英语四级阅读理解英语四级阅读理解.docVIP

Passage One Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage. The prospects for women who are scientists and engineers at major research universities have improved, although women continue to face unfair treatment in salary and access to some other resources, a panel of the National Research Council concludes in a new report. In recent years “men and women faculty in science, engineering and mathematics have enjoyed comparable opportunities,” the panel said in its report, released on Tuesday. It found that women who applied for university jobs and, once they had them, for promotion and tenure (终身任职), were at least as likely to succeed as men. In another report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Wisconsin reviewed a variety of studies and concluded that the achievement gap between boys and girls in mathematics performance had narrowed to the vanishing point. Although girls are still of a smaller number in the ranks of young math prodigies (神童), they said, that gap is narrowing, which undermines claims that a greater prevalence (流行) of profound mathematical talent in males is biologically determined. The researchers said this and other phenomena “provide abundant evidence for the impact of sociocultural and other environmental factors on the development of mathematical skills and talent and the size, if any, of math gender gap.” The research council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, gathered its expert panel at the request of Congress. The panel surveyed six disciplines — biology, chemistry, mathematics, civil and electrical engineering, and physics — and based its analysis on interviews with faculty members at 89 institutions and data from federal agencies, professional societies and other sources. The panel was led by Claude Canizares, a physicist who is vice president for research at M.I.T, and Dr. Sally Shaywitz of Yale Medical School, an expert on learning. The Wisconsin researchers