| 考试日期： | 2012年9月15日 |
| Reading Passage 1 | |
| Title: | The Use of Pesticide |
| Question types: | 判断；选择；填空 |
| 文章内容回顾 |
杀虫剂的使用。某个地区针对cotton的化肥进化史。本文为针对一印度村中农业化肥的改革问题，从最初人们为经济利益大量种植棉花及无限制使用人工化肥，对当地生态产生了巨大的影响，到使用天然植物的种子来充当化肥的变革历程。种棉花用化肥和农药，先是有利刺激产量，然后发现坏处，最后有个neem seeds诞生了，又有效又环保，最后大家都不用化肥了，政府也搞了一个什么water project。 本文难度系数不高。 |
| 英文原文阅读 |
Farmers all over the world are suffering from a "pesticides treadmill". Pests are growing resistant to their sprays. So farmers have to spray ever more to have any effect, or buy new, more expensive chemicals. But at the same time world cotton prices have stagnated. So farmers face a serious squeeze on their profits, combined with growing threats to their health from the pesticides. Is there another way? Maharashtra state is a centre of India's cotton growing -- much of it on small farms such as those in Wardha district. Here many insects live in the cotton fields. The most destructive, the American bollworm, is spreading and growing resistant to pyrethroids and other cheap pesticides. To save their crops, farmers are spraying typically 10-12 times in a single growing season. One farmer, Vittal Rao Karamore, says he sprayed his fields 14 times. Partly as a result, cotton farmers have become the biggest users of pesticides inIndia. Cotton occupies just 5% of the country's fields, says NRI entomologist Derek Russell, but those fields use more than half of the country's pesticides. This repeated spraying is very expensive, forcing many farmers into debt. And it is counter-productive, encouraging resistance to the chemicals among the pests. So the next year the farmer must spray even more. Spraying often pollutes drinking water and neighbouring crops, and is a health hazard for farmers and their families. It is also hard labour. To spray a hectare of cotton, the farmer carries equipment weighing about 40 kilograms for 10 kilometres up and down the rows in the hot sun. No wonder women such as Bindutai Bhoge, a widow from thevillageofKaranji Bhoge, employ men to do their spraying. So heavy spraying increases the vulnerability of farming communities to debt and poor health, while reducing the money the farmers have for other vital needs, such as educating their children. Farmers like Sulochana Balpande from Karanji Kaji village, who grows cotton partly to provide money to educate her two daughters. The tragedy is that much of this spraying is unnecessary. Researchers under Dr Keshav Kranthi of the Central Institute for Cotton Research in Nagpur, in collaboration with Derek Russell of the NRI, have spent several years investigating which pests cause real damage to the cotton plants, and when. They showed that the deadly bollworm is a migrant that only visits cotton fields briefly during most years. Constant spraying may simply kill other insects, who are harmless or even beneficial to the crop. So Dr Kranthi drew up simple rules for spraying, based on teaching farmers to recognise the different insects on their crops. Once farmers know which pests are dangerous and when they attack, they can confine their spraying to the critical moments when it will make a real difference, says the institute's director, Dr C.D. Mayee. Agricultural students from nearbyAkolaUniversitysuggested a new way of getting the message across, by staging street theatres at farmers' fairs. In one play, the cotton plant is represented as a drunk addicted to pesticides. Constant spraying is like giving alcohol to a drunk, they say. The plant will do better without. The project has been an astonishing success, says Derek Russell. Villagers now spray only once or twice a season -- and sometimes not at all. They are healthier and wealthier. And far from losing crops, their production has risen by 75%, because they have been able to spend more time and money on seeds and fertilisers. Today, Bindutai Bhoge walks the fields to check for pests rather than paying men to spray. And Vittal Rao Karamore, who planned to give up cotton growing, now only sprays once or twice a season and is in profit. He can spend his time weeding and watering his other crops -- and getting more rest. |
