officers, only one in four private colleges say the essay is of “considerable importance” in judging an application. Among public colleges and universities, the number drops to roughly one in 10. By contrast, 86 percent place “considerable importance” on an applicant?s grades, 70 percent on “strength of curriculum.”
O) Still, at the most selective schools, where thousands of candidates may submit identically high grades and test scores, a marginal item like the essay may serve as a tie-breaker between two equally qualified candidates. The thought is certainly enough to keep the pot boiling under parents like Meg, the lawyer-mom, as she tries to help her son choose an essay topic. For a moment the other day, she thought she might have hit on a good one. “His father?s from France,” she says. “I said maybe you could write about that, as something that makes you different. You know: half French, half American. I said, ?You could write about your identity
issues.? He said, ?I don?t have any identity issues!? And he?s right. He?s a well-adjusted, normal kid. But that doesn?t make for a good essay, does it?” 注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
46. Today many universities require their applicants to write an essay of up to five hundred words.
47. One recent change in college admissions is that selective colleges and universities have movedthe traditional deadline to earlier dates.
48. Applicants and their parents are said to believe that the personal essay can sway the admissions committee.
49. Applicants are usually better off if they can write an essay that distinguishes them from the rest.
50. Not only is the competition getting more intense, the application process today is also totally different from what baby boomers knew.
51. In writing about their own experiences many applicants slip into clichés, thus failing to engage the reader.
52. According to a recent survey, most public colleges and universities consider an applicant?s grades highly important.
53. Although the application essay causes lots of anxiety, it does not play so important a role in the college?sdecision-making process.
54. The question you aresupposed to write about may seem outside the self, but the theme of the essay should center around its impact on you.
55. In the old days, applicants only had to submit a sample of their school papers to show their writing ability.
46~50 GBAOF 51~55 JNMLE The Uses of Difficulty
The brain likes a challenge—and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity.
A) Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won?t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he?s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: “ease of use”. When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.
B) It?s an odd thought. Why would anyone make their work more difficult than it already is? Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends. In 1966, soon after the Beatles had finished work on “Rubber Soul”, Paul McCartney looked into the possibility of going to America to record their next album. The equipment in American studios was more advanced than anything in Britain, which had led the Beatles? great rivals, the Rolling Stones, to make their latest album, “Aftermath”, in Los Angeles. McCartney found that EMI’s (百代唱片) contractual clauses made it prohibitively expensive to follow suit, and the Beatles had to make do with the
primitive technology of Abbey Road.
C) Lucky for us. Over the next two years they made their most groundbreaking work, turning the recording studio into a magical instrument of its own. Precisely because they were working with old-fashioned machines, George Martin and his team of engineers were forced to apply every ounce of their creativity to solve the problems posed to them by Lennon and McCartney. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “A Day in the Life” featured revolutionary sound effects that dazzled and mystified Martin?s American counterparts.
D) Sometimes it?s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. For more than two decades, starting in the 1960s, the poet Ted Hughes sat on the judging panel of an annual poetry competition for British schoolchildren. During the 1980s he noticed an increasing number of long poems among the submissions, with some running to 70 or 80 pages. These poems were verbally inventive and fluent, but also “strangely boring”. After making inquiries Hughes discovered that they were being composed on computers, then just finding their way into British homes.
E) You might have thought any tool which enables a writer to get words on to the page would be an advantage. But there may be a cost to such facility. In an interview with the Paris Review Hughes speculated that when a person puts pen to paper, “you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it, when you couldn?t write at all”. As the brain attempts to force the unsteady hand to do its bidding, the tension between the two results in a more compressed, psychologically denser expression. Remove that resistance and you are more likely to produce a 70-page ramble (不着边际的长篇大论).
F) Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level.
G) As a poet, Ted Hughes had an acute sensitivity to the way in which constraints on self-expression, like the disciplines of metre and rhyme (韵律), spur creative thought. What applies to poets and musicians also applies to our daily lives. We tend to equate（等同于）happiness with freedom, but, as the psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips has observed, without obstacles to our desires it’s harder to know what we want, or where we’re heading. He tells the story of a patient, a first-time mother who complained that her young son was always clinging to her, wrapping himself around her legs wherever she went. She never had a moment to herself, she said, because her son was “always in the way”. When Phillips asked her where she would go if he wasn?t in the way, she replied cheerfully, “Oh, I wouldn?t know where I was!”
H) Take another common obstacle: lack of money. People often assume that more money will make them happier. But economists who study the relationship between money and happiness have consistently found that, above a certain income, the two do not reliably correlate. Despite the ease with which the rich can acquire
almost anything they desire, they are just as likely to be unhappy as the middle classes. In this regard at least, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.
I) Indeed, ease of acquisition is the problem. The novelist Edward St Aubyn has a narrator remark of the very rich that, “not having to consider affordability, their desires rambled on like unstoppable bores, relentless (持续不断的) and whimsical（反复无常的）at the same time.” When Boston College, a private research university, wanted a better feel for its potential donors, it asked the psychologist Robert Kenny to investigate the mindset of the super-rich. He surveyed 165 households, most of which had a net worth of $25m or more. He found that many of his subjects were confused by the infinite options their money presented them with. They found it hard to know what to want, creating a kind of existential bafflement. One of them put it like this: “You know, Bob, you can just buy so much stuff, and when you get to the point where you can just buy so much stuff, now what are you going to do?”
J) The internet makes information billionaires out of all of us, and the architects of our online experiences are catching on to the need to make things creatively difficult. Twitter?s huge success is rooted in the simple but profound insight that in a medium with infinite space for self-expression, the most interesting thing we can do is restrict ourselves to 140 characters. The music service This Is My Jam helps people navigate the tens of millions of tracks now available instantly via Spotify and iTunes. Users pick their favourite song of the week to share with others. They only get to choose one. The service was only launched this year, but by the end of September 650,000 jams had been chosen. Its co-founder Matt Ogle explains its raison d’être (存在的理由) like this: “In an age of endless choice, we were missing a way to say: ?This. This is the one you should listen to?.”
K) Today?s world offers more opportunity than ever to follow the advice of the Walker Brothers and make it easy on ourselves. Compared with a hundred years ago, our lives are less tightly bound by social norms and physical constraints. Technology has cut out much of life?s donkeywork, and we have more freedoms than ever: we can wear what we like and communicate with hundreds of friends at once at the click of a mouse. Obstacles are everywhere disappearing. Few of us wish to turn the clock back, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves how useful the right obstacles can be. Sometimes, the best route to fulfilment is the path of more resistance.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
46. The rigorous requirements placed on the writing of poetry stimulate the poet?s creativity.
47. With creativity, even old-fashioned instruments may produce spectacular sound effects.
48. More money does not necessarily bring greater happiness.
49. It IS a false assumption that lessons should be made easier to learn.
50. Obstacles deliberately placed in the creation of music contribute to its success.
51. Those who enjoy total freedom may not find themselves happy.
52. Ted Hughes discovered many long poems submitted for poetry competition were composed oncomputers.