今日的两场考试：
上午是常出现的题目，这个排阵，让人心疑，2018年为什么不考这题？
20200104 AM = 20161126= 20140316 = 20121124
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
Nowadays, it is easier to be an educated person than it was in the past.
下午也是一个比较容易展开的题目
20200104 PM
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Teachers should assign homework to students every day.
先说下上午好了。
Educated 这个概念如果要细讲的话，就会比较复杂，可能会有考生去定义什么是educated person， 比如是有独立思考能力的，比如是终身学习者等。
如果欢喜这种展开方式，也能展开足够的细节当然是好的。
只是，作为语言考试，我们把Educated 理解为接受知识，或者学习，这个表面的意思，也是完全OK的，毕竟畅销书Educated 对于这个单词的定义里，也有简单的“读书，上学”这个层面的意思。而且这样写起来应该是更为容易的。
所以现在是不是变得更为容易了？
可以写现在有online的一些学习的东西。有更为affordable public educational system， 父母也更为支持孩子去接受教育了等等….
当然现在也有一些阻碍的力量, 比如分心的科技设备等。
只是在写的时候，记得一定要突出和过去的对比。
下面说一下下午那篇文章。
家庭作业要不要每天的。
有意思的是New York Times专门组织了一群专家来讨论：
有兴趣的可以去搜一下。这里不做详谈。其实这个话题距离大多数考生的生活都比较近，还是比较好写的。
这里分享另外一篇也是关于homework 的 纽时的文章。
标题
As Students Return to School, Debate About the Amount of Homework Rages
作者
Christine Hauser
How much homework is enough?
My daughter, Maya, who is entering second grade, was asked to complete homework six days a week during the summer. For a while, we tried gamely to keep up. But one day she turned to me and said, “I hate reading.”
I put the assignment aside.
That was my abrupt introduction to the debate over homework that is bubbling up as students across the United States head back to school.
This month, Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Godley, Tex., let parents know on “Meet the Teacher” night that she had no plans to load up her students’ backpacks.
“There will be no formally assigned homework this year,” Ms. Young wrote in a note that was widely shared on Facebook. “Rather, I ask that you spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success. Eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside, and get your child to bed early.”
Other conversations about homework are humming in town halls and online. Some school districts, including one near Phoenix, have taken steps to shorten the summer break, out of concern that too much is forgotten over the summer. But discussions on blogs like GreatSchools.org or StopHomework.com reveal a belief that the workload assigned to students may be too heavy.
“How many people take home an average of two hours or more of work that must be completed for the next day?” said Tonya Noonan Herring, a New Mexico mother of three, in an article on GreatSchools.
The National PTA and the National Education Association endorse a 10-minute guideline: Time spent on after-school work should not exceed 10 minutes a grade level a night. “That is, a first grader should have no more than 10 minutes of homework, a sixth grader no more than 60 minutes and a 12th grader no more than two hours,” the National PTA says.
The National Education Association said those recommendations followed general guidelines from the research of Harris M. Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and the author of “The Battle Over Homework.”
“The horror stories I hear from parents and students about five or more hours spent on homework a night fly in the face of evidence of what’s best for kids, even what’s best for promoting academic achievement,” he wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times.
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