阅读部分

　　本次考试阅读部分难度中等，之前一直担心的结构复杂型科学类文章并没有出现，相反大家普遍感觉科学社科类文章比较正常。本次考试的历史双篇是关于黑人问题的文章，这个话题，包括道格拉斯的文章本身，之前的课程里都涉及过，算是正常的话题和主题。

　　第一篇：

　　This passage isadapted from Nikolai Gogol, The Mysterious Portrait, originally published in1842.

　　主要个讲一个画家的事情。他的professor觉得他画画过度注重外部，花里胡哨，教育他不要专注金钱方面。要注意艺术本身。画家本身对这一观点并不完全赞同，因为觉得还是要赚钱，否则养不活自己。

　　评价：本文情节部分略少，描述性语言占篇幅很大。最后一大段直接是画家inner monologue, 对professor以及art career 的一些思考，质疑，反思。大量rhetorical questions出现。词汇题比较简单。情节不复杂。主人公少，没有复杂人物关系链。主人公观点、态度均较好把握。属于比较容易的小说。

　　文章原文：

　　Young Chartkov was an artist with a talent that promised much: in flashes and moments his brush bespoke power of observation, understanding, a strong impulse to get closer to nature.

　　"Watch out, brother," his professor had told him more than once, "you have talent; it would be a sin to ruin it. But you're impatient. Some one thing entices you, some one thing takes your fancy—and you occupy yourself with it, and the rest can rot, you don't care about it, you don't even want to look at it. Watch out you don't turn into a fashionable painter. Even now your colors are beginning to cry a bit too loudly. Your drawing is imprecise, and sometimes quite weak, the line doesn't show; you go for fashionable lighting, which strikes the eye at once. Watch out or you'll fall right into the English type. Beware. You already feel drawn to the world: every so often I see a showy scarf on your neck, a glossy hat. . . It's enticing, you can start painting fashionable pictures, little portraits for money. But that doesn't develop talent, it ruins it. Be patient.Ponder over every work, drop showiness—let the others make money. You won't come out the loser."

　　The professor was partly right. Sometimes, indeed, our artist liked to carouse or play the dandy—in short, to show off his youth here and there. Yet, for all that, he was able to keep himself under control. At times he was able to forget everything and take up his brush, and had to tear himself away again as if from a beautiful, interrupted dream. His taste was developing noticeably. He still did not understand all the depth of Raphael, but was already carried away by the quick, broad stroke of Guido, paused before Titian's portraits, admired the Flemish school. 6 The dark surface obscuring the old paintings had not yet been entirely removed for him; yet he already perceived something in them, though inwardly he did not agree with his professor that the old masters surpassed us beyond reach; it even seemed to him that the nineteenth century was significantly ahead of them in certain things, that the imitation of nature as it was done now had become somehow brighter, livelier, closer; in short, he thought in this case as a young man thinks who already understands something and feels it in his proud inner consciousness. At times he became vexed when he saw how some foreign painter, a Frenchman or a German, sometimes not even a painter by vocation, with nothing but an accustomed hand, a quick brush, and bright colors, would produce a general stir and instantly amass a fortune. This would come to his mind not when, all immersed in his work, he forgot drinking and eating and the whole world, but when he would finally come hard up against necessity, when he had no money to buy brushes and paints, when the importunate landlord came ten times a day to demand the rent. Then his hungry imagination enviously pictured the lot of the rich painter; then a thought glimmered that often passes through a Russian head: to drop everything and go on a spree out of grief and to spite it all. And now he was almost in such a situation.

　　“Yes! be patient, be patient!" he said with vexation. "But patience finally runs out. Be patient! And on what money will I have dinner tomorrow? No one will lend to me. And if I were to go and sell all my paintings and drawings, I'd get twenty kopecks for the lot. They've been useful, of course, I feel that: it was not in vain that each of them was undertaken, in each of them I learned something. But what's the use? Sketches, attempts—and there will constantly be sketches, attempts, and no end to them. And who will buy them, if they don't know my name? And who needs drawings from the antique, or from life class, or my unfinished Love of Psyche, or a perspective of my room, or the portrait of my Nikita, though it's really better than the portraits of some fashionable painter? What is it all, in fact? Why do I suffer and toil over the ABC's like a student, when I could shine no worse than the others and have money as they do?”

