2018年4月26日雅思考试阅读回顾

P1 书评：城市的胜利 The Book Review: The Triumph of City

P2 西方戏剧的发展 The Origin of Western Theater

P3 拯救濒临消失的语言 Save Endangered Language

 

朗阁教师郝丹丹点评

1. 本次考试难度中等偏上。

2. 整体分析：涉及社会（P1）与历史（P2）及人文（P3）

3. 主要题型：本场考察了较多的填空题（15题），三篇文章均有出现，重点考察Summary填空（12题）。同时延续以往出题偏好，考察判断题（10题）。单选题（5题）和多选题（2题）在本场考试中均有出现。乱序配对题本场出现较少，仅在P2出现了段落细节配对（6题）。在本场考试中并未出现List of Headings 题型。

4. P1 书评：城市的胜利

参考答案：

填空：

1.disease

2.political

3.richer

4.economy

5.museum

6.property

7.personal contact

8.consumption

判断：

9.FALSE

10.TRUE

11.NOT GIVEN

12.TRUE

13.FALSE

（答案仅供参考）

文章大意：

一本书的节选，提到了几个城市的发展，并进行对比。

5.P2 西方戏剧的发展

参考答案：

段落细节配对：

14. B

15. A

16-19. 待补充

多选：

20、21. B C

22、23. A D

句子填空

24-26. 待补充

文章大意：

介绍了古代表演的特征，随后介绍了埃及和希腊戏剧的特点。

6. P3 拯救濒临消失的语言

参考答案待补充

 

参考文章：

Save Endangered Language

“Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearance of 90percent of the very field to which it is dedicated. “-Michael Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis ”.

A

Ten years ago Michael Krauss sent a shudder through the discipline of linguistics with his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be uttered within a century. Unless scientists and community leaders directed a worldwide effort to stabilize the decline of local languages, he warned, nine tenths of the linguistic diversity of humankind would probably be doomed to extinction. Krauss’s prediction was little more than an educated guess, but other respected linguists had been clanging out similar alarms. Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in the same journal issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had since passed into extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90 surviving Aboriginal languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups. The same was true for all but 20 of the 175 Native American languages spoken or remembered in the US., Krauss told a congressional panel in 1992.

B

Many experts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. To start, there is scientific self-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do with the limits of human speech, which are far from fully explored. Many researchers would like to know which structural elements of grammar and vocabulary—if any— are truly universal and probably therefore hardwired into the human brain. Other scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words that appear in otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these cases, the wider the portfolio of languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right answers.

C

Despite the near constant buzz in linguistics about endangered languages over the past 10 years, the field has accomplished depressingly little. “You would think that there would be some organized response to this dire situation,” some attempt to determine which language can be saved and which should be documented before they disappear, says Sarah G. Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “But there isn’t any such effort organized in the profession. It is only recently that it has become fashionable enough to work on endangered languages.” Six years ago, recalls Douglas H. Whalen of Yale University, “when I asked linguists who was raising money to deal with these problems, I mostly got blank stares.” So Whalen and a few other linguists founded the Endangered Languages Fund. In the five years to 2001 they were able to collect only $80,000 for research grants. A similar foundation in England, directed by Nicholas Ostler, has raised just $8,000 since 1995.

D

But there are encouraging signs that the field has turned a corner. The Volkswagen Foundation, a German charity, just issued its second round of grants totaling more than $2 million. It has created a multimedia archive at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house recordings, grammars, dictionaries and other data on endangered languages. To fill the archive, the foundation has dispatched field linguists to document Aweti (100 or so speakers in Brazil), Ega (about 300 speakers in Ivory Coast), Waima’a (a few hundred speakers in East Timor), and a dozen or so other languages unlikely to survive the century. The Ford Foundation has also edged into the arena. Its contributions helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice program created in 1992 by Leanne Hinton of Berkeley and Native Americans worried about the imminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in California. Fluent speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their native tongue through 360 hours of shared activities, spread over six months. So far about 5 teams have completed the program, Hinton says, transmitting at least some knowledge of 25 languages. “It’s too early to call this language revitalization,” Hinton admits. “In California the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the recruitment rate of young speakers. But at least we prolong the survival of the language.” That will give linguists more time to record these tongues before they vanish.

E

But the master-apprentice approach hasn’t caught on outside the U.S., and Hinton’s effort is a drop in the sea. At least 440 languages have been reduced to a mere handful of elders, according to the Ethnologue, a catalogue of languages produced by the Dallas-based group SIL International that comes closest to global coverage. For the vast majority of these languages, there is little or no record of their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or use in daily life. Even if a language has been fully documented, all that remains once it vanishes from active use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of features that the scientist was lucky and astute enough to capture. Linguists may be able to sketch an outline of the forgotten language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree, but little more. “How did people start conversations and talk to babies? How did husbands and wives converse?” Hinton asks. “Those are the first things you want to learn when you want to revitalize the language.”

H

Linguists agree that ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is multilingualism. Even uneducated people can learn several languages, as long as they start as children. Indeed, most people in the world speak more than one tongue, and in places such as Cameroon (279 languages), Papua New Guinea (823) and India (387) it is common to speak three or four distinct languages and a dialect or two as well. Most Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec, have a gut reaction that anyone speaking another language in front of them is committing an immoral act. You get the same reaction in Australia and Russia. It is no coincidence that these are the areas where languages are disappearing the fastest. The first step in saving dying languages is to persuade the world’s majorities to allow the minorities among them to speak with their own voices.

 

考试预测

1. 四月的考试重点基本都更集中于基础拿分的顺序题型，其中summary填空和判断题所占的题量都会超过20题，是考生备考的重点。选择题的出题因场次而异，有些场次完全不做考察，有些则有6-10题的考察。难度较大的段落细节配对和Heading题一般在一场考试中至少会出现一种，需要高分的同学考前应适当练习。
2. 下场考试的话题可能有科技类、环境类。
3. 重点浏览14-15年机经。

 

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