The largest animal that ever lived on land or in water still exists. Not even the giant dinosaurs were as large as some whales. One sulphur-bottom whale caught in the Antarctic was 110 feet long, and weighed between 90 and 100 tons.

　　注:最高级和数字是阅读时关注的重点.

　　Whales can grow to such enormous size because their bodies are supported by the water. An animal that lives on land can only grow to a size that his legs can support, while a bird's size is limited by its wing size. A whale has none of these difficulties.

　　Millions of years ago, whales lived on land and walked on four legs. Today, whales still have small bones that are the remains of their hind legs, but these bones can only be seen on the inside of the whale. No one knows why whales left the land to live in the water. however, scientists can surmise that when the whales changed their environment, their bodies underwent a change -- taking on a more fish-like appearance. This new form. offered less resistance to the water,

　　enabling the whales to swim faster.

　　Despite their fish-like form, whales are not fish. A whale will drown, just as a man will, if it stays under water too long. When a whale is under water, it closes its nostrils tightly and holds its breath. The air in its lungs becomes very hot and full of water vapour. When the whale rises to the surface and exhales, its hot breath produces a column of water vapor that rises high in the air. A man produces the same effect when he exhales warm air on a cold morning.

　　注:转折关系是阅读时需重点关注的逻辑关系,阅读重点应该在despite后面所引导的信息.

　　Whales are classified as mammals because they bear their young, rather than laying eggs,, and because the mother whales give the babies milk. Like other mammals, whales have warm blood.Their blood stays at the same temperature, even when they move from hot to cold water. They keep warm in cold water because they have a thick layer of fat just under their skins. This fat is called blubber, and it is thicker on whales that spend their lives in cold water. Almost all land mammals, except man, have hair on their bodies to keep them warm, but whales, which have very few hairs, are kept warm by their fat.

　　注:因果关系,转折关系并存的句子作为考点的可能性很大，需重点关注及阅读.

　　Whales do not bear young more often than every two years. The births are usually single births, but there have been instances of whale twins Mother whales show a great deal of affection for their! young. If the baby whale is killed, the mother will stay close to it for a long time. The young grow very rapidly during their first three or four years. And, although no one is certain how long a whale lives, the normal life span is probably less than 100 years.

　　第二篇文章选自The New York Times.原文题目是Near Cambodia's Temple Ruins, a Devotion to Learning。这是一篇社会生活类的小新闻，难度不大。

　　Millions of tourists come here every year to visit the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, an influx that has helped transform what once resembled a small, laid-back village into a thriving and cosmopolitan town with thumping nightlife and more than 10,000 hotel rooms. But the explosion of the tourism industry here has also done something less predictable. Siem Reap, which had no universities a decade ago, is now Cambodia’s second-largest hub for higher education, after the capital, Phnom Penh.

　　全文首段呈现Angkor Wat过去和现在的强对比。第二句以but开头，引出核心话题,即伴随旅游业的发展，随之相关的教育业也发展起来。

　　The sons and daughters of impoverished rice farmers flock here to work as tour guides, receptionists, bartenders and waitresses. When their shifts are over, they study finance, English and accounting.“I never imagined that I could go to university,” said Hem Sophoan, a 31-year-old tour guide who is now studying for his second master’s degree. “There’s been so much change and opportunities for young people.”The establishment of five private universities here is helping to transform the work force in this part of Cambodia, one of Asia’s poorest countries.

　　第二段指出当地孩子是怎样半工半读的。其中大量直接引语可以略读。

　　Khim Borin, a 26-year-old tour guide by day and law student by night, says he wants to become a lawyer. But he sometimes has trouble staying awake in class during the high tourist season, when he spends hours scaling vertiginous temple steps and baking in the tropical sun.“I tell my friends, ‘Hit me if you see me falling asleep,”’ he said. The five universities in Siem Reap currently enroll more than 10,000 students. Most of the campuses, which are scattered around the town, are quiet during the day but come to life with the buzz of students’ motorcycles as soon as the sun sets.

