专四作文阅读材料题.doc

Read carefully the following excerpt on term-time holiday arguments in the UK, and then write your response in NO LESS THAN 200 words, in which you should：
summarize the main message of the excerpt, and then comment on whether parents should take children out of school for holiday during term time in order to save money. You should support yourself with information from the excerpt.
Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.

Term-time holidays will be banned Parents are to be banned by Michael Gove, UK's Education Secretary, from taking their children out of school to save money on holidays.
He is to abolish the right of head teachers to 'authorize absence' from the classroom, which has been used to let families take term-time breaks, and will warn them they face fines for their children not being at school.
‘Any time out of school has the potential to damage a child's education,' a senior source at the Department for Education said this weekend. 'That is why the government will end the distinction between authorized and unauthorized absence.
‘This is part of the government's wider commitment to bring down truancy levels in our schools. There will also be stricter penalties for parents and schools.
‘The tough measures on truancy are part of a wider attempt by Mr. Gove to make education more academically rigorous and to tackle a culture in the educational establishment which he believes has accepted 'excuses for failure’.
Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the measure would discourage parents from trying to put pressure on heads to sanction term time holidays. 'The high cost of holidays outside of term time is still an issue but ultimately a child's education is more important than a holiday,' he said.

参考答案
When it comes to whether parents should take their children to spend holidays during term-time, views on the issue vary from person to person. Parents claim that by doing so, they can save a lot of money born of busy school holidays. Educational officials strongly oppose this tendency on the ground that it encourages truancy, which in turn damages a child’s education. From my perspective, the merits of banning term-time holidays outweigh its demerits.
　　To begin with, taking tough measures on this kind of truancy is conducive to the normal teaching process, one of the key elements to guarantee kid’s academic performance. As we know, currently, teachers have the discretion to approve a certain time of absence from school for each child, which is supposed to be for illness and is not supposed to be granted for holidays. By definitely abolishing the right of head teachers to “authorize absence” from the classroom, those teachers can rarely be pestered by parents who want to take children to go on a holiday just to save money, which severely disrupts teaching process. What ‘s more, without strict penalties imposed on the parents who lead to their kid’s playing truant, those parents can gradually view asking for holiday leave as a right. Once this cultural expectation is formed, the level of truancy will dramatically increase.

　　Accordingly, the growing trend of term-time holidays should be banned with no delay. In this way, teachers can impart knowledge without disturbance and parents will be deterred from saving money at the expense of sacrificing their kid’s education.

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