阅读理解。
You are busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let's assume you once actually
completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn't it tempting to lie
just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma (文凭) represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished
an extra couple of years back at State University?
More and more people are turning to an utter deception (欺骗) like this to land their first job or to move
ahead in their careers. For personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A
job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better
with a diploma from a well-known university. Registrars (学籍管理员) at most well-known colleges say that
they deal with dishonest claims like these at the rate of about one per week.
Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms. If it turns out that an applicant is
lying, most colleges are unwilling to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school refers to them as
"special cases." One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says these
claims are made by "no such people".
To avoid complete lies, some job seekers claim that they "attended" or "were associated with" a college
or university. After careful checking, a personnel officer may discover that "attending" means being dismissed
after one semester. It may be that "being associated with" a college means that the job-seeker visited his
younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice
dates back at least to the turn of the center-that's when they began keeping records, anyhow.
If you don't want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a fake diploma.
One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any
number of nonexistent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from "Smoot State
University". The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the "University of Purdue." As there is no Smoot
State and the real school in Indiana is properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one
sheet of paper.
1. The writer mainly wants to tell us that _____.
A. college degrees can now be purchased easily
B. nowadays it is very hard for people to find jobs
C. lying about college degrees is becoming a widespread problem
D. employers are no longer interested in applicants' actual performances
2. As used in the first line of the second paragraph, the word "utter" means _____.
A. thorough
B. careful
C. incomplete
D. spoken
3. Once finding applicants with false diplomas, most colleges would _____.
A. keep the records of them
B. drive the them out of college
C. avoid direct conflicts with them
D. accuse them of such behaviors
4. We can learn from the passage that _____.
A. US employers value their job applicants with a degree from top universities
B. University of Purdue and Purdue University are the same school
C. people with fake diplomas can get their first jobs in US easily
D. people pay the same price for a fake diploma from different universities