2015年3月12日雅思阅读考题回忆及权威解析

                                  苏州环球教育学校 周敏

　　本场考试适逢植树节，在这样生机勃勃的日子，祝愿大家早日和雅思say goodbye，迎接新生活！

Passage1 （旧题）

　　题材：传记类/历史类

　　题目：The Extraordinary Watkin Tench

　　文章大意：Waltkin Tench的人物传记。此人为英国人，在历史上非常有名，他曾因参加英国的“第一舰队（first fleet）”——殖民澳大利亚的舰队，并出版两本书描述这一经历而著名。具体信息可参见http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watkin_Tench文中讲述了他对原住民非常友好，关注人性，是个伟大的人。

题型: 判断题(6), 简答题(7)，

判断题：

1. A great deal was known about Tenchbefore arriving to Australia. FALSE

2. Tench drew pictures of what he sawduring his journey. NOT GIVEN

3. Generally treat convicts well. FALSE

4. Tench’s opinion towards Aboriginal remainedunchanged. FALSE

5. An Aboriginal gave Tench food as a giftwhen they first met. NOT GIVEN

6. Tench held unusual opinion in his time.TRUE

简答题：

7. Diaries

8. 3 years

9. Chains

10. Governor Phillip

11. Hunting birds

12. China

13. Botany Bay

Passage 2（新题）

题材：心理类

题目：Are artists liars?

文章大意：

主要通过马龙白兰度的例子讲述表演者都是很好的谎言家。

题型：heading题（6）；判断题（5）；填空题（3）

Passage 3 (新题)

题材：教育类

文章大意：关于theory-basedresearch 的话题，管理类院校的科研成果。

备考建议：雅思考试阅读模式趋于稳定，本次考试阅读一道旧题，两道新题。这次的难度稍稍有所提高，如何在难题的情况下拿到高分就需要一定的基础和技巧。想要拿到雅思阅读高分，考生需要在考试的过程中掌握正确的做题方案，合理的掌控时间，这样才能更加有效率的做题。除了时间掌控之外，考生们在考场上还要注意的是考试的题型安排，正确的做题顺序可以帮助考生更加有效的完成题目。

雅思阅读题型众多，但是比较常见的有以下五种类型：

Multiple Choice;

Summary（以及与之类似的Short-answerquestions, Sentence Completion or Table/Flow-chart Completion, etc）;

True/False/Not Given;

List of Headings;

Matching（包括ParagraphMatching, 特殊定位词的配对）

这次考试中基本涵盖了上述所有题型，如何合理安排考试做题顺序是拿高分的关键。接下来和大家分享一些做题顺序的原则：

第一种出题模式：List ofHeadings和Paragraph Matching。这两种题型都是针对全文出题，往往也作为第一种题型出现，但是一篇文章内不会同时出现这两种题型。考生在做题时不一定要先完成这样的题型，再处理下面的题型。相反，考生应该先处理该篇文章后面其他的细节题，比如T/F/NG, Summary等题型，先把这些细节题在文章中做到定位后，再阅读每一段做出这些细节题，通过这些题目对出题的段落有一个深入了解之后，再顺带选出该段的Heading或者找出配对的句子，这样就能保证把看文章的重复率降到最低，实现做题速度的最大化。

第二种出题模式，则是全篇题目均为细节题。这种情况需要考生根据自身题型熟练程度和平时做题的正确率程度，选择最容易的题型开始入手，比如说文章题目分布为T/F/NG, Matching, Multiple Choice, 按大部分考生做题的定位习惯和正确率来说，首先应先定位T/F/NG和Matching这两种题型，然后做题方式和之前的第一种出题模式类似，通过阅读出现这两种题型的段落，对出题段有一定的了解后，在顺带将最后一种题型Multiple Choice放在该段中寻找是否有出题点，如果有的话则进行选择。

雅思阅读是有目的的进行阅读，建议考生带着问题去寻找答案，并养成在文中划出相关信息的习惯，这样不仅提高了阅读的速度还提高了阅读的效率。

以上和大家分享了雅思阅读考试中的部分应试策略和解题技巧，祝同学们在雅思考试中取得好成绩。

附：

参考文章1：

Duringthe late 18th and 19th centuries, large numbers of convicts were transported tothe various Australian penal colonies by the British government. One of theprimary reasons for the British settlement of Australia was the establishmentof a penal colony to alleviate pressure on their overburdened correctionalfacilities. Over the 80 years more than 165,000 convicts were transported toAustralia.

