考研英语阅读理解中的主题原则_新浪教育

考研英语阅读理解中的主题原则

http://www.sina.com.cn 2003/05/21 11:00 新浪教育

　　主旨题型又叫主题原则，主要针对文章主题设问，考查考生对通篇文章的理解和把握，但是要特别注意和下面这种题型区分开来。

　　This passage appears to be a digest of.

　　(A) a book review

　　(B) a scientific paper

　　(D) a newspaper editorial［199670］

　　［正确答案］A

　　这种题型考查考生是否能根据文章的行文风格判断文章的文体。但迄今为止，此类题型只在1996年出现了一次，因此考生复习时可以忽略此种题型，只需将其与主题原则题目区分开来即可。笔者建议考生在做主题题型时遵循这样的原则：因为此类题干扰性最大，难度也最大，考生须读完全文才能准确把握文章主题。所以考生拿到这种题时，不要急于去找答案，不论其出现在什么位置都把它作为最后一道题来做，因为在做另外三道题时，无疑有助于加深对整个文章的理解。而且，事实上，首先做主旨题，考生往往还会回过头来核查答案，这样耗时间，做题效率低。

　　主题题型分为两种：

　　1.明确的主题题型

　　此类题型位置较为固定，一般是第一个问题或最后一个问题，要求考生为文章选择合适的标题或是总结文章的中心思想。此类题型相对难度较小。

　　What accounts for the great outburst of major inventions in early America—breakthroughs such as the telegraph, the steamboat and the weaving machine?Among the many shaping factors, I would single out the country's excellent elementary schools; a labor force that welcomed the new technology; the practice of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the American genius for nonverbal,“spatial”thinking about things technological.

　　Why mention the elementary schools? Thanks to these schools our early mechanics, especially in the New England and Middle Atlantic states, were generally literate and at home in arithmetic and in some aspects of geometry and trigonometry.Acute foreign observers related American adaptiveness and inventiveness to this educational advantage. As a member of a British commission visiting here in 1853 reported,“With a mind prepared by thorough school discipline, the American boy develops rapidlysintosthe skilled workman.”A further stimulus to invention came from the“premium”system, which preceded our patent system and for years ran parallel with it. This approach, originatedabroad, offered inventors medals, cash prizes and other incentives.In the United States, multitudes of premiums for new devices were awarded at country fairs and at the industrial fairs in major cities. Americans flocked to these fairs to admire the new machines and thus to renew their faith in the beneficence of technological advance.

　　Given this optimistic approach to technological innovation, the American worker took readily to that special kind of nonverbal thinking required in mechanical technology. As Eugene Ferguson has pointed out,“A technologist thinks about objects that cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in his mind by a visual, nonverbal process ... The designer and the inventor ... are able to assemble and manipulate in their minds devices that as yet do not exist.”This nonverbal“spatial”thinking can be just as creative as painting and writing. Robert Fulton once wrote,“The mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc., like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as an exhibition of his thoughts, in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea.”When all these shaping forces—schools, open attitudes, the premium system, a genius for spatial thinking—interacted with one another on the rich U.S. mainland, they produced that American characteristic, emulation. Today that word implies mere imitation. But in earlier times it meant a friendly but competitive striving for fame and excellence.

　　The best title for this passage might be

　　［A］Inventive Mind

　　［C］Effective Schooling

　　［B］Ways of Thinking

　　［D］Outpouring of Inventions［1996.66］

　　［正确答案］A

　　No company likes to be told it is contributing to the moral decline of nation.“Is this what you intended to accomplish with your careers?”Senator Robert Dole asked Time Warner executives last week.“You have sold your souls, but must you corrupt our nation and threaten our children as well?”At Time Warner, however, such questions are simply the latest manifestation of the soul_searching that has involved the company ever since it was born in 1990. It's a self_examination that has, at various times, involved issues of responsibility, creative freedom and the corporate bottom line.At the core of this debate is chairman Gerald Levin, 56, who took over for the late Steve Ross in 1992. On the financial front, Levin is under pressure to raise the stock price and reduce the company's mountainous debt, which will increase to .3 billion after two new cable deals close. He has promised to sell off some of the property and restructure the company, but investors are waiting impatiently.The flap over rap is not making life any easier for him. Levin has consistently defended the company's rap music on the grounds of expression. In 1992, when Time Warner was under fire for releasing Ice_T's violent rap song Cop Killer, Levin described rap as a lawful expression of street culture, which deserves an outlet.“The test of any democratic society,”he wrote in a Wall Street Journal column,“lies not in how well it can control expression but in whether it gives freedom of thought and expression the widest possible latitude, however disputable or irritating the results may sometimes be. We won't retreat in the face of any threats.”

