język angielski - przykładowe zadania - poziom dwujęzyczny

Gravely, George set about the task of teaching me. He was undeterred by the fact that there were no school-books available on the island; he ransacked his own library and appeared on the appointed day armed with a most unorthodox selection of tomes. He taught me the rudiments of geography from the maps in the back of an ancient copy of Pears Cyclopaedia, French from a fat dictionary called Le Petit Larousse and mathematics from memory. From my point of view, however, the most important thing was that we devoted some of our time to natural history and George meticulously and carefully taught me how to observe and how to note down observations in a diary. At once my enthusiastic but haphazard interest in nature became focused.

Every morning I would watch George stalking through the olive-trees. “Good morning. The disciple awaits the master agog with anticipation, I trust. If I remember rightly, we were involved in the herculean task of discovering how long it would take six men to build a wall if three of them took a week. I seem to recall that we spent almost as much time on this problem as the men spent on the wall. Ah well, let us gird our loins and do battle once again. Perhaps it’s the shape of the problem that worries you, eh? Let us see if we can make it more exciting. If it took two caterpillars a week to eat eight leaves, how long would four caterpillars take to eat the same number? Now, apply yourself to that.”

While I struggled with the apparently insoluble problem of the caterpillars’ appetite, George would be otherwise occupied. He was at that time engaged in learning some of the local peasant dances, for which he had a passion. So, while waiting for me to finish the sum, he would drift about in the gloom of the room, practising complicated dancing-steps, a habit that I found disconcerting, to say the least, and to which I shall always attribute my inability to do mathematics.

Let’s look more closely at some of the specific measures taken into account under the U.S. News formula. Take faculty resources. A school that primarily hires full-time professors with the highest degrees in their fields and pays them handsomely scores above a school that relies more on lower-paid, part-time professors. The thinking here seems plausible enough: the higher-paid professor is more likely to have an impressive curriculum vitae and be a good teacher, and a full-time professor has more time to teach and prepare for classes than a harried adjunct.  2  But in practice the things that make a professor well known in his field – published articles, groundbreaking research – must compete for his time and attention with teaching obligations.

How about schools that are rich? On the whole, such schools can spend more money on their students and score better in the “financial resources” category – which measures spending on things such as faculty salaries, libraries and other forms of academic support, and student counselling – than schools with tiny endowments. The catch is that a high level of per-student spending does not necessarily translate into, say, a high level of per-student learning.  3 

The fact that faculty resources and financial means don’t necessarily correlate with high levels of learning also undercuts the most important of the U.S. News measures: peer assessment. Peer assessment is purely subjective: university presidents, provosts, and admissions officers are simply asked to rate each school on a scale of 1 to 5.  4  In one sense, then, rankings have merely made explicit the perceptions of prestige and quality that existed among educators long before anyone tried to record them. But it turns out that university officials tend to base their assessment of “reputation” on an institution’s wealth in resources.

On the whole, rich, prestigious, research-oriented universities are assumed, rightly or wrongly, to provide a better education than other schools. Therefore, university administrators are devoting increasing amounts of time and money to improving the things that build prestige, whether or not those things improve the educational experience of the undergraduates the institution is meant to serve.