　　第二篇：社科类

　　本文主要讲述了错误记忆对人的干扰。错误记忆是一种普遍存在的现象，无论是Ordinarymemory people，还是HSAM(high autobiographic memory人群)都会受到这种记忆误区的影响。

　　加利福尼亚大学的心理学家对此开展了调查研究。该调查将选取的样本按照Ordinary memory people 和HSAM人群分为两个小组。将很多具有混淆性的词作成列表展示给他们，一段时间后给抽走列表，考察两组记忆情况。结果显示两组人员均会犯记忆性错误。

　　但是该实验有一点没有给出结论即普通记忆人群和HSAM人群都用同样的方式思考，导致两者记忆程度不同的原因究竟是什么。这也正是促进该项研究继续进行的因素。

　　点评：本文在社科类文章中难度适中。Evidence-based题目中等难度。没有特别怪异的出题点。与平时上课讲解做题思路保持一致

　　文章原文：

　　The phenomenon of false memories is common to everybody — the party you’re certain you attended in high school, say, when you were actually home with the flu, but so many people have told you about it over the years that it’s made its way into your own memory cache. False memories can sometimes be a mere curiosity, but other times they have real implications. Innocent people have gone to jail when well-intentioned eyewitnesses testify to events that actually unfolded an entirely different way.

　　What’s long been a puzzle to memory scientists is whether some people may be more susceptible to false memories than others — and, by extension, whether some people with exceptionally good memories may be immune to them. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences answers both questions with a decisive no. False memories afflict everyone — even people with the best memories of all.

　　To conduct the study, a team led by psychologist Lawrence Patihis of the University of California, Irvine, recruited a sample group of people all of approximately the same age and divided them into two subgroups: those with ordinary memory and those with what is known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). You’ve met people like that before, and they can be downright eerie. They’re the ones who can tell you the exact date on which particular events happened — whether in their own lives or in the news — as well as all manner of minute additional details surrounding the event that most people would forget the second they happened.

　　Word recall was also hazy. The scientists showed participants word lists, then removed the lists and tested the subjects on words that had and hadn’t been included. The lists all contained so-called lures — words that would make subjects think of other, related ones. The words pillow, duvet and nap, for example, might lead to a false memory of seeing the word sleep. All of the participants in both groups fell for the lures, with at least eight such errors per person—though some tallied as many as 20. Both groups also performed unreliably when shown photographs and fed lures intended to make them think they’d seen details in the pictures they hadn’t. Here too, the HSAM subjects cooked up as many fake images as the ordinary folks.

　　“What I love about the study is how it communicates something that memory-distortion researchers have suspected for some time, that perhaps no one is immune to memory distortion,” said Patihis.

　　What the study doesn’t do, Patihis admits, is explain why HSAM people exist at all. Their prodigious recall is a matter of scientific fact, and one of the goals of the new work was to see if an innate resistance to manufactured memories might be one of the reasons. But on that score, the researchers came up empty.

　　“It rules something out,” Patihis said. “[HSAM individuals] probably reconstruct memories in the same way that ordinary people do. So now we have to think about how else we could explain it.” He and others will continue to look for that secret sauce that elevates superior recall over the ordinary kind. But for now, memory still appears to be fragile, malleable and prone to errors — for all of us.

　　第三篇：科学类

　　来自于2013年economist newspaper的beans’ talk。植物有地下网络，有危险的时候可以用来警告同类，研究者通过实验证明了这种现象，fungal hyphae在植物中充当了Wi-Fi的功能，如果一个豆类植物被aphids袭击，它会用这种真菌警告其他豆类危险的来临。根据Johnson之前的研究，豆类植物被蚜虫袭击时，会释放一种易挥发的化学物质，能irritate and repel 蚜虫并吸引吃蚜虫的wasps。但是它不知道植物直接能不能传输危险到来的信号。

　　评价：文章长度适中，结构清晰：提出问题-实验set-up-实验过程-实验结论，属于科学类典型实验文章结构。但是实验过程以及结论均不好理解。科学类生词偏多。又为第三篇文章，容易打乱学生做题的tempo。

　　文章原文：

　　THE idea that plants have developed a subterranean internet, which they use to raise the alarm when danger threatens, sounds more like the science-fiction of James Cameron’s film “Avatar” than any sort of science fact. But fact it seems to be, if work by David Johnson of the University of Aberdeen is anything to go by. For Dr Johnson believes he has shown that just such an internet, with fungal hyphae standing in for local Wi-Fi, alerts beanstalks to danger if one of their neighbors is attacked by aphids.

