2023年上半年高中英语学科知识与教学能力真题

Passage 1

    Humanities professors have come up with a seemingly foolproof defense against those who trash degrees in, say, English literature or philosophy as wasted tuition dollars, one-way tickets to unemployment. Oh no, we say – the humanities prepare students to succeed in the working world just as well as all those alleged practical majors, maybe even better.

    We offer tools of thought. We teach our students to understand and analyze complex ideas. We help them develop powers of expression, written and verbal. The lengthy essays we assign enhance their capacity to do independent work. At our best, we teach them how to reason—and reasoning undergirds (形成…的基础) every successful professional project. In the short term, such a defense may seem effective. But it is dead wrong.

    The humanities are not about success. They're about questioning success and every important social value. Socrates taught us this, and we shouldn't forget it. Sure, someone who studies literature or philosophy is learning to think clearly and write well. But those skills are means to an end. That end as Plato said is learning how to live one's life. “This discussion is not about questions, but about the way one should live.”

    That’s what’s at the heart of the humanities—informed, thoughtful dialogue about the way we ought to conduct life. This dialogue honors no pieties (虔诚): All positions are debatable; all values are up for discussion. Socrates, who probably concentrates the spirit of the humanities better than anyone, spent his time rambling around Athens asking people if they thought they were living virtuous lives. He believed that his city was getting proud and lazy, like an overfed thoroughbred (纯种的) horse, and that it needed him, the stinging gadfly, to wake it up. The Athenians had to ask themselves if the lives they were leading really were good. Socrates didn’t help them work their way to success; he helped them work their way to insight and virtue.

    Now, Americans are in love with success-success for their children in particular. As a parent of sons in their 20s, I understand this and sympathize with it. But our job as humanists isn't to second whatever values happen to be in place in society. We' re here to question those values and maybe offer alternatives.

    We commonly think in binaries. Vanilla is the opposite of chocolate. The opposite of success—often defined today as high-status work and a big paycheck—is failure. But the great books tell us that this is not necessarily true.

    The humanities are not against conventional success; far from it. Many of our students go on to distinguished careers in law and business. But I like to think they do so with a fuller social and self-awareness than most people. For they have approached success as a matter of debate, not as an idol of worship. They have considered the options. They have called “success” into question and, after due consideration, they have decided to pursue it. I have to imagine that such people are far better employees than those who have moved lockstep (因循守旧的做法) into their occupations. I also believe that self-aware, questioning people tend to be far more successful in the long run.

    What makes humanities students different isn't their power of expression, their capacity to frame an argument or their ability to do independent work. Yes, these are valuable qualities, and we humanities teachers try to cultivate them. But true humanities students are exceptional because they have been, and are, engaged in the activity that Plato commends[1]seeking to understand themselves and how they ought to lead their lives.

    If some of our current defenders have their way (随⼼所欲，得逞), the humanities will survive, but in name only.The humanities will become synonymous with unreflective training for corporate success.

    What would Socrates think?

请阅读 Passage 2，完成第 26 ～ 30 ⼩题。

Passage 2

    We all ask each other a lot of questions. But we should all ask one question a lot more often: “What are you reading?” It’s a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives.

    Here’s one example: I met, at a bookstore, a woman who told me that she had fallen sadly out of touch with her beloved grandson. She lived in Florida. He and his parents lived elsewhere. She would call him and ask him about school or about his day. He would respond in one-word answers: Fine. Nothing. Nope.

    And then one day, she asked him what he was reading. He had just started “The Hunger Games,” a series of dystopian young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins. The grandmother decided to read the first volume so that she could talk about it with her grandson the next time they chatted on the phone. She didn’t know what to expect, but she found herself hooked from the first pages.

    The book helped this grandmother cut through the superficialities of phone chat and engage her grandson on the most important questions that humans face about survival and destruction and loyalty and betrayal and good and evil, and about politics as well. Now her grandson couldn’t wait to talk to her when she called—to tell her where he was, to find out where she was and to speculate about what would happen next.

    Other than belonging to the same family, they had never had much in common. Now they did. The conduit was reading. We need to read and to be readers now more than ever.

We overschedule our days and complain constantly about being too busy. We shop endlessly for stuff we don’t need and then feel oppressed by the clutter that surrounds us. We rarely sleep well or enough. We compare our bodies to the artificial ones we see in magazines and our lives to the exaggerated ones we see on television. We watch cooking shows and then eat fast food. We worry ourselves sick and join gyms we don’t visit. We keep up with hundreds of acquaintances but rarely see our best friends. We bombard ourselves with video clips and emails and instant messages. We even interrupt our interruptions.

    And at the heart of it, for so many, is fear - fear that we are missing out on something. Wherever we are. Someone somewhere is doing or seeing or eating or listening to something better. Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can’t interrupt books; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them. They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness. They speak to us, thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention.

And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s. You can rant against a book, scribble in the margin or even chuck it out the window. Still, you won’t change the words on the page.

    The technology of a book is genius: The order of the words is fixed, whether on the page or on the screen, but the speed at which you read them is entirely up to you. Sure, this allows you to skip ahead and jump around. But it also allows you to slow down, savor and ponder.

    At the trial in which he would be sentenced to death, Socrates said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life. By comparing what you’ve done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone. It is a solitary activity that connects you to others.