Discovery Zone has sold 120 outlets in the past 14 months, boasting sandboxes full of brightly colored plastic balls, mazes(迷宫), obstacle courses, slides and mountains to climb. Now McDonalds is getting into the act. The burger giant is test-marketing a new playground, Leaps&Bounds, in Naperville, Ill. Phys Kids of Wichita has opened one center and has plans to expand.
American parents are rightly worried about their kids leisure life. There are 36 million children in the U.S. aged 2 to 11 who watch an average of 24 hours of TV a week and devote less and less energy to active recreation. Nationwide decrease in education budgets are making the problem worse, as gym classes and after-hours sports time get squeezed. Says Discovery Zone president Jack Gunion: “we have raised a couple of pure couch potatoes.”
In an attempt to attract more people , the new facilities cater to the concerns of two-earner families, staying open in the evenings, long after traditional public playground have grown dark and unusable. At Naperville’s Leaps&Bounds, families can play together for $4.95 per child, parents free. Fresh-faced assistants, dressed in colorful sport pants and shirts, guide youngsters to appropriate play areas for differing age group.
These new playground are not meant to be day-care facilities; parents are expected to stay and play with their kids rather than drop them off. But several also provide high-tech baby-sitting services. At some of the Discovery Zones, parents can register their children in special supervised programs, then leave them and slip away for a couple of hours to enjoy a movie or dinner.
The most fun of all, though, is getting to do what parents used to do in the days before two-career families and two-hour commutes: play with their kid. That, at least, is old-fashioned, even at per-hour rates.
68. What is this article mainly talking about?
A. Children can play in the public playground without parents’ care.
B. The fast development of Discovery Zone.
C. A new type of playground for kids.
D. The decay of outdoor playground.
69. According to the article, which of the following is true to the new playground?
A. The cost is high for a family.
B. It’s a place where kids can watch TV while eating potatoes.
C. It doesn’t allow parents to leave their kids.
D. It’s a place where parents can play together with their kids.
70. What does the writer mean by saying “old-fashioned”?
A. The so-called new playground is outdated.
B. the new playground offers a fashion which is popular in the past.
C. The new playground is also enjoyed by old people.
D. The new playground is actually enjoyed by parents
71. What is the writer’s attitude toward the new playground?
A. Agreeable. B. Indifferent. C. Objective. D. Neutral.
(C)
Engineering students are supposed to be examples of practicality and rationality, but when it comes to my college education I am an idealist and a fool. In high school I wanted to be an electrical engineer and, of course, any sensible student with my aims would have chosen a college with a large engineering department, famous reputation and lots of good labs and research equipment. But that’s not what I did.
I chose to study engineering at a small liberal-arts(文科)university that doesn’t even offer a major in electrical engineering. Obviously, this was not a practical choice; I came here for more noble reasons. I wanted a broad education that would provide me with flexibility and a value system to guide me in my career. I wanted to open my eyes and expand my vision by interacting with people who weren’t studying science or engineering. My parents, teachers and other adults praised me for such a sensible choice. They told me I was wise and mature beyond my 18 years, and I believed them.
I headed off to college and I was sure I was going to have an advantage over those students who went to big engineering “factories” where they didn’t care if you had values or were flexible. I was going to be a complete engineer: technical genius and sensitive humanist(人文学者)all in one.
Now I’m not so sure. Somewhere along the way my noble ideals crashed into reality, as all noble ideals eventually do. After three years of struggling to balance math, physics and engineering courses with liberal-arts courses, I have learned there are reasons why few engineering students try to reconcile(协调)engineering with liberal-arts courses in college.
The reality that has blocked my path to become the typical successful student is that engineering and the liberal arts simply don’t’ mix as easily as I assumed in high school. Individually they shape a person in very different ways; together they threaten to confuse. The struggle to reconcile the two fields of study is difficult.
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