27. (20170924) High school graduates usually have two months' break before they go to college or university. The high school now requires all the graduates to do one of the following to take full advantage of this break.

— Students need to attend classes to complete university-level courses that have direct connection to their majors of study.

— Students need to join a team led by their teacher to visit museums or historical sites and write a paper about it.

Which one do you think is more beneficial for students? Why?

头脑风暴

高中生毕业后，在上大学前通常有两个月的假期。你认为哪项活动对学生更有好处？

——学习自己专业相关大学难度的课程。

——参加老师领导的团队，参观博物馆或者历史遗迹，并写一篇论文。

我们来分析这两种选择的优势。

学习课程：

可以尽快找到适合自己的学习节奏和方法。

可以提前进入学习状态，衔接更好，避免两个月后对自己高中学过的内容感到生疏。

可以提前感受，并确定自己是不是真正适合学这个学科（高中和大学难度差异很大）。

参观写论文（paper）：

锻炼写作能力，为大学很繁重的写作压力做准备。

提升人文素养，在大学更容易结识有知识的朋友。

拓展知识面，选专业的时候多一些选择。

范文思路

论点：学习课程。

理由一：可以尽快找到适合自己的学习节奏和方法。

理由二：确定自己是不是真正适合学这个学科（高中和大学难度差异很大）。

理由三：在高中的时候已经写过很多论文（paper），并不是需要继续锻炼的能力。

范文文本

As a prospective student who is about to embark on a new journey to the US in a few months，I am a member of a large crowd that has yet decided on what activities to participate in during our two-month break before we go to college. Some of the traditional options include summer school，obtaining our driver's license and traveling around the world, but we believe that there must be something even more meaningful. Between the two options provided above, personally, I choose the former, taking a college-level course in my own major.

First of all, it is universally acknowledged that college life, especially its academic aspect, poses a bigger challenge than does high school life. Therefore, it is a key to academic success that we discover a learning method or rhythm most suitable to us as early as possible. In high school, we have easy access to a lot of resources, such as the help of our parents and the supervision of our teachers, which takes a large part of our academic stress away. In contrast, in college, this aspect will not be the same as our parents are no longer capable of helping us and our professors will not push us to meet the deadlines of our assignments. As a result, we need to make more efforts to be a more independent learner in order to qualify as an undergraduate student. In fact, I consider the best way of achieving such to be gaining first-hand experience in completing a course similar to the courses we will have to take before we go to college.

Second of all, by taking a college-level course in our own field of study, we will be able to familiarize ourselves with the difficulty of such courses, so as to determine whether we are truly suitable for this major. If someone who has gone to college were to be asked, most of them would say that college-level courses greatly exceeds its high school counter parts in terms of difficulty. Without such knowledge, one is likely to hold the false belief that solely based on their performance in high school, they will be able to handle the college courses in their intended field of study. For example, one of my classmates passed all his high school chemistry courses and decided that he would go on to study chemistry in college. However, in his freshman year, he failed two of the three introductory courses in chemistry and was forced to change his major. It turned out that he was able to do well in high school due to his excellent memorization, but college-level chemistry requires strong logical thinking, which he does not possess.

Last but not least, I believed that compared with visiting museums and writing papers, taking a course is a superior choice. The reason for my preference lies in the fact that many high school courses, such as history, sociology and economy, require students to complete projects which include visiting museums and historical sites before writing essays and papers on a regular basis, which has prepared them more than well enough for college. This renders the activity of visiting one more museum and writing one more paper quite moot because it does not foster any new skill, and thus fails to achieve its objective of “college-readiness”.

In a nutshell, I do deem taking a college level course in one's own major a superior way of preparing a student for college.

语料积累

pose a bigger challenge 带来更大的挑战

meet the deadlines 在截止日期之前完成

qualify as 有资格称为

undergraduate student 大学（本科）学生

familiarize ourselves with 使我们熟悉

hold a false belief 持有错误的观点

memorization 记忆，记忆力