Poverty, social injustice, child labor,harsh and dirty living conditions and long working hours were prevalent in19th-century Britain. Dickens' novels perhaps best illustrate this; even somegovernment officials were horrified by what they saw. Only in 1833 and 1844were the first general laws against child labor (the Factory Acts) passed inthe United Kingdom.

WilliamHogarth's Gin Lane, 1751

According to Robert Hughes in The FatalShore, the population of England and Wales, which had remained steady at 6 millionfrom 1700 to 1740, began rising considerably after 1740. By the time of theAmerican Revolution, London was overcrowded, filled with the unemployed, andflooded with cheap gin. Crime had become a major problem. In 1784 a Frenchobserver noted that "from sunset to dawn the environs of London became thepatrimony of brigands for twenty miles around."

Eachparish had a watchman, but British cities did not have police forces in the modernsense. Jeremy Bentham avidly promoted the idea of a circular prison, but thepenitentiary was seen by many government officials as a peculiarly American concept.Virtually all malefactors were caught by informers or denounced to the localcourt by their victims.

Pursuantto the so-called  "BloodyCode", by the 1770s there were 222 crimes in  Britain which carried the death penalty,almost all of which were crimes against property. These included such offencesas the stealing of goods worth over 5 shillings, the cutting down of a tree,the theft of an animal, even the theft of a rabbit from a rabbit warren.

The Industrial Revolution led to anincrease in petty crime due to the economic displacement of much of thepopulation, building pressure on the government to find an alternative to confinementin overcrowded goals. The situation was so dire that hulks left over from theSeven Years' War were used as makeshift floating prisons. Eight of every 10prisoners were in jail for theft. The Bloody Code was gradually rescinded inthe 1800s because judges and juries considered its punishments too harsh. Sincelawmakers still wanted punishments to deter potential criminals, theyincreasingly applied transportation as a more humane alternative to execution.

Transportation had been applied as a punishmentfor both major and petty crimes since the seventeenth century. Around 60,000convicts were transported to the British colonies in North America in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the American Revolutionary Warbrought an end to that means of disposal, the British Government lookedelsewhere. After James Cook's famous voyage to the South Pacific in which hevisited and claimed the east coast of Australia in the name of the BritishEmpire, he described Botany Bay, the bay on which present-day Sydney sits, asan ideal place to establish a settlement. In 1788 the First Fleet arrived andthe first British colony in Australia was established.

参考文章2：

Areartists liars?

Humansare natural-born storytellers, so lying is in our blood.  Ian Leslie considers how this comes out in ourart...

Specialto MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Shortlybefore his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videosabout acting, to be    called “Lying fora Living”.   On the surviving footage,Brando can   be seen dispensing gnomicadvice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywoodstars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited randompeople from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footageis said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giantSamoan).  “If you can lie, you can   act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer forRolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage.  “Are you good at  lying?” asked Kaftan.  “Jesus,” said Brando,   “I’mfabulous at it.”

Brandowas not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar isa fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of alower order — as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars andartists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft storiesthat are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication,emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers andperformers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as Idiscovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artisticstorytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in thecases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.

Acase study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the storyof a  middle-aged  woman with  brain  damage caused  by  a series  of  strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but whatshe actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary  events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patientspontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands,involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets froma shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. Whatelse?”

