阅读及理解--抓主题.doc

抓主题思想是阅读理解的关键
阅读的主要目的在于检测考生阅读和理解成段的书面语言的能力。实际上，这种测试并非纯粹的单项测试，而是一种综合性的语言运用能力的测试，既检测考生应具有的多方面的语言知识和技能，又考查他们对语言文字的理解、分析、推理和鉴赏等方面的思维能力。
如何获取段落的主旨大意
针对主旨大意的阅读理解题
阅读的首要目的是看懂所读材料的主旨大意，阅读测试自然也以此作为测定考生阅读能力的主要标准。在针对主旨大意的阅读理解题中，大多数针对段落（或短文）的主题（subject），主题思想（main idea），题目（title）或目的（purpose）拟题。题型颇多，用词不尽相同，但所针对的都是段落（或短文）的主旨大意。
辨认主题句（topic sentence）
辨认主题句是获取段落主旨大意的一个有效的方法。凡表述段落主旨大意的句子叫主题句。这种句子一般具有三个特点：（1）表述的意思比较概括，相对其他句子来看，这种概括性更为明显；（2）句子结构较简单，多数都不采用长难句的形式；（3）段落中其它的句子必定是用来解释、支撑或扩展主题句所表述的主题思想（main idea）。
I. To grasp the main idea by identifying the topic sentence
Example 1
Passage: Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many contrasts .He was the son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with a love of literature, an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He made a fortune but lived a simple life, and although cheerful in company he was often sad in private. A love of mankind, he never had a wife or family to love him; a patriotic son of his native land, he died alone on foreign soil. He invented a new explosive, dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of mining and road building, but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his fellow men. During his useful life he often felt he was useless:“Alfred Nobel.”he once wrote of himself ,“ought to have been put to death by a kind doctor as soon as, with a cry, he entered life .”World-famous for his works he was never personally well known, for throughout his life he avoided publicity.“I do not see,”he once said ,“that I have deserved any fame and I have no taste for it.”But since his death, his name has brought fame and glory to others.
Question: The passage chiefly states
A. that Alfred Nobel led a useful life
B. why he acted contrary to his own wishes
C. how he brought fame and glory to others
D. that all his life was full of contradictions

Example 2
Passage ;sometime certain eras or events from our past receive little or no attention. This might be because there is little information available on these subjects, or because the subjects are controversial or shameful, and we are reluctant {不愿}to face them。But when we ignore or deny a part of our past， we fail to learn the lessons that history can teach us， and we neglect people who are part of that history。 There people ---and their history—can become “invisible”, and in time we can forget that they ought to be part of what we think of as history.
Question: What is the author’s main point?
A. History tends to repeat itself.
B. Historians should not write about disputed matters .
C. More people should study history.
D. No part of history should be ignored.

Example 3
Passage: If you were planning to buy a television set, the following advertisement would attract your attention:“Color TV， only $79. Two day sale. Hurry. ”However, when you go to the store ready to buy ,you may discover that the advertised sets are sold out.. But the salesman is quick to reassure you that he has another model, a more reliable set which is “just right for you。”It costs $359. This sales trick is called “bait(引诱) and switch ”.Buyers are baited with a sale offer, and then they are switched to another more costly item. Buying items on sale requires careful consideration of the merchandise and the reasons for the sale.
Question: The main purpose of passage is
A. to advertise color TV for sale
B. to reveal a sales trick
C. to give the customer good advice about purchasing
D .to argue against “bait and switch”