　　第三段继续介绍孩子们的学习状况，尤其是在半工半读过程中遇到的困扰。

　　The United Nations and foreign aid organizations have had an oversize role in helping steer the country since the Khmer Rouge were driven from power more than three decades ago. But the symbiosis of work and study here came together without any master plan.

　　It was driven largely by supply and demand: universities opened to cater to the dreams of Cambodia’s youth. University administrators say 80 to 90 percent of the students hold full-time jobs.

　　第四段but指出这种教育形式的弊端。

　　Most students pay the annual tuition of $400 themselves. Luckier students get sponsorship from foreigners. On a recent evening, an Argentine insurance saleswoman on vacation here, Maria Theresa Landoni, went to the university to pay the tuition of a young woman who wanted to study tourism.

　　第五段以事实加例子的形式讲学费问题。

　　Ms. Landoni struck up a friendship with the driver of her tuk-tuk, the open-air motorized rickshaws popular here, and met his daughter during a visit to the family’s house. “They were very, very, very poor,” Ms. Landoni said. “This is a country that has suffered a lot.”Ms. Landoni said she agreed to pay one semester’s worth of fees for the daughter: $180. “I don’t have a lot of money,” Ms. Landoni said. “But I have enough for that.”

　　第六段通过例子告诉我们很多当地人的经济状况不好，供孩子读书非常不易。

　　Many graduates seem to have stayed with their employers and moved up, their degrees having made them better prospects for managerial roles. But it is too early to draw conclusions about whether the degrees are leading to better jobs. The six-year-old University of South-East Asia, for example, has had only two graduating classes, and they were small.

　　最后一段通过seem和but的强对比，作者对当地的这种教育形式持保留态度。

　　题目：

　　1. 细节题，考察对比细节，定位全文首段。

　　2. 细节题，审题时根据be attributed to，判断考察原因。

　　3. 细节题，考生定位到第五段即可。

　　4. 细节题，考生定位到第三段当中的强对比细节即可。

　　5. 主旨题，考生依据排除法可成功解题。

　　第三篇文章同样来自The New York Times，原文题目为The pocket calculator, near death.这是一篇介绍袖珍计算器的文章。

　　The pocket calculator has been relegated to the role of a graphic icon on digital screens rather than an object in its own right. But in the early 1970s, it was at the forefront of consumer technology.

　　文章首段讲袖珍计算器过去和现在在科技领域角色转换对比。

　　A pocket calculator was the closest that most 1970s consumers came to owning anything with computational power, even if all it could do was basic math. The Sinclair Executive was one of a cluster of pocket-size electronic calculators developed at the same time. The first one small enough to fit in a shirt pocket was the Busicom LE-120A Handy, introduced in Japan in early 1971.

　　第二段以事实加例子的结构呈现，抓住事实，即1970s的袖珍计算器还处在科技前沿。

　　When the Sinclair Executive was introduced in 1972 by the British entrepreneur Clive Sinclair, it was cheaper, slimmer and looked much slicker than the others, thanks to a gleaming black ABS plastic case designed by Mr. Sinclair's brother, Iain. Design magazine hailed it as "at once a conversation piece, a rich man's plaything and a functional business machine." Dozens of other manufacturers developed their own versions. The pinnacle of calculator design was the exquisite 1977 ET44, by Germany's Braun.

　　第三段继续介绍袖珍计算器在1970s的发展。

　　Culturally, the product peaked in 1981 when the German electro band Kraftwerk released a single titled "Pocket Calculator." "I am adding and subtracting," run the lyrics. "I'm controlling and composing. By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody."

　　第四段讲袖珍计算器在1981年的新发展。

　　As personal computers flooded onto the market in the 1980s, calculators, pocket-size and otherwise, seemed steadily less appealing. Clive Sinclair had already turned his attention to other inventions, starting with computing. By the middle of the decade, he moved on to transportation with the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle, which was designed with a single seat but no roof.

