Since many of you are planning to study at a college or university in this country, you may be curious to know what you usually do in a typical week, how you can get along with your fellow students, and so on. These are the questions I want to discuss with you today.
First, let’s talk about what your weekly schedule will look like. No matter what your major may be, you can expect to spend between four and six hours a week for each class attending lectures. Lectures are usually in very large rooms because some courses such as introduction to sociology or economics often have as many as two or three hundred students, especially at large universities. In lectures, it’s very important for you to take notes on what the professor says because the information a lecture is often different from the information in your textbooks. Also, you can expect to have exam questions based on the lectures. So it isn’t enough to just read your textbooks; you have to attend lectures as well. In a typical week you will also have a couple of hours of discussion for every class you take. The discussion section is a small group meeting usually with fewer than thirty students where you can ask questions about the lectures, the reading, and the homework. In large universities, graduate students, called teaching assistants, usually direct discussion sections.
If your major is chemistry, or physics, or another science, you’ll also have to spend several hours a week in the lab, or laboratory, doing experiments. This means that science majors spend more time in the classroom than non science majors do. On the other hand, people who major in subjects like literature or history usually have to read and write more than science majors do.
59. The main purpose of this text is .
A. to help the students to learn about university life
B. to persuade the students to attend lectures
C. to encourage the students to take part in discussions
D. to advise the students to choose proper majors
60. We can learn from the passage that university professors .
A. spend about 5 hours on lectures each week
B. must join the students in the discussion sections
C. prefer to use textbooks in their lectures
D. require the students to read beyond the textbooks
61. A discussion section does NOT include .
A. working under the guidance of university professors
B. talking over what the students have read about the courses
C. discussing the problems related to the students’ homework
D. raising questions about what a professor has said in a lecture
62. According to the author, science majors .
A. have to work harder than non science majors
B. spend less time on their studies than non science majors
C. consider experiments more important than discussions
D. read and write less than non science majors