Example 4
Passage : Most people do not think of fishes and other marine animals as having voices, and of those who are aware of the fact that many of them can “speak ”,few understand that these “conversations” have significance. Actually , their talk may be as meaningful as much of our own. For example, some sea animals use their “voices” to locate their food in the ocean expanses; other , to let their fellows know of their where—abouts; and still others, as a means of obtaining mates. Sometimes, “speaking” may even mean the difference between life and death to a marine animal. It appears in some cases that when a predator {捕食者} approaches, the prey {被捕食者} depends on no more than the sounds it makes to escape.
Question: The main thought of the paragraph is that
A. fish sounds are apparently random
B. the noises produced by fish are” meaningful”
C. “speaking ”may mean the difference between life and death to a sea animal
D. “fish voices ” have no significance
Example 5
Passage : The world is full of poisonous substances. Many of them occur quite naturally, independently of any action of man . Thus the vapour from an active volcano may contain so much sulphur that plants cannot grow nearby . Rivers flowing through forests may became deoxygenated because so much natural organic material is deposited in them . Mercury, occurring naturally in the ocean, may reach such high levels that large numbers of fish are killed .
Question: Which sentence best expresses the main idea of the paragraph?
A. we can see natural poisonous substances everywhere
B. Many of poisonous substances are not man-made.
C. There are always masses of poisonous substance in rivers and forests.
D. Rivers may be deoxygenated, and large numbers of fish may be killed.

Example 6
Passage :The nature of technology has always been determined by man’s discovery and manipulation {使用} of materials. For a million years stone and bone provided the materials. for tools and weapons, such as knives, axes and spears. With the Iron Age man learned to make more sophisticated tools and deadlier weapons. The great advance in transport in the 19th century were made possible by the discovery of steel. Today, advances in field such as medicine and space technology are dependent on the use of plastics.
Question: Which title is the best one for the passage?
A. A Short History of Weapons
B, Advances in Materials
C. What Determines the Nature of Technology
E. The Important Uses of Plastics

Example 7
Passage: Nomads are people who have no fixed homes but move regularly from place to place. Hunting peoples, such as Bushmen, Pygmies, and Australian aborigines {土著人},move in search of larger animal populations. Pastoral {游牧}nomads, in the Middle East and Central Asia, move with the seasons to find pasture {牧草}for their animals. Other pastoral peoples, also dependent on the seasons, cultivate crops but are nomadic when their crops require no attention. Some agricultural workers, in the United States particularly, follow a nomadic life also, migrating northward during the growing and harvesting season and returning to the warmer southern regions in the winter. Generally speaking the nomads’ movements are regulated by the seasons and the effects of the seasons on plant and animal life.
Question: The main subject of the passage is
A. migrating peoples
B. hunting peoples
C. pastoral nomads
D. the effects of the seasons on plant and animal life

Example 8
Passage: Human beings have adapted to the physical world not by changing their physical nature, but by adjusting their society. Animals and plants have made adjustments, over long periods, by the development of radical changes in their very organisms, Hereditary differences meet needs of various environments. But among humans, differences in head form and in other physical features are not, in most cases, clearly adaptive. Nor is it that mental capacities of races are different. As far as we know, the races are equally intelligent and equally capable of solving their problems of living together. The varying ways of life, it seems. Are social and learned differences and not physical and inherited differences. It stands to reason, therefore, that man’s adjustment to his surroundings should be studied in custom and institution, not in anatomy {身体结构} and neural {神经 } structure.
Question:
According to the passage, anyone who wanted to study human adaptation to environment should do so through the field of
A. physics B. Sociology C. Geology D. Medicine

Example 9
Passage: Martin Luther King was an ordained minister from Atlanta, Georgia. He gained prominence as a civil-rights leader during the 1950’s. In 1956 he led a boycott {抵制} by Montgomery, Alabama, blacks against segregated {种族隔离}city bus lines. After his success in Montgomery, he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This gave him a base to expand the civil-rights movement in the South and throughout the nation. In 1963 he organized a massive civil-rights march on Washington, D.C. which brought together more than 200,000 people. It was there that he delivered his famous “ I Have a Dream” speech. In the years that followed, King broadened his political involvement. He continued to work for civil rights, but he also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam war. His criticism of the war was based on his belief that the war was contributing to poverty in America. He argued that our valuable national resources were being used to finance the war rather than to fight poverty at home. In 1968 he planned another large-scale march to Washington. It was to called the poor people ’s march. He never fulfilled his wish though. In April of 1968 he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to help settle a strike by sanitation workers. While there he was assassinated {暗杀}.