| 题型难度分析 | 第一篇的题型包括判断，选择，填空，整体难度不大。其中判断题是学生的弱项，正确率不是太高。主要考察学生对于是、非、无概念的清晰把握和区分。填空题相对来说是拿分题，建议可以先做。 |
| 题型技巧分析 |
是非无判断题是上半年度的重点题型，有顺序原则。 注意看清是TRUE还是YES, 本篇是TRUE/ FALSE/ NOT GIVEN 解题步骤： 1. 速读句子，找出考点词（容易有问题的部分）。考点词：比较级，最高级，数据（时间），程度副词，特殊形容词，绝对化的词（only, most, each, any, every, the same as等） 2. 排除考点词，在余下的词中找定位词，去原文定位。 3. 重点考察考点词是否有提及，是否正确。 TRUE的原则是同义替换，至少有一组近义词。 FALSE是题目和原文截然相反，不可共存，通常有至少一组反义词。 NOT GIVEN原文未提及，不做任何推断，尤其多考察题目的主语等名词在原文是否有提及。 4. 通读所有段落，依次寻找答案。因为每段都会有答案，因此现在所需要做的事情就是到每段去找答案。要注意在选出信息后，要在选出的段落上做上记号，以免浪费时间。 |
| 剑桥雅思推荐原文练习 | 剑7 Test 2 Passage 2 The True Cost of Food |
| Reading Passage 2 | |
| Title: | The Playful Nature of Scientists |
| Question types: |
信息段落配对 Which paragraph contains the following information? 多项选择（选两个） 填空 |
| 文章内容回顾 | 关于科学家的幽默的行为。讲述玩乐和科学之间的相同性，探索科学家的玩乐精神。本文难度系数大。 |
| 英文原文阅读 |
I've been working lately on a ludic theory of human nature. In case you haven't studied Latin in a while (perhaps not since several lifetimes ago), I hereby inform you that ludic means playful. I'm calling my theory a ludic theory because if I called it a playful theory you wouldn't take it seriously. (I'm trying hard to ignore the fact that the only common English derivative of ludic is ludicrous.) Heaven take pity on those few of us who try to take play seriously. It's hard to do. Play, by definition, is something that is not serious. I'm sure that's part of the reason why most serious scholars stay far away from the topic. The great classic scholarly book on human play is entitled Homo Ludens, which means literally Man the Player. It was written by Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, in 1938. It's a wonderful book and has inspired me greatly. But my own theory is quite different from Huizinga's. Huizinga stated clearly that his is a cultural theory of play, not a biological theory. My theory, in contrast, is fundamentally biological, though it is also cultural, because, in matters of human behavior, biology and culture are inextricably entwined. Another big difference is that Huizinga tended to equate play with contest and to focus on agonistic, or competitive aspects of play, while I hold that play is fundamentally noncompetitive. I can understand how someone such as Huizinga, steeped in Western cultural history, might view play primarily as contest. In my theory, contest is a morphing of play with something that is close to the opposite of play--a drive to beat and dominate others. When we combine these two opposites, play becomes more serious (and thereby more acceptable to contemporary adults) and domination becomes more playful--not entirely a bad thing, but not the same as pure play. In the remaining paragraphs here, I present a sketch of the ludic theory. In subsequent weekly posts I shall elaborate on specific aspects of the theory, presenting evidence along the way. [Some of what I shall present overlaps with ideas I published in a recent article-- Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence, in The American Journal of Play, 1 (#4), 2009, pp 476-522.] In most non-human mammals, play occurs almost entirely among the young of the species and seems clearly to serve the function of skill learning and practice. As I have noted in previous posts, young mammals, in play, practice the very skills that they must develop in order to make it into adulthood and to thrive and reproduce. Predators practice predation, as when tiger clubs stalk and pounce on bugs, wind-blown leaves, and each other. Prey animals practice getting away from predators, as when zebra colts dodge and dart in their playful frolicking and endless games of tag. Young males of many species practice fighting, taking turns pinning one another in their species-specific ways and getting out of pinned positions. Young females of at least some species practice nurturance, in playful care of young. We humans have inherited the basic youthful play characteristics of our animal ancestors, but