考研英语阅读理解命题思路透析和真题揭秘
2006年Text 3
When prehistoric man arrived in new parts of the world, something strong happened to the large animals; they suddenly became extinct. Smaller species survived, the large, slow-growing animals were easy game, and were quickly hunted to extinction. Now something similar could be happening in the oceans.
That the seas are being over-fished has been known for years what researchers such as Ransom Myers and Boris Worm have shown is just how fast things are changing. They have looked at half a century of data from fisheries around the world. Their methods de not attempt to estimate the actual biomass (the amount of living biological matter) of fish species in particular parts of the ocean, but rather changes in that biomass over time. According to their latest paper published in Nature, the biomass of large predators (animals that kill and eat other animals) inanes fishery is reduced on average by 80% within 15 years of the start of exploitation. In some long-fished areas, it has halved again since then.
Dr. Worm acknowledges that these figures are conservative, one reason for this is that fishing technology has improved Today's vessels can find their prey using satellites and sonar, which were not available 50 years ago that means a higher proportion of what is in the sea is being caught, so the real difference between present and past is likely to be worse than the one recorded by changes in catch sizes. In the early days, too, longlines would have been more saturated with fish. Some individuals would therefore not have been caught, since to baited hooks would have been available to trap them, leading to an underestimate of fish stocks in the past. Furthermore, in the early days of longline fishing, a lot of fish were lost to sharks after they had been hooked. That is no longer a problem, because there are fewer sharks around noise.
Dr. Myers and Dr. worm argue that their work gives a correct baseline, which future management efforts must take into account. They believe the date support an idea current among marine biologists, that of the "shifting baseline". The notion is that people have failed to detect the massive changes which have happened in the ocean because they have been looking back only a relatively short time into the past. That matters because theory suggests that the maximum sustainable yield that can be cropped form a fishery comes when the biomass of a target species is about 50% of its original levels. Most fisheries are well below that, which is a bad way to de business.
33. By saying these figures are conservative (line in ,paragragf-3), Dr worm means that
[A] fishing technology has improved rapidly
[B] then catch-sizes are actually smaller then recorded
[C] the marine bio mass has suffered a greater loss
[D] the date collected so far are pit pf date.
[答案] C
[解题思路]
本题要求判断Worm博士说的"这些数据尚未保守"这句话的具体含义，其对应的信息是文章的第三段。该段第一句话后面的内容是对这句话内容的补充说明，指出现代渔业技术的改进、鲨鱼的减少等因素都大大提高了捕鱼率，正如该段所说的，"the real difference between present and past is likely to be worse than the one recorded by changes in catch sizes"（现在和过去的真正差距可能会比之前通过捕获区记录变化得到的数据更大）。也就是说，这些数据保守的原因在于实际的捕鱼量可能比现有数据更大，即海洋动物总量损失的实际情况比现有数据显示的结果更加严重，因此C选项为正确答案。A选项是解释这句话的原因之一，但不是其含义。B选项的表述与文章意思相反。D选项认为这些数据已经过时，但数据保守并不意味着它已过时，文章中也没有提到这一点，因此该选项错误。
[题目译文]
Worm博士说"这些数字是保守的"（第三段第一行）这句话的意思是 。
[A] 捕鱼技术得到了快速提高
[B] 捕鱼量实际上没有记录的那么大
[C] 海洋生物量受到了更大的损失
[D] 迄今为止搜集到的资料已经过时
2006年Text 4
Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad.
This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil.
You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.
After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.
People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.
Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda--to lure us to open our wallets to make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.
What we forget--what our economy depends on is forgetting--is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.
37. The word "bummer" (Line 5. paragraph 5) most probably means something
[A] religious
[B] unpleasant
[C] entertaining
[D] commercial
[答案] B
[解题思路]
本题要求猜测bummer这个词的意思，可以回到原文从上下文寻找线索。文章第五段第二句话提到了"the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms"（最有效的大众媒体是教堂，它提醒信徒们，他们的灵魂处于危险之中，他们总有一天会成为蛆虫的食物）。在这一前提下，显而易见我们可以推出下一句话的意思应该是"因此，他们并不需要艺术再来表现这种失落感"，因此答案为B。
[题目译文]
"bummer"（第五段第五行）这个词最可能的意思是 。
[A] 宗教的
[B] 不愉快的
[C] 娱乐的
[D] 商业的
2007年Text 1
If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in 2006's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this strange phenomenon to be even more pronounced.
What might account for this strange phenomenon? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.
Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in "none of the above." Ericsson grew up in Sweden, and studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. "With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson recalls. "He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers."
This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever inborn differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers. Their work makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers -- whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born.
22. The word "mania" (Line 4, Paragraph 2) most probably means
[A] fun.
[B] craze.
[C] hysteria.
[D] excitement.
[答案] B
[解题思路]
"mania"这个词出现在文章第二段，原句为"soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania"（ 热爱足球的父母更可能在春季（每年足球狂热的鼎盛时期）怀孕）。仔细观察原文可以发现mania对应于句子开头的mad，因此包含有"疯狂"的意思，正确答案为B选项。A和D选项的两个词都没有达到"狂热"这个程度，而C选项的hysteria在程度上又大大超过了mania，也不符合原文。
[题目译文]
"mania"（第二段第四行）最有可能的意思是
[A] 嬉笑
[B] 狂热
[C] 歇斯底里
[D] 兴奋
