News Plus慢速英语:十三五规划以创新为核心 中国学生两次国际考试成绩被取消

迅雷高速下载    音频下载[点击右键另存为]

You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Innovation will be put at the core position for China's development in the five years from 2016. That's according to a communique released following a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
Party leaders discussed an economic blueprint that will set the direction for the world's second-largest economy over the next five years.
The government says that sectors including science, technology and culture need to be made more innovative.
China plans to encourage a system that nurtures innovation and sees better allocation of resources including labor, capital, land, technology and management.
The country will continue to encourage mass entrepreneurship in the hope that it will lead to new technology.

This is NEWS Plus Special English.
Two recent incidents in which Chinese students' international test results have been withheld or canceled have pushed educators to advise those planning to study abroad to hone their language skills instead of just learning by rote.
All 360 Chinese students who took the Upper Level Secondary School Admission Test in Beijing and Shanghai on Sept 19 had their results canceled recently. The test, administered by the Secondary School Admission Test Board, is one of the basic requirements for candidates to enter secondary schools in the United States.
In late September, at least 100 Chinese students who had sat exams under the International English Language Testing System in August and September received messages from the British Council, which administered the test, saying that their results would be "withheld permanently".
The authorities of the two tests said that the results couldn't reflect the students' real level of attainment, and therefore the results were withheld or canceled in order to ensure the validity and integrity of the tests.
Although the U.S. test authority and the British Council didn't elaborate further on the reasons, tutors believed that a major cause may be Chinese students' practice of memorizing test answers in advance.
It is a common practice in China that students preparing for tests memorize the questions and answers shared on the Internet by previous test takers.
In Western countries, such practices are seen as strongly breaching test rules.