新編大學(xué)英語第二冊(cè)u(píng)nit11 Text B: Those College Finals

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UNIT 11 AFTER-CLASS READING 1; New College English (II)

Those College Finals

1 I was sitting around downtown the other night. The wind was blowing; the temperature was frigid; the atmosphere was depressing. I knew that the combination of these things reminded me of something, and soon enough I realized what that something was. Final exams.

2 The most miserable moments of a college student's life come during final exam week during the winter. It is a horror that stays with a person for the rest of his life: the desperation, the frustration, the realization that one has to cough up mounds of knowledge that one does not even possess. And that one's future career may depend on how well one does the coughing.

3 I checked the calendar. Sure enough, it was just about time for the end of the term at Northwestern University, just up the road from me. I knew that thousands of students were up there at that very moment, bending over textbooks and notes and trying against all odds to memorize arcane facts and figures that they really cared nothing about. I couldn't help myself. I headed for the campus. In the first building where I stopped, a light was burning brightly in a classroom. I walked in; two young men had papers spread all over the room. Class was not in session; the two were alone. "Hi, fellows," I said. They looked up. Their eyes were filled with pain. They appeared to have gone without sleep for three or four days.

4 "What's up, guys?" I said.

5 "Please leave us alone," one of them said softly.

6 "Leave you alone?" I said.

7 "Finals," the other one gasped.

8 I walked out of the room and began a leisurely stroll around campus. Men and women looked as if they were about to sob as they staggered toward the library. They muttered to themselves. They lifted their eyes in silent prayer. They walked into trees, steadied their bodies, and kept walking. I felt great. I had been one of them, and now I wasn't. There probably is no feeling in this world more exhilarating than being on a college campus during final exams, and knowing that you don't have to take them.

9 I spent most of the evening wandering from building to building, watching the students get ready for the next day's finals. It was all so familiar. They gathered around long tables, spiral-bound notebooks open, and they shot questions at one another. There were lengthy periods of silence, and then a series of tentative answers. Cursing was common. Moans broke out. They stomped on the floor, and gazed out the window, and seemed to be ready to weep. Once in a while they glanced over at me. Under normal circumstances they probably would have been curious about my presence, but on this night their eyes were so glazed over that they couldn't even think straight. I just read the sports section and winked at them.

10 If I would have been in a charitable mood, I would have told them one of the great secrets of the real world. It is a secret that all of us who have been to college learned only after we got out; a secret that, if college students knew it, would ease their minds and make them calm. The secret is this: There are no final exams in real life.

11 It's true. In the real world, you don't have to know anything. There are no cases in which you have to sit down in a crowded room, scrunch your eyes up in concentration and regurgitate obscure and ridiculous facts from memory. In real life, you get to bring the book along. Believe it, college students: Real life is an open-book test. If you've forgotten something, you get to go look it up, or ask someone who's smarter than you. It's easy; much easier than college.

12 The only place you'll ever encounter something as bizarre and frightening as a final exam is at college. The college administrators fool the students by making them believe that final exams are only a mild precursor of what is going to happen every day in the big, mean' world. But it's not true. If the real world were as bizarre and rotten as final exams, you'd see everyone on the street walking around in the same demented, pathetic state as college students during exam week. No, it's all downhill after college finals. Real life is a coast, a glide. No one is ever going to ask you to compare and contrast the works of the Elizabethan authors no one is ever going to demand that you trace the battles of the Boer War. If someone did come up to you at work and ask you something like that, he'd soon be locked up in an institution somewhere.

13 I could have told the students that. I could have soothed their minds and made things simple for them. I could have asked them to join me for a beer and forget about finals week. Look at the top executives of the Fortune 500 companies, I could have told them. Do you think anyone would ever dare ask them how they did on their college final exams? I could have filled the students' mind with comforting thoughts like that.

14 But I didn't. And why should I have? I went through finals many times; finals made me crazy, and now it was time for these students to be made crazy. I watched them in their despair, and I smiled the smile of the truly contented. I stayed on campus until nearly midnight, and then I wandered off. On a path between some classroom buildings, something tumbled across the sidewalk, blowing in the wind. I knelt to pick it up. It was a blue book, the dreadful, chilling symbol of finals week. A blue book that some poor student had carried out of his exam and then discarded on the ground. I stuck it in my pocket and laughed a mechanical laugh. The lights still glowed in the campus building, as they would all night, but I got to go home.