　　第五段讲计算机的普及对袖珍计算器发展的影响。

　　The pocket calculator is a victim of "Moore's Law," the theory that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip will roughly double every two years, increasing computing power at the same rate.

　　Even tiny digital devices have become so powerful that they can fulfill the functions of numerous products. Like any other product whose function can be replicated by an app, the pocket calculator is threatened with extinction. Digital devices fulfill their function just as effectively, and are more convenient because they do so many other things too.

　　最后两段讲袖珍计算器的发展受到同类电子产品发展的威胁，有面临消亡的危险。

　　题目：

　　1. 细节题，考察全文首段强对比细节。

　　2. 细节题，这类介绍事物发展进程的文章中first, introduce等引出的细节往往是考点。考生定位全文第二段即可。

　　3. 细节题，定位第三段，考察比较细节。

　　4. 细节题，考生可利用对大写人名这类专有名词的敏感度迅速定位。

　　5. 细节题，考察比较细节。考生可定位文章最后一段解题。

　　By Dorothy Spears (The New York Times)

　　Question 16-20: (郑玲华)

　　How much museumgoers know about art makes little difference in how they engage with exhibits, according to a study by a German cultural scholar who electronically measured which items caught visitors' attention and how they were emotionally affected. The scholar, Martin Trondle, also found that solitary visitors typically spent more time looking at art and that they experienced more emotions.

　　开篇第一句点题并总领全文，为艺术人文类话题，指出参观者对艺术的了解程度与他们在展览上欣赏的能力几无关系，according后内容为人物介绍，可略读。

　　Mr. Trondle and his team outfitted 576 volunteers with a glove equipped with GPS function to track their movement through the galleries of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland for two months beginning in June 2009. Sensors in the gloves measured physical evidence of emotional reactions, like heartbeat rates and sweat on their palms. Afterward, the volunteers were asked questions about where they had spent the most time, and about the feelings that particular works evoked.

　　第二段为例子段，通过Mr. Trondle与其团队所作的实验，以测得参观者游览时的反应，可略读节省时间。

　　Mr. Trondle found that there appeared to be little difference in engagement between visitors with a proficient knowledge of art and "people who are engineers and dentists." He said artists, critics and museum directors often focus on perhaps one work in a room, while visitors with moderate curiosity and interest tend to move from work to work and read text panels.

　　第三段为第二段实验的结果，证明了首段观点即参观者个人素养的高低对游览展品并没有影响。“proficient”一词在中口阅读中屡次出现，表示为熟悉、熟练，此处强调哪怕艺术修养极高，也无影响，加强说服力。

　　Mr. Trondle said his study, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, established for the first time that "there is a very strong correlation between aesthetic experience and bodily functions." He defined the art-affected state as a sense of immersion in a work, or of feeling addressed by it, concluding that museum-going is best done alone. Visitors tended to feel more stimulated by sculptures that impeded their progress through the galleries. "People want to trip over the art," he said.

　　第一句的后半句引号内文字为主旨句，即Mr. Trondle的实验得出的最终结论，因此第四段是文章的升华部分起始处。看到“concluding”之类的总结关键词需特别关注，一般含有核心内容。

　　Some experts are skeptical. "This technology is so new and so young," said Paul C. Ha, director of the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We don't know what we have yet."

　　第五段为专家对这类新观点提出反对意见与挑战，首句为主题句。

　　Bonnie Pitman, distinguished scholar in residence at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas, Dallas, an expert on the subject of visitor responses to art, said: "I'm not sure that just because you have more data, that gives you a better understanding of the very complicated set of issues involved in experiencing works of art." Referring to Mr. Trondle's belief that an elevated heart rate signals a more profound art experience, she said: "Those transcendent moments when you're just completely awash in the color and beauty of a great Pissarro or Sisley or Monet - those moments aren't necessarily going to raise your heart rate. They're going to slow you down."

