You’re doing homework online for a science class. A question appears: Do newborn babies see the world in black and white? You don’t know the answer. Do you google it?
①Searching online for the answer may get you a better grade on the homework. But it won’t necessarily help you learn. Researchers note that students who usually receive higher marks on the homework but lower test grades are much more likely to use the Internet for answers while completing their homework. With these findings in mind, the researchers are questioning the validity of homework as a useful learning tool.
Glass, a psychologist, discovered this from analyzing homework and the grades on tests that he gave college students who took his courses from 2008 to 2017. He gave his students a series of online homework tasks. In 2008, only around 3 out of 20 students performed better on their homework than on the exam. By 2017, more than half of the students performed this way. Glass wondered what caused this result. ②So he thought about what had changed over the 10 years. One big thing was the rise of smartphones. They existed in 2008, but were not common. Now almost everyone carries one. ③So it would be easier today to quickly go online and find the answer to almost any homework question. But students can’t use phones during an exam. And that might explain why they aren’t doing that well on the tests.
To test this, Glass and a co-author Kang asked students in 2017 and 2018 whether they came up with their homework answers themselves or looked them up. ④Students who tended to look up answers also tended to do better on homework than their exams.
【小题1】What is the author’s purpose in writing the first paragraph?
| A．To share a story. | B．To answer two questions. |
| C．To ask for help. | D．To introduce the topic. |
【小题2】What does the underlined word “validity” in Paragraph 2 mean?
| A．Effect. | B．Purpose. | C．Benefit. | D．Design. |
【小题3】What makes students finish homework better according to Glass’s study?
| A．The rise of the Internet. | B．The progress in teaching. |
| C．The help from parents. | D．The popularity of smartphones. |
【小题4】Which of the following is the topic sentence of this text?
【小题5】Which section of a newspaper is this text probably taken from?
| A．Study and intelligence. | B．Technology and education. |
| C．The Internet and teaching. | D．Social media and science. |
