一 教育类
1. A nation should require all its students to study the same national
curriculum until they enter college rather than allow schools in different
parts of the nation to determine which academic courses to offer.”

2. While some leaders in government, sports, industry, and other areas
attribute their success to a well-developed sense of competition, a society
can better prepare its young people for leadership by instilling in them a
sense of cooperation.

3. In order to improve the quality of instruction at the college and
university level, all faculty should be required to spend time working
outside the academic world in professions relevant to the courses they
teach.

4. Universities should require every student to take a variety of courses
outside the student’s field of study because acquiring knowledge of
various academic disciplines is the best way to become truly educated.

5. Colleges and universities should offer more courses on popular music,
film, advertising, and television because contemporary culture has much
greater relevance for students than do arts and literature of the past.

6. It is primarily through formal education that a culture tries to
perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears.

7. Some educational systems emphasize the development of students’
capacity for reasoning and logical thinking, but students would benefit
more from an education that also taught them to explore their own emotions.

8. It is often asserted that the purpose of education is to free the mind
and the spirit. In reality, however, formal education tends to restrain our
minds and spirits rather than set them free.

9. How children are socialized today determines the destiny of society.
Unfortunately, we have not yet learned how to raise children who can help
bring about a better society.

10. Both parents and communities must be involved in the local schools.
Education is too important to leave solely to a group of professional
educators.

11. The purpose of education should be to provide students with a value
system, a standard, a set of ideas—not to prepare them for a specific job.

12. Society should identify those children who have special talents and
abilities and begin training them at an early age so that they can
eventually excel in their areas of ability. Othervise, these talents are
likely to remain undeveloped.

13. Although innovations such as video, computers, and the internet seem to
offer schools improved methods for instructing students, these technologies
all too often distract from real learning.

二 学习类
1. We can usually learn much more from people whose views we share than
from people whose vies contradict our own. Disagreement can cause stress
and inhibit learning.

2. No field of study can advance significantly unless outsiders bring their
knowledge and experience to that field of study.

3. Anyone can make things bigger and more complex. What requires real
effort and courage is to move in the opposite direction-in other words, to
make things as simple as possible.

4. Students should memories facts only after they have studied the ideas,
trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. Students who have
learned only facts have learned very little.

5. Scholars and researches should not be concerned with whether their work
makes a contribution to the larger society. It is more important that they
pursue their individual interests, however unusual or idiosyncratic those
interests may seem.

6. In any academic area or professional field, it is just as important to
recognize the limits of our knowledge and understanding as it is to acquire
new facts and information.

7. Facts are stubborn things. They cannot be altered by our wishes, our
inclinations, or the dictates of our passions.

8. Students should bring a certain skepticism to whatever they study. They
should question what they are taught instead of accepting it passively.

9. There is no such thing as purely objective observation. All observation
is subjective; it is always guided by the observer’s expectations or
desires.

10. The human mind will always be superior to machines because machines are
only tools of human minds.

11. Critical judgment of work, in any given field has little value unless
comes from someone who is an expert in that field.

12. People who pursue their own intellectual interests for purely personal
reasons are more likely to benefit the rest of the world than are people
who try to act for the public good.

13. Originality does not mean thinking something that was never thought
before; it means putting old ideas together in new ways.

14. The study of ac academic discipline alters the way we perceive the
world. After studying the discipline, we see the same world as before, but
with different eyes.

15. The way students and scholars interpret the materials they work with in
their academic fields is more of personality than of training. Different
interpretations come about when people with different personalities look at
exactly the same objects, facts, data, or events and see different things.

16. As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible,
but more complex and more mysterious.

17. It is a grave mistake to theorize before one has data.
三 行为类
1. Although many people think that the luxuries and conveniences of
contemporary life are entirely harmless, they in fact, prevent people from
developing into truly strong and independent individuals.

2. Public figures such as actors, politicians, and athletes should expect
people to be interested in their private lives. When they seek a public
role, they should expect that they will lose at least some of their privacy.

3. Creating an appealing image has become more important in contemporary
society than is the reality or truth behind that image.

4. The concept of ‘individual responsibility’ is a necessary fiction.
Although societies must hold individuals accountable for their own actions,
people’s behavior is largely determined by forces not of their own making.

5. People work more productively in teams than individually. Teamwork
requires cooperation, which motivates people much more than individual
competition does.

6. In any realm of life-whether academic, social, business, or political—
the only way to succeed is to take a practical, rather than an idealistic,
point of vies. Pragmatic behavior guarantees survival, whereas idealistic
views tend to be superceded by simpler, more immediate options.

7. It is primarily through our identification with social groups that we
define ourselves.

8. Only through mistakes can there be discovery or progress.

9. Most people recognize the benefits of individuality, but the fact is
that personal economic success requires conformity.

10. People who are the most deeply committed to an idea or policy are the
most critical of it.

11. No amount of information can eliminate prejudice because prejudice is
rooted in emotion, not reason.

12. The most essential quality of an effective leader is the ability to
remain consistently committed in particular principles and objectives. Any
leader who is quickly and easily influenced by shifts in popular opinion
will accomplish little.

13. Sometimes imagination is a more valuable asset than experience. People
who lack experience are free to imagine what is possible and thus can
approach a task without constraints of established habits and attitudes.

14. In any given field, the leading voices come from people who are
motivated not by conviction but by the desire to present opinions and ideas
that differ from those held by the majority.

15. It is always an individual who is the impetus for innovation; the
details may be worked out by a team, but true innovation results from the
enterprise and unique perception of an individual.

16. Success, whether academic or professional, involves an ability to
survive in a new environment and--, eventually, --to change it.

17. Most people choose a career on the basis of such pragmatic
considerations as the needs of the economy, the relative ease of finding a
job, and the salary they can expect to make. Hardly anyone is free to
choose a career based on his or her natural talents or interest in a
particular kind of work.

18. If a goal is worthy, then any means taken to attain it is justifiable.

19. People often look for similarities, even between very different things,
and even when it is unhelpful or harmful to do so. Instead, a thing should
be considered on its own terms, we should avoid the tendency to compare it
to something else.

20. People are mistaken when they assume that the problems they confront
are more complex and challenging than the problems, faced by their
predecessors. Thus illusion is eventually dispelled with increased
knowledge and experience.

21. Moderation in all things is ill-considered advice. Rather, one should
say, ‘Moderations is most things,’ since many areas of human concern
require or at least profit from intense focus.

22. Most people are taught that loyalty is a virtue. But loyalty—whether
to one’s friends, to one’s school or place of employment, or to any
institution—is all too often a destructive rather than a positive force.

四 政治类
1. It is often necessary, even desirable, for political leaders to withhold
information from the public.

2. There are two types of laws: just and unjust. Every individual in a
society has a responsibility to obey just laws and, even more importantly,
to disobey and resist unjust laws.

3. To be an effective leader, a public official must maintain the highest
ethical and moral standards.

4. It is impossible for an effective political leader to tell the truth all
the time. Complete honesty is not a useful virtue for a politician.
5. Those who treat politics and morality as though they were separate
realms fail to understand either the one or the other.

6. Laws should not be stationary and fixed. Instead, they should be
flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times, and places.

7. The goal of politics should not be the pursuit of an ideal, but rather
the search for common ground and reasonable consensus.