Another reason those opportunities will be open to educated young people from middle-class and poorer backgrounds is that hiring is more merit-oriented today than ever before. In principle, at least, our country has always been a society where all people are equal: yet in the past, children of the wealthy and well-connected could expect to obtain higher-status jobs and to receive better pay. But the laws and programs resulting from our civil-rights struggles have produced a modern business climate in which jobs are available on an equal-opportunity basis, and in which candidates have a legal right to be judged on the merit of their educational background and experience.

   In conclusion, education is probably the main factor in opening doors to success for young people in our society. The fact that education has supplanted money and property in this role is attributable to a more egalitarian system of higher education, as well as to more merit-based hiring practices that generally value individual education over family fortune or relation. (347 words)

   5. 摘要题型写作

    摘要题型写作是难度非常大的一种写作形式。随着考生英语水平的不断提高，这种题型引起考生的普遍重视。

   1) 摘要题型写作要点：

   ① 动笔之前，考生一定要认真仔细地阅读所给原文，弄懂原文大意，掌握原文要点。

   ② 摘要的长度一般是原文的四分之一或五分之一，考试时应遵守规定的字数限制。

   ③ 在做摘要时考生切忌照搬原文。

   ④ 摘要应与原文的观点保持一致，并且仍按原文的逻辑顺序排列。

   ⑤ 重点反映主要观点，删除细节。

   ⑥ 简化从句，用简短的语句代替冗长的语句。

   ⑦ 检查与修改时，考生应重点检查是否遗漏了原文的要点或包含了细节。

    2) 摘要题型写作实例

    ① 试题题目

    Directions:

    Study the following essay carefully and write a summary in about 80 words.

   We continue to share with our remotest ancestors the most tangled and evasive attitudes about death, despite the great distance we have come in understanding some of the profound aspects of biology. We have as much distaste for talking about personal death as for thinking about it; it is an indelicacy, like talking in mixed company about venereal disease or abortion in the old days. Death on a grand scale does not bother us in the same special way: we can sit around a dinner table and discuss war, involving 60 billion volatilized human deaths, as though we were talking about bad weather; we can watch abrupt bloody death every day, in color, on films and television, without blinking back a tear. It is when the numbers of dead are very small, and very close, that we begin to think in scurrying circles. At the very center of the problem is the naked cold deadness of one’s own self, the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty, and it is unmentionable, unthinkable. We may be even less willing to face the issue at first hand than our predecessors because of a secret new hope that maybe it will go away. We like to think, hiding the thought, that with all the marvelous ways in which we seem now to lead nature around by the nose, perhaps we can avoid the central problem if we just become, next year, say, a bit smarter. (246 words)