　　Dr Johnson knew from his own past work that when broad-bean plants are attacked by aphids they respond with volatile chemicals that both irritate the parasites and attract aphid-hunting wasps. He did not know, though, whether the message could spread, tomato-like, from plant to plant. So he set out to find out—and to do so in a way which would show if fungi were the messengers.

　　As they report in Ecology Letters, he and his colleagues set up eight “mesocosms”, each containing five beanstalks. The plants were allowed to grow for four months, and during this time every plant could interact with symbiotic fungi in the soil.

　　Not all of the beanstalks, though, had the same relationship with the fungi. In each mesocosm, one plant was surrounded by a mesh penetrated by holes half a micron across. Gaps that size are too small for either roots or hyphae to penetrate, but they do permit the passage of water and dissolved chemicals. Two plants were surrounded with a 40-micron mesh. This can be penetrated by hyphae but not by roots. The two remaining plants, one of which was at the center of the array, were left to grow unimpeded.

　　Five weeks after the experiment began, all the plants were covered by bags that allowed carbon dioxide, oxygen and water vapor in and out, but stopped the passage of larger molecules, of the sort a beanstalk might use for signaling. Then, four days from the end, one of the 40-micron meshes in each mesocosm was rotated to sever any hyphae that had penetrated it, and the central plant was then infested with aphids.

　　At the end of the experiment Dr Johnson and his team collected the air inside the bags, extracted any volatile chemicals in it by absorbing them into a special porous polymer, and tested those chemicals on both aphids (using the winged, rather than the wingless morphs) and wasps. Each insect was placed for five minutes in an apparatus that had two chambers, one of which contained a sample of the volatiles and the other an odorless control.

　　The researchers found, as they expected from their previous work, that when the volatiles came from an infested plant, wasps spent an average of 3½ minutes in the chamber containing them and 1½ in the other chamber. Aphids, conversely, spent 1¾ minutes in the volatiles’ chamber and 3¼ in the control. In other words, the volatiles from an infested plant attract wasps and repel aphids.

　　Crucially, the team got the same result in the case of uninfected plants that had been in uninterrupted hyphae contact with the infested one, but had had root contact blocked. If both hyphae and roots had been blocked throughout the experiment, though, the volatiles from uninfected plants actually attracted aphids (they spent 3½ minutes in the volatiles’ chamber), while the wasps were indifferent. The same pertained for the odor of uninfected plants whose hyphae connections had been allowed to develop, and then severed by the rotation of the mesh.

　　Broad beans, then, really do seem to be using their fungal symbionts as a communications network, warning their neighbors to take evasive action. Such a general response no doubt helps the plant first attacked by attracting yet more wasps to the area, and it helps the fungal messengers by preserving their leguminous hosts.

　　第四篇：历史双篇

　　第一篇选自1865年4月Frederich Douglass的演讲“What the Black Man Wants”.

　　第二篇选自1865年6月Richard H. Dana Jr.的演讲“To Consider the Subject ofRe-organization of the Rebel States.”

　　背景：某Bank 发布新政策，涉及侵犯黑人自由合法权利。

　　第一篇：道格拉斯开篇就直接谴责和声讨 Bank 的新政策。使“解放黑奴宣言”成为了笑话。进一步继续强调黑人合法权益。

　　第二篇：首段就对比了美国奴隶与antiquity奴隶的不同。提出那时的歧视与现在不同。那时race一致，所以其实奴隶也有艺术家，小说家，也可以有权利。而现在race种族不同。美国白人早已习惯了歧视文化，很难快速得到改变，不想和黑人平权，奴隶制的法律也不可能一时就被废除。

　　评论：第一篇文章由于是道格拉斯所著，所以作者立场容易抓。与平时上课重点强调的黑奴问题保持一致。第二篇文章作者身份为southerner, 所以在涉及Civil War 上面与道格拉斯立场有小偏差。第二篇文章主观点不好抓。第二篇文章题目难度较大。理解偏差的话失分会比较严重。Disposition 涉及词汇题了。讲过很多遍这个词的重要性了。

