2013年考研英语的阅读理解练习(二)

　　Passage2

　　Youre busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; lets assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isnt it tempting to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University?

　　More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their 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 at most well-known colleges say theydeal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of aboutone per week.

　　Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then. If it turns out that an applicants lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them impostors; another refers to them asspecial cases. One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made byno such people.

　　To avoid outrightlies, some job-seekers claim that they attended or were associated with a college or university. After carefully 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 century-thats when they began keeping records, anyhow.

　　If you dont want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phonydiploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of non-existent 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 properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.