in the course of our biological and cultural evolution we have elaborated upon them and created new functions. Playfulness in humans does not end when adulthood begins and it serves many functions beyond the learning of species-specific skills. Social play in all animals requires that all tendencies toward aggression and dominance be suppressed. This is especially true in playful fighting, which is one of the most common forms of animal play. The fundamental difference between a play fight and a real fight is that the former involves no intention to hurt, drive away, or dominate the other animal. A play fight between two young animals can only occur if both are willing partners. Anything that smacks of true aggression or tendency to dominate would cause the threatened animal to run away, and the play, with all its fun and opportunity for learning, would end. And so, in the course of natural selection, animals developed signals to let each other know that their playful attacks are not real attacks, and they developed, for purposes of play, self-restraints and means of self-handicapping to operate against any tendencies to dominate or hurt one another in play. We inherited these play-enabling signals and restraints from our primate ancestors, and then--through both culture and biological evolution--we built upon them. We brought playfulness and signals associated with it (such as laughter) into adulthood, and we used them to promote ways of cooperating and sharing with one another that surpass those of other mammals. I am going to argue, in my next post, that when we bring playfulness to bear in our social interactions we create a spirit of equality and personal freedom that allows us to overcome our equally human drive to dominate one another. Hunter-gatherer societies were especially successful in cultivating playfulness as a means of defeating aggression and dominance. Their way of life required close cooperation and sharing, of the sort that could easily be defeated by aggression and dominance. Their playful approach to social life apparently enabled them to survive, relatively peacefully, for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the invention of agriculture. In our culture today, play and humor are still forces for defeating aggression, dominance, and hierarchy, though we don't use them as effectively as hunter-gatherers did. Play, in any species, is done primarily for the fun of it, not to fill some felt survival need. A young animal or child playing may be learning, but it is not consciously learning; it is just having fun. I don't know if other animals have a perceptual sense of beauty, but it is easy to imagine how doing something just for the fun of it could, in humans, become doing something just for the beauty of it. Play is also, by definition, creative. It is not an automatic response to demands from outside, but is creative behavior deriving from within. Moreover, play is representative. A play fight is not a fight, but it represents a fight. Playful predation is not a hunt, but it represents a hunt. In humans, the representative power of play grew immensely. Human children--and adults, too--can represent not just fights and hunts, but truly anything in play. Play thereby provides a foundation for all of imagination. Fun, beauty, creativity, representation, imagination--these are the essences of art, music, literature, theoretical science, and (I will argue two weeks from now) religion. These activities, which characterize our species everywhere, make us human. They all originated biologically in play. Play is the biological germ, which we inherited from our animal ancestors, which grew in us to make us human. In animals, play is quite separate from productive behaviors. Playful predation and real predation are two different things. But in humans playfulness can blend with productivity. When productive work is suffused with the qualities of play--that is, with freedom, creativity, and imagination--we experience that work as play. Hunter-gatherers