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  3. When U. S. News started the college and university rankings 25 years ago, no one imagined that these lists would become what som

When U. S. News started the college and university rankings 25 years ago, no one imagined that these lists would become what som

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问题     When U. S. News started the college and university rankings 25 years ago, no one imagined that these lists would become what some consider to be the 800-pound gorilla of American higher education, important enough to be the subject of doctoral dissertations, academic papers and conferences, endless debate, and constant media coverage. What began with little fanfare" has spawned imitation college rankings in at least 21 countries or regions, including Canada, China, Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, and Taiwan.
    Today, it’s hard to imagine there ever was a void of information to help people make direct comparisons between colleges, but such was the case in 1983 when we first ventured into the field. The editors back then, led by Marvin L. Stone, thought the project was worth attempting because a college education is one of the most important — and most costly — investments that people ever make. So the magazine designed a survey and sent it out to 1, 308 college presidents to get their opinions of which schools offered the best education. The winners: Stanford (National Universities) and Amherst (National Liberal Arts Colleges).
    That academic-reputation-only method was repeated in 1985 and 1987. In 1988, we started to use statistical data as part of the ranking methodology, evaluating those numbers along with the results of the survey. In 1997, in another pioneering step, the America’s Best Colleges rankings made the leap online at usnews. com. The online version, viewed by millions, has substantially more information and extended rankings than there is room for in the magazine.
    Of course, we’ve changed the ranking formula over the years to reflect changes in the world of higher education. In general, the biggest shift has been the move toward evaluating colleges less by the quality of the students they attract (inputs) and more by the success the school has in graduating those students (outputs). We operate under the guiding principle that the methodology should be altered only if the change will better help our readers compare schools as they’re making decisions about where to apply and enroll.
    Based on the success of the college rankings, we decided to expand the process to other levels of education. The America’s Best Graduate Schools rankings debuted in 1990 with annual listings of medical, engineering, law, business, and education schools.
    Our newest education ranking is America’s Best High Schools, first published in the fall of 2007. It identified the 100 best public schools out of more than 18,000 across the nation. Just as when we embarked on college rankings, setting up the process wasn’t easy, but it’s already proved to have enormous weight with our readers.
What can be inferred from the text?
选项 A、The college rankings do a lot to help the students who don’t know which university to choose.
B、Education of different levels adopts the ranking system to encourage competition.
C、The newest education ranking exercises a great deal of influence on the readers.
D、U. S. News has a deep understanding on the response of the readers.
答案C
解析 推理判断题。第四段末句谈到，“排名的方法只有在能够帮助他们更好地比较学校的情况下才应该得到改变”，但文中并没说大学的排名对不知道选哪所大学的学生帮助很大，排除[A]；[B]中的encourage competition文中并未提到，也排除；由尾段尾句可知，新的教育排名在读者心中是很有份量的，故[C]正确。[D]则是根据尾段尾句进行的过度引申。
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