　　Levin would not comment on the debate last week, but there were signs that the chairman was backing off his hard_line stand, at least to some extent. During the discussion of rock singing verses at last month's stockholders' meeting, Levin asserted that“music is not the cause of society's ills”and even cited his son, a teacher in the Bronx, New York, who uses rap to communicate with students. But he talked as well about the“balanced struggle”between creative freedom and social responsibility, and he announced that the company would launch a drive to develop standards for distribution and labeling of potentially objectionable music.

　　The 15_member Time Warner board is generally supportive of Levin and his corporate strategy. But insiders say several of them have shown their concerns in this matter.“Some of us have known for many, many years that the freedoms under the First Amendment are not totally unlimited,”says Luce.“I think it is perhaps the case that some people associated with the company have only recently come to realize this.”

　　The best title for this passage could be.

　　［A］A Company under Fire

　　［B］A Debate on Moral Decline

　　［C］A Lawful Outlet of Street Culture

　　［D］A Form of Creative Freedom［1997.66］

　　［正确答案］A

　　Being a man has always been dangerous.There are about 105 males born for every 100 females,but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity,and among 70_year_olds there are twice as many women as men.But the great universal of male mortality is being changed.Now,boy babies survive almost as well as girls do.This means that,for the first time,there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate.More important,another chance for natural selection has been removed.Fifty years ago,the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight.A kilogram too light or too heavy meant death almost certain.Today it makes almost no difference.Since much of the variation is due to genes,one more agent of evolution has gone.

　　There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide:stay alive,but have fewer children.Few people are as fertile as in the past.Except in some religious communities,very few women have 15 children.Nowadays the number of births,like the age of death,has become average.Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring.Again,differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished.India shows what is happening.The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples.The grand mediocrity of today—everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring—means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper_middle_class India compared to the tribes.

　　For us,this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived.Strangely,it has involved little physical change.No other species fills so many places in nature.But in the past 100,000 years—even the past 100 years—our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not.We did not evolve,because machines and society did it for us.Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution:they“look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship,as at something wholly beyond his comprehension.”No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness.But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were,they will look just like us.

　　Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

　　［A］Sex Ratio Changes in Human Evolution

　　［B］Ways of Continuing Man's Evolution

　　［C］The Evolutionary Future of Nature

　　［D］Human Evolution Going Nowhere［2000.58］

　　［正确答案］D

　　Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world's volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth's surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.

　　That the plates are moving is not beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injectedsintosthe sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders ofswheresthe two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translatedsintosmotion with respect to the earth's interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot_spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years.

　　The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate come to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops seed fissures (cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability (inconstancy).

　　The passage is mainly about.

　　［A］the features of volcanic activities

　　［B］the significance of hot spots in geophysical studies

　　［C］the importance of the theory about drifting plates

　　［D］the process of the formation of volcanoes［1998.70］

　　［正确答案］B

　　When a new movement in art attains a certain fashion,it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at,for,however farfetched and unreasonable their principles may seem today,it is possible that in years to come they may be regarded as normal.With regard to Futurist poetry,however,the case is rather difficult,for whatever Futurist poetry may be—even admitting that the theory on which it is based may be right—it can hardly be classed as Literature.

　　This,in brief,is what the Futurist says:for a century,past conditions of life have been conditionally speeding up,till now we live in a world of noise and violence and speed.Consequently,our feelings,thoughts and emotions have undergone a corresponding change.This speeding up of life, says the Futurist,requires a new form of expression.We must speed up our literature too,if we want to interpret modern stress.We must pour out a large stream of essential words,unhampered by stops,or qualifying adjectives,or finite verbs.Instead of describing sounds we must make up words that imitate them;we must use many sizes of type and different colored inks on the same page,and shorten or lengthen words at will.

　　Certainly their descriptions of battles are confused. But it is a little upsetting to read in the explanatory notes that a certain line describes a fight between a Turkish and a Bulgarian officer on a bridge off which they both fallsintosthe river—and then to find that the line consists of the noise of their falling and the weights of the officers:“Pluff! Pluff! A hundred and eighty_five kilograms.”

　　This,though it fulfills the laws and requirements of Futurist poetry,can hardly be classed as Literature.All the same,no thinking man can refuse to accept their first proposition:that a great change in our emotional life calls for a change of expression. The whole question is really this:have we essentially changed?

　　This passage is mainly.

　　［A］a survey of new approaches to art

　　［B］a review of Futurist poetry

　　［C］about merits of the Futurist movement

　　［D］about laws and requirements of literature［2000.59］

　　［正确答案］B

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