Question:
The best title for the passage would be
A. A Massive Civil-Rights March on Washington
B. “I Have a Dream”
C. Martin Luther King’s Achievements As a Civil-Right Leader
D. Martin Luther King’s Tragic Death

Example 10
Passage: One phase of the business cycle is the expansion phase. This phase is a two-fold one, including recovery and prosperity. During the recovery period there is ever-growing expansion of existing facilities, and new facilities for production are created . More businesses are created and older ones expanded. Improvements of various kinds are made. there is an ever-increasing optimism about the future of economic growth, Much labour is employed. More raw materials are required. As one part of the economy develops, other parts are affected. For example, a great expansion in automobiles results in an expansion of the steel, glass, and rubber industries are stimulated, demand for workers and suppliers of raw materials including farmers. This increases purchasing power and the volume of goods bought and sold. Thus prosperity is diffused among the various parts of the population. This prosperity period may continue to rise and rise without an apparent end. However, a time comes when this phase reaches a peak and stops moving up wards. This is the end of the expansion phase.
Question: the title below that best expresses the ideas of this passage is
A. The Business Cycle B. The Recovery Stage
C. Attaining Prosperity D. An Expansion Society E. The Period of Good Times

II. To grasp the main idea by writing a mental headline or title.
(A quick way to do this is: (1) Decide the person, place, or thing which is the subject of the reading passage. The subject can be spmething abstract, suxh as an idea. It can be a process, or something in motion, for which no single-word synonym exists. This person, place,thing,idea, or process then becomes the subject of the headline or title. (2) Decide the most important thing that is being said about the subject. Either the subject must be doing something,or something is being done to it. This action becomes the verb of the mental headline or title. )

Example 11
Venezuela normally ranks second to the United States in petroleum production. Most of its production occurs around the shores of Lake Maracaibo; although recent discoveries near the mouth and middle course of the Orinoco River are important. Soviet oil production is concentrated on the western slopes of the Caspian Sea near Baku and Grozny, and near Ufa in the Volgan River Valley and on the western slopes of The Ural Mountains. Iraq, Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrein, Qatar, the Neutral Zone and Turkey together produce about one-fourth of the world’s petroleum. Most of the remainder of the world’s oil is produced in Indonesia-Mexica, and Romania. Many other countries produce smaller amounts, but they are generally insignificant in their overall contribution to the world oil picture.
According to the whole text, we may decide:
(1) The subject of this passage is petroleum (oil) production
(2) The most important thing about it is “different in amount in the countries mentioned”
So our mental headline would be:
Petroleum production is different among the countries
Petroleum production has different ranks in the world

Question: The best title for the passage is
A. oil- Producing Areas
B. Irregular Distribution of Petroleum in the World
C. Different contribution to the world Oil Production
D. Overall Contributions to the World Oil Picture
E. The United States-the First Ranking Producer of Petroleum

Example 12
If you work as a soda jerker (冷饮店售货员) you will, of course, not need much skill in expressing yourself to be effective. If you work on a machine, you ability to express yourself will be of little importance. But as soon as you move one step up from the bottom your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken or the written word. And further away your job is from manual work, the larger the organization of which you are employee, the more important it will be that you know how to convey your thoughts in writing or speaking. In the very large business organization, whether it is the government, the large corporation, or the Army, this ability to express oneself is perhaps the most important of all the skills a man can possess.

According to the whole text , we may decide:
(1) The subject of this passage is the ability to express oneself.
(2) The most important thing abut it is the dependence on the kinds of jobs.
So our mental headline would be:
Your ability to expressing oneself depends on your job How much skill in expressing oneself one needs depends on what kind of job he does.
Question:
The title that best expresses the main idea of this passage is
A. How to Be an Employee
B. The Language Competence Needed in the Jobs
C. Your Effectiveness Depends on Your Ability
D. Be Good at Expressing Yourself

Example 13
The average population density of the world is 47 persons per square mile. Continental densities range from no permanent inhabitants in Antarctica to 211 per square mile in Europe. In the western hemisphere, population densities range from about 4 per square mile in Canada to 675 per square mile in Iceland to 831 per square mile in the Netherlands. Within countries the