had a genius for keeping their productive work within the realm of play. In our culture today, those people who have the most freedom of choice and opportunity for creativity within their work are most likely to say they enjoy their work and regard it as play. This final point, drawn out, provides the most direct and clear functional line between animal and human play. But education in humans is far more than learning in other species. We are the cultural being, and education is the passing of culture from generation to generation. In previous posts I have already written about play as a vehicle for children's education, but I will have more to say in a future post about the ways by which animal play was modified, in humans, to become such a powerful force for education. |
| 题型难度分析 | 这篇文章的难度比第一篇的难度略高，除了细节配对和填空题之外，还有多选题，建议先做填空。 |
| 题型技巧分析 |
段落细节信息配对题 1. 无序 2. 注意有可能出现NB 3. 注意大量题目和原文的近义替换 段落细节配对难度较大，建议考生放在本篇文章所有题型的最后去做。做时注意切不可逐题去原文整篇文章搜寻答案，这样会导致文章来来回回看很多遍，耗时太长。 1. 划出所有题目的keywords, 同时考虑到有可能出现近义替换的词，有针对性的去原文寻找答案。比如：看到be conscious of立刻想到雅思高频近义替换是be aware of…, 看到reproduce想到copy。 2. 某些题目可以对题目进行细致的分析。平时通过精读多多熟悉文章结构安排，了解行文模式） 3. 做题时以文章为基准，每看一段，浏览题目中的keywords是否与其相关。 |
| 剑桥雅思推荐原文练习 | 剑4 Play is A Serious Business |
| Reading Passage 3 | |
| Title: | Cinema inUK |
| Question types: | 单项选择；判断；填空 |
| 文章内容回顾 | 讲述了在英国的电影院，电影出版商和电影制作者之间的博弈以及发展趋势，垄断等问题。难度系数中等。 |
| 英文原文阅读 |
TheUnited Kingdomhas had a major influence on modern cinema. The first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park,Londonin 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. It is generally regarded that the British film industry enjoyed a 'golden age' in the 1940s, led by the studios of J. Arthur Rank and Alexander Korda. The British directors Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean are among the most critically acclaimed of all-time,[1] with other important directors including Charlie Chaplin,[2] Michael Powell,[3] Carol Reed[4] and Ridley Scott.[5] Many British actors have achieved international fame and critical success, including Julie Andrews,[6] Richard Burton,[7] Michael Caine,[8] Charlie Chaplin,[9] Sean Connery,[10] Vivien Leigh,[11] David Niven,[12] Laurence Olivier,[13] Peter Sellers[14] and Kate Winslet.[15] Some of the most commercially successful films of all time have been produced in the United Kingdom, including the two highest-grossing film franchises (Harry Potter and James Bond).[16] Ealing Studios has a claim to being the oldest continuously working film studio facility in the world.[17] Despite a history of important and successful productions, the industry has often been characterised by a debate about its identity and the level of American and European influence. Many British films are co-productions with American producers, often using both British and American actors, and British actors feature regularly inHollywoodfilms. Many successful Hollywood films have been based on British people, stories or events, including Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean and the 'English Cycle' of Disney animated films.[18] In 2009 British films grossed around $2 billion worldwide and achieved a market share of around 7% globally and 17% in the United Kingdom.[19] UK box-office takings totalled £944 million in 2009, with around 173 million admissions.[19] The British Film Institute has produced a poll ranking what they consider to be the 100 greatest British films of all time, the BFI Top 100 British films.[20] The annual British Academy Film Awards hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts are the British equivalent of the Oscars.[21] |
| 题型难度分析 | 本篇文章还是以判断，单选作为主打题型，题型难度适中。单选是几乎每场考试都有的题型。 |
| 题型技巧分析 | 单选题，主要考察划定位词的能力和对原文句子paraphrase的能力。学会区分相似选项。近义词替换是单选和填空题的重点。 |
| 剑桥雅思推荐原文练习 | 剑6 Cinema |
|
考试趋势分析和备考指导： 1. 本次考试的题型相对简单，段落细节信息配对题量不多，判断题和单选占了主导地位。和上半年考试趋势基本相似。 2. 填空题此次出现了2组，是拿分题，考生应注意熟练快速定位能力的培养。 3. 话题在剑桥系列中都能找到清晰的影子，且话题和之前的考题也有相似性，所以雅思阅读的话题还是有规律可循的。 4. 考生应多关注每次考试机经，尤其是题型种类的趋势。 5. 本次没有考察heading题，不代表其重要性下降，heading依旧是主流题型之一，考生不应以一次的考题为主。 |