　　第五篇：科学类

　　选自“Gouldian Finches’ Head Colour Reflects TheirPersonality” 2013 by Ecologica

　　有一种鸟类，头的颜色是跟鸟的性格有关。有两个假设。头是黑色的鸟比头是红色的鸟来的没那么aggressive。第二个假设：红色的比黑色的更勇敢更愿意探索新事物。但也有可能正好相反，两个理由：红色的太显眼，不愿意冒险，黑色的鸟更愿意主动去找食物(因为红色的鸟是dominant bird，黑色不主动就没东西吃了)。做了三个实验证明假设的正确。第一个假设是对的，黑色头鸟没有那么aggressive，第二个假设的推测是对的，红色鸟没有那么愿意take risks以及尝试新奇。给出来的原因：红色太鲜明，容易被暴露。自然的原因导致这种结果。aggression和 take risks没有关系;他们的勇敢和冒险相关。

　　间剩余比较“可怜”，影响阅读质量。按顺序做题的同学，反而可能因此失分。Time management还是需要再敲黑板强调一下啦!!做不完题建议区域化解决最后一篇文章。图表题应该先完成。

　　数学部分

　　计算器部分的数学，应用题阅读难度稍微高一点。容易导致做不完题。非计算器部分比较简单。认真审题，不要出现粗心大意类的错误。

　　写作部分

　　Adapted from Harlan M. Krumholz, “Give the Data to the Peolpe” by The NewYork Times Company. Originally published February 2, 2014

　　本文主要讲讲数据公布用于进一步科学研究的重要性。从事实出发，讲到强生公司与自己团队的合作，再讲到data release 各种机构不愿意的原因，之后提到YODA和Medtroincs 之前的合作，后提到这一项目也并不是证明随便谁都能拿到released data。最后总结论点。结尾段tone 比较 decisive。

　　LAST week, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.

　　This is an extraordinary donation to society, and a reversal of the industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would lose value if exposed to public scrutiny.

　　Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be discovered or released.

　　Even when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made available. End users of research — patients, doctors and policy makers — are implicitly told by a single group of researchers to “take our word for it.” They are often forced to accept the report without the prospect of other independent scientists’ reproducing the findings — a violation of a central tenet of the scientific method.

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　　To be fair, the decision to share data is not easy. Companies worry that their competitors will benefit, that lawyers will take advantage, that incompetent scientists will misconstrue the data and come to mistaken conclusions. Researchers feel ownership of the data and may be reluctant to have others use it. So Johnson & Johnson, as well as companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Medtronic that have made more cautious moves toward transparency, deserve much credit. The more we share data, however, the more we find that many of these problems fail to materialize.

　　In 2011, YODA struck a deal with Medtronic to release all the data on one of its products — a device that stimulates the production of bone. At the time, questions had been raised about the device’s safety, including whether it caused cancer, and about the conflicts of interests of some of the company’s researchers. Medtronic made the unusual decision to respond to the debate by releasing the device’s data for independent review. We commissioned and then published two independent reviews of the data, and now have made them globally available.

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　　Interestingly, the reviews produced somewhat conflicting results. One found that the device was no better than a bone graft and might be associated with a slight increase in cancer, while the other found that the device was effective and the cancer risk inconclusive. To us these differences reinforce the value of open science: now the data are out there for further study.

　　This program doesn’t mean that just anyone can gain access to the data without disclosing how they intend to use it. We require those who want the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for commercial or legal purposes. Our intent is not to be tough gatekeepers, but to ensure that the data are used in a transparent way and contribute to overall scientific knowledge.

　　There are many benefits to this kind of sharing. It honors the contributions of the subjects and scientists who participated in the research. It is proof that an organization, whether it is part of industry or academia, wants to play a role as a good global citizen. It demonstrates that the organization has nothing to hide. And it enables scientists to use the data to learn new ways to help patients. Such an approach can even teach a company like Johnson & Johnson something it didn’t know about its own products.

　　点评：本文内容与措词难度适中。Reading维度会更好拿分。但是由于不是演讲类型文章，…比较不好分析。Reasoning 部分不太擅长的同学，就需要更多专注evidence部分的提取和分析啦。Rhetorical Devices 部分比较少。从word choice 部分下手会好写一点。总体来看，分析部分不是特别容易得分。希望同学们平时的写作练习和学习也不要忽略reasoning 部分的分析。