【福利赠书】不会方法，练再多GRE阅读成绩也就这么差了！！

相信接触过GRE考试的同学都知道GRE阅读可分为长阅读和短阅读，虽然长阅读在真正考试中占比不算大，也是很多同学会选择“适当放弃”的一项内容，但是对于目标分在325以上的同学来说，攻克长阅读势在必行。

 

今天小编请到新航道GRE团队，张妍老师在这里跟大家分享一些长阅读主旨题的解题小技巧。

 

长阅读本身篇幅较大，逻辑关系复杂，很多同学会发现读完整篇文章后只能隐约记住一些细节性内容，再看主旨题的选项更是毫无头绪。其实上过新航道课程的同学都知道张妍老师说过一个主旨题的公式，那么我们把它应用到长阅读上就是把握全文话题+分段关系。下面我们以两篇长阅读为例，看看如何正确解答主旨题长阅读。

Example 1

 

“Blues is for singing,” writes folk musicologist Paul Oliver, and “is not a form of folk song that stands up particularly well when written down.” A poet who wants to write blues can attempt to avoid this problem by poeticizing the form—but literary blues tend to read like bad poetry rather than like refined folk song. For Oliver, the true spirit of the blues inevitably eludes the self-conscious imitator. However, Langston Hughes, the first writer to grapple with these difficulties of blue poetry, in fact succeeded in producing poems that capture the quality of genuine, performed blues while remaining effective as poems. In inventing blues poetry, Hughes solved two problems: first, how to write blues lyrics in such a way that they work on the printed page, and second, how to exploit the blues form poetically without losing all sense of authenticity.

 

长阅读的段使用我们课上所说的结构性阅读法阅读（红线内容为必读内容）。根据划线内容，我们掌握的信息是：Hughes创造出了一种诗歌风格，不仅可以演绎出blue poetry,而且还可以保持诗歌本身的特质，以及他的做法。

 

一般来说长阅读的段都会体现出全文话题，所以在这里我们知道，下文肯定是围绕Langton Hughes的blue poetry的具体内容进行展开。

 

There are many styles of blues, but the distinction of importance to Hughes is between the genres referred to as “folk blues” and “classic blues.” Folk blues and classic blues are distinguished from one another by differences in performers (local talents versus touring professionals), patronage (local community versus mass audience), creation (improvised versus composed), and transmission (oral versus written). It has been a commonplace among critics that Hughes adopted the classic blues as the primary model for his blues poetry, and that he writes his best blues poetry when he tries least to imitate the folk blues. In this view, Hughes’ attempts to imitate the folk blues are too self-conscious, too determined to romanticize the African American experience, too intent on reproducing what he takes to be the quaint humor and naïve simplicity of the folk blues to be successful.

 

我们在阅读中间段落时要注意把握其与段的关系，这一段有两个重点信息：1. 区分“folk blues”和“classic blues”；2. 评论家普遍认为Hughes主要是采取classic blues作为诗歌的书写方法（注：最后一句话明显是对上一句的进一步解释说明，所以在考试时可以忽略不读，考生们在考试时一定要时刻注意把握句句关系）。

 

But a more realistic view is that by conveying his perceptions as a folk artist ought to—through an accumulation of details over the span of his blues oeuvre, rather than by overloading each poem with quaintness and naivety–Hughes made his most important contributions to the genre. His blues poems are in fact closer stylistically to the folk blues on which he modeled them than to the cultivated classic blues. Arnold Rampersad has observed that virtually all of the poems in the 1927 collection in which Hughes essentially originated blues poetry fall deliberatively within the “range of utterance” of common folk. This surely applies to “Young Gal’s Blues,” in which Hughes avoids the conventionally “ poetic” language and images that the subjects of death and love sometimes elicit in his ordinary lyric poetry. To see what Hughes’ blues poetry might have been like if he had truly adopted the classic blues as his model, one need only look to “Golden Brown Blues,” a song lyric Hughes wrote for composer W.C. Handy. Its images, allusions, and diction are conspicuously remote from the common “range of utterance.”

 

最后一段的的转折词“But”很明显的体现出对第二段内容的反驳，即从现实的观点来看，Hughes的诗歌风格更接近于“folk blues”，以及原因（注：该段落后文的信息明显是基于“His blues poems are in fact closer stylistically to the folk blues”这句话进行进一步的阐述，所以在作主旨题时可以暂时忽略不读）

The primary purpose of the passage is to

A. describe the influence of folk and classic blues on blues poetry

B. analyze the effect of African American culture on blues poetry

C. demonstrate that the language used in Hughes’ blues poetry is colloquial

D. defend Hughes’ blues poetry against criticism that it is derivative

E. refute an accepted view of Hughes’ blues poetry style

 

那我们现在来整理下上述内容，这篇文章主要谈论话题是Hughes的blue poetry，下文基于他的诗歌风格进行讨论，传统上认为他的诗歌风格主要是“classic blue”，但是现实的观点确认为他的诗歌风格更偏于“folk blue”。根据这些信息我们来看一些其主旨题，AB两个选项的内容并没有涉及到Hughes，主体话题信息不一致，直接排除。CD中的colloquial和derivative这两个内容我们在结构性阅读时并没有读到，排除。选项E中的内容符合我们刚刚总结的内容，故选E。

Example 2

 

Based on evidence from tree rings, pollen samples and other records, scientists have for a long time assumed that interglacials—warm interludes between ice ages—were as mild and uniform as the Holocene, the present interglacial, has been for all of its 8,000 to 10,000 years. But new research in Greenland has put this assumption into question.