In   the  language   of    psychiatry,   this  woman   was   ‘confabulating’.   Chronic confabulation is a rare type ofmemory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In theliterature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted  or misinterpreted  memories  about oneself   or  the world,  without  the conscious intention to deceive”.   Whereas amnesiacs make errors ofomission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible tofill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things   up.  Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.

Confabulatingpatients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestlygive absurdly implausible explanations of why they’re in hospital, or talkingto a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical scar, explained that duringthe Second World War he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times inthe head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The samepatient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they haddied in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet morefantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander inIndia or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to deceive. Theyengage in    what Morris Moscovitch, aneuropsychologist, calls “honest lying”. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed bytheir uncertainty, they are seized by a “compulsion to narrate”: a deep-seatedneed to shape order and explain what they do not understand.

Aswith the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, the stories spun bychronic confabulators are conjured up instantaneously—an interlocutor only hasto ask a question, or say a particular word, and they’re  off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrasethrown out by his pianist as the start of his solo. A patient might explain toher visiting friend that she’s    inhospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next toher (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient.Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jammingtogether words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when   asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinetteof France, answered that she had been “suicided” by her family. In a sense,these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom“nothing is wasted”.Unlike writers, however, they have little or no controlover their own material.

Chronicconfabulation is usually associated with damage to the brain’s frontal lobes,particularly the region responsible for self-regulation and self-censoring. Ofcourse we all are sensitive to associations —hear the word “scar” and you toomight think about war wounds, old movies or tales of near-death experiences.But rarely do we let these random thoughts reach consciousness, and fewer stillwould ever articulate   them.   We self-censor for the sake of truth, senseand social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators can’t do this. They randomlycombine real memories with stray thoughts, wish and hope, and summon up a storyfrom the confusion.

Thewider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves.Evidently there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal humanmind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn.  We are born storytellers, spinning narrativeout of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keepsus tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us ourability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helpsus to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others.  But it can lead us into trouble, particularlywhen we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most  of the  time,  as our  stories  bubble up  to  consciousness,  we exercise  our cerebral censors,controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts ofreasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.  

Duringa now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister,recounted a tale to illustrate   the   horrors  he endured   after a   national newspaper tainted his name. He toldof how, on leaving his home in Westminster one morning with his teenagedaughter, he found himself 'stampeded' by a documentary crew. Upset and scaredby the crew's aggresive behavior, his daughter burst into tears, he said, andAitken bundled her into his ministerial car. But as they drove away he realisedthat they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raisingchase across central London ensued. The  journalists  were only  shaken  off when  Aitken  executed a  cunning deception: he stoppedat the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.

Thecase, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claimsmade  by the  Guardian  about Aitken’s  relationships  with Saudi  arms   dealers, including meetings heallegedly  held with them on a   trip to Paris  while he was a government minister. Whatamazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken toldduring his testimony.  Some werenecessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it appeared, forthe sheer thrill of invention. As Aitken stood at the witness stand and piledlie upon lie —apparently carried away by the improvisatory act ofcreativity—it’s    possible that he feltsimilar to Brando during one of his performances.  Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997,   when the defence finally found indisputableevidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken’scharm, fluency and flair fortheatrical displays of sincerity   lookedas if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in his façade came justdays before, when a documentary crew submitted the unedited rushes of their“stampede”       encounter with Aitkenoutside his home. They revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not withhim that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister hadsimply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.

Ofcourse, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literallyattempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come tothe theatre, or open this book, and we’ll lie to you. Perhaps this is why wefelt it necessary to invent art  in  the first  place:  as a  safe  space into  which  our lies  can  be corralled,  and channelled intosomething socially useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, artis the best way to refine and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insightfulones. But that is not the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies”differ from normal lies, and from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators,is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lieson behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writershave a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about thehuman condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express   a curious truth that can only be expressedin a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not”. Art is a liewhose secret ingredient is truth.