　　第六段为第五段的例子段落，详细介绍了一名学者的反对意见，在此可以略读。

　　Given all of the recent attention on blockbuster exhibitions at vast museums, "you might assume that our future is not very rosy," said Roland Waspe, director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, a smaller museum with a range of paintings and sculptures dating from the Middle Ages to the present. He said the research suggested "we now have an advantage, because we see that, for an optimal art experience, museums have to be small, they have to be more empty, and they have to be, in the most positive sense, a place of contemplation."

　　最后一段为总结段，段落最后一句总结全文，表明最新实验对现在动辄豪华规模的大型展会提出反对与质疑，并提倡小型展览、小型博物馆等等，这种“缩小化”模式才能真正令参观者有所启迪。“blockbuster”一词曾在高口阅读中考过，今年出现在众口阅读中，值得引起大家的注意，该词原指“大片”，现在更对引申为大制作。最后一词“contemplation”一词也属高频词，为沉思之意。

　　15-20: 第五篇

　　第一段第一句虽为问句，但仍包含主题内容，指出文章主要描写喜欢贬低他人、否认他人价值之人。其余句子为描述句，可适当略读。最后一句“but”一词为转折词，转折词为关键词汇， 应对方式“看后不看前”，因此but之后的部分为重点，文中该句强调这类人可能是由于强烈的自卑感导致自己的不当行为。

　　第二段第一句为主题句，表明现在的趋势每况愈下，问题严重程度远超我们的认知。后半部分内容探讨了可能导致人们贬低他人、刻意为难的各种理由，如“bussiness culture”, “masculine” manamgement style, “job insecurity”等等因素，词汇略有难度，但总体不影响理解。本段中词汇较多、信息量较大，如“aggressive”一词，属中口高频词，指有进取心的、攻击性的，需要多加巩固。

　　第三段较短，做承上启下之用。

　　第四段为例子段，讲述若在实际中遇到这类人，正确的处理方式为何，最后部分为总结内容，需详读。

　　26-27：

　　本篇阅读由两段组成，主要讲述了Gracia如何通过新学的手语以及其他方法和班上的同学交流。

　　首段的前两句交代了Gracia所在班级的情况，从eleven other children可以得知该班共有12名学生，其中8名会使用手语。

　　文章从首段的第三句开始，着重介绍Gracia的情况。通过阅读首段，可以得知Gracia的老师并不希望Gracia在学习了手语后只用手语进行交流;她鼓励Gracia通过观察自己的嘴型，练习并掌握词语的发音。以上这些信息可以通过首段中的一系列关键语句得出：resolves to keep her voice inside，won’t settle for that，to see the shapes of the words and to practice them等。

　　文章的第二段转而介绍Gracia与班上其他同学交流时的一些情况，通过开头的Outside of class与首段衔接，并再次提示首段主要讲的是Gracia在课堂上学习、交流的情况。第二段的前半部分讲述了Gracia在使用新学的手语与同学进行交流时所遇到的困难，既：Gracia sends signals out slowly from her body，At times she sees nothing more than a rapid blur。

　　第二段的后半部分则讲述了Gracia在遇到上述困难时所采取的对策，既：Instead, she focuses on lips, as she had done at home。不过，文章在结尾处提到，Gracia所采取的该对策，用来与老师交流还行，但班上的同学更希望Gracia能够understand not lips but hands。

　　28-29：

　　本篇阅读出自Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English 3中的试卷原题，由两段组成。

　　首段的第一句作为引入，提出The search for the biological foundation of human culture inevitably leads to non-verbal communication，提示文章将围绕non-verbal communication展开。

　　后文继而提出两种对立的观点，由However一词区分，既：Intuition suggests that such communication has been an essential element of the evolution of humans as social beings和However, there is the opposite hypothesis that the evolution of non-verbal communication may in part be the result of our being thoroughly social entities。

　　文章的第二段提出需要通过多学科的角度(linguistics，biological anthropology and other fields)判断首段中两种观点的正误;该信息可从calls for an interdisciplinary effort to explore the processes involved这一关键语句中得出。

　　30：

　　很明显可以看出，这段文字是在推荐某本书籍，可从Neverthless I recommend the book highly这一关键语句中得出上述信息。