 

根据上述方法，先结构性阅读段，得出全文主体信息，即先提出一个长期的假设（interglacials were as mild and uniform as Holocene），同时引出近期在格陵兰岛的研究去质疑这种假设。因此我们可知本文主体描述对象是这个new research。

 

Researchers on two teams, the Greenland Ice-Core Project (GRIP) and the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2), have analyzed two different cylinders of ice, each about two miles in depth, pulled up from the Greenland ice sheet. Such ice cores trap gases, bits of dust, and other chemicals that were present in the snow that fell over Greenland for thousands of years and then became compressed into ice. By studying these components, scientists have obtained a detailed archive of many aspects of climate, including air temperatures, snowfall, and concentrations of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere.

 

第二段介绍了new research的研究内容（two teams & 获得一些天气方面的信息）

 

Findings from the upper sections of the cores have confirmed what scientists already knew: climate during the last ice age fluctuated rapidly. But scientists were astonished by findings from the lower sections of the GRIP core, which provided a close look at an interglacial period other than our own, the Eemian interglacial, a period that lasted from 135,000 to 115,000 years ago. Data from GRIP seem to indicate that the Eemian climate swung at least as wildly as the climate of ice age periods.

 

第三段进一步阐述了研究的内容（upper sections & lower sections）

 

Researchers’ clues to the Eemian climate come from measurements of the ratios of two slightly different types of oxygen, isotopes oxygen-16 and oxygen-18, preserved in the GRIP core. These ratios register the fluctuations of air temperatures over the seasons and years. When the air was warm, vapor containing the heavier isotope, oxygen-18, condensed and formed precipitation, in the form of snow, more readily than did vapor containing oxygen-16. Thus, snow that fell during warmer periods contains proportionally more oxygen-18 than snow deposited during cold spells. Evidence of rapid climate shifts was also drawn from other sources, such as measurements of amounts of dust and calcium ions in the ice layers during cold periods: winds were strong, causing calcium-rich dust from loess deposits, which are composed of loose surface sediment, to blow across the ice sheet. Thus, differing amounts of dust in the layers also indicate changing climatic conditions.

 

第四段依旧是基于研究内容展开，主要是天气研究的证据来源（oxygen-16, oxygen-18, and other sources）

 

However, finds from the lower section of GISP 2 do not confirm those of GRIP. The wild climate swings shown by GRIP in the last interglacial are not seen in the GISP2 core. According to a GISP 2 scientist, the weight of flowing glacial ice above has stressed the lower sections of both cores. This may have deformed the lower ice, disrupting its annual layers and thereby causing the discrepancy between the records. Still, some climatologists believe GRIP’s record may be the more reliable of the two. It was drilled closer to a location called the ice divide, where stresses would have been lower, they say.

 

最后一段是关于研究的成果，两个team的研究结果不一致。

The passage is primarily concerned with

A. refuting certain scientific theories about Earth’s climatic history

B. outlining new findings concerning Earth’s climate during ice ages

C. discussing new research that may challenge a long-held scientific assumption about Earth’s climatic history

D. describing the climatic changes that occurred when Earth moved from an ice age into an interglacial period

E. reconciling conflicting evidence concerning climatic changes.

 

基于上述内容，我们可知这篇文章的主体信息是a new research in Greenland，它反驳了传统上关于间冰期的观点，以及该研究的内容、研究方式、以及成果。因此可知，该主旨题的正确答案是C。

根据上述的两个例子我们可知，在做长阅读主旨题时，我们需要善于选读，即仅仅读结构性语句，且注意句句间的关系。同时要整理好文章逻辑，分清段落和段落间的关系。在结合选项时要注意先保证主体信息一致，进而保证全文逻辑的一致性。

本文作者：张妍

新航道国际教育集团托福阅读学科带头人，新航道苏州学校GRE/GMAT学科带头人，全科阅读主讲，北美数学主讲，《GRE实考词汇1500》编著者。布里斯托大学硕士，雅思托福阅读满分。从业数年来不断地研究各类语言考试和致力于解决中国学生英文阅读的逻辑障碍，课堂上将学术研究技能和应试提分技能完美融合，培养阅读高分，GRE高分八百余人次。荣获新航道国际教育集团阅读授课大赛第三名。丰富的国外生活阅历和新颖的教学方法，帮助迅速提分的同时也锻炼了学生的思维能力，让英语学习不再只是一个应付考试的工具，而是另一扇体验世界的门窗。

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