2020年7月四级 第1套 Section A 选词填空

Questions __26__ to __35__ are based on the following passage.

"Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated." Those were the words uttered by pioneering British scientist Rosalind Franklin, who firmly believed that the pursuit of science should be __26__ to all. As a woman working in the first half of the 20th century, Franklin's contributions to some of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time including the structure of DNA were sadly __27__ in her lifetime.

More than 60 years after Franklin's death, we are __28__ living in a different world, where women play an important part in every echelon (阶层) of our society—not least in science, innovation, higher education and research. UK universities are world leaders when it comes to advancing and __29__ gender equality. In the past decade, we have seen a __30__ increase in England in the number of women accepted on to full-time undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and maths(Stem subjects). And in the last academic year, women __31__ for more than half of all Stem postgraduates at UK universities.

Data shows us the __32__ to success gets harder for women to climb the further up they go. Although women make up the majority of undergraduates in our universities, just under half of academic staff are female. At __33__ levels, only a quarter of professors are women, and black women make up less than 2% of all female academic staff.

There are also stark differences in pay across grades. The gender pay gap based on median salaries across the sector in 2016 - 2017 was 13.7%, __34__ there is still some way to go to ensure women are rising through the ranks to higher grade positions and being paid __35__.