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雅思阅读Matching题解题方法

段落+相关信息

  • 浏览标题+首段
  • 浏览大题类型,确认解题顺序
  • 注意NB(多选,一般是最长的)
  • 细读信息,精准翻译,找关键词,关键词一般是:
  • 首末段对应词
  • 特殊词
  • statistical
  • demographics
  • 出现effects,末段可能大
  • 题目中有details/description一词的一般只对应段落中部例子
  • 举例子时,作者一般用:
  • For example
  • say
  • to think of
  • e. e.g.
  • such as /like
  • including。。。
  • Put another way
  • In other words
  • 通读文章各段,寻找关键字的同义词
  • 比较信息,选择答案

练习一:

PLAY IS A SERIOUS BUSINESS

 

Does play help develop bigger, better brains?

Bryant Furlow investigates

 

A Playing is a serious business. Children engrossed in a make-believe world, fox cubs play-fighting or kittens teasing a ball of string aren’t just having fun. Play may look like a carefree and exuberant way to pass the time before the hard work of adulthood comes along, but there’s much more to ir than that. For a start, play can even cost animals their lives. Eighty per cent of deaths among juvenile fur seals occur because playing pups fail to spot predators approaching. It is also extremely expensive in terms of energy. Playful young animals use around two or three per cent of their energy cavorting, and in children that figure can be closer to fifteen per cent. ‘Even two or three per cent is huge,’ says John Byers of Idaho University. ‘You just don’t find animals wasting energy like that’ he adds. There must be a reason.

 

B But if play is not dimply a developmental hiccup, as biologists once thought, why did it evolve? The latest idea suggests that play has evolved to build big brains. In other words, playing makes you intelligent. Playfulness, it seems, is common only among mammals, although a few of the larger-brained birds also indulge. Animals at play often use unique signs – tail- wagging in dogs, for example – to indicate that activity superficially resembling adult behaviour is not really in earnest. A popular explanation of play has been that it helps juveniles develop the skills they will need to hunt, mate and socialise as adults. Another has been that it allows young animals to get in shape for adult life by improving their respiratory endurance. Both these ideas have been questioned in recent years.

 

C Take the exercise theory. If play evolved to build muscle or as a kind of endurance training, then you would expect to see permanent benefits. Rut Byers points out that the benefits of increased exercise disappear rapidly after training stops, so any improvement in endurance resulting from juvenile play would be lost by adulthood. ‘If the function of play was to get into shape’, says Byers, ‘the optimum time for playing would depend on when it was most advantageous for the young of a particular species to do so. But it doesn’t work like that. Across species, play tends to peak about halfway through the suckling stage and then decline.

 

D Then there’s the skills-training hypothesis. At First glance, playing animals do appear to be practising the complex manoeuvres they will need in adulthood. But a closer inspection reveals this interpretation as too simplistic. In one study, behavioural ecologist Tim Caro, from the University of California, looked at the predatory play of kittens and their predatory behaviour when they reached adulthood. He found that the way the cats played had no significant effect on their hunting prowess in later life.

 

E Earlier this year, Sergio Pellis of Lethbridge University, Canada., reported that there is a strong positive link between brain size and playfulness among mammals in general. Comparing measurements for fifteen orders of mammal, he and his team found larger brains (for a given body size) are linked to greater playfulness. The converse was also found to be true. Robert Barton of Durham University believes that, because large brains are more sensitive to developmental stimuli than smaller brains, they require more play to help mould them for adulthood. ‘I concluded it’s to do with learning, and with the importance of environmental data to the brain during development,’ he says.

 

F According to Byers, the timing of the playful stage in young animals provides an important clue to what’s going on. If you plot the amount of time a juvenile devotes to play each day over the course of its development, you discover a pattern typically associated with a ‘sensitive period’ – a brief development window during which the brain can actually be modified in ways that are not possible earlier or later in life. Think of the relative ease with which young children – but not infants or adults – absorb language. Other researchers have found that play in cats, rats and mice are at its most intense just as this ‘window of opportunity’ reaches its peak.

 

G ‘People have not paid enough attention to the amount of the brain activated by play,’ says Marc Bekoff from Colorado University. Bekoff studied coyote pups at play and found that the kind of behaviour involved was markedly more variable and unpredictable than that of adults. Such behaviour activates many different parts of the brain, he reasons. Bekoff likens it to a behavioural kaleidoscope, with animals at play jumping rapidly between activities. ‘They use behaviour from a lot of different contexts – predation, aggression, reproduction/ he says. ‘Their developing brain is getting all sorts of stimulation,’

 

H Not only is more of the brain involved in play than was suspected, but it also seems to activate higher cognitive processes. ‘There’s enormous cognitive involvement in play,’ says Bekoff. He points out that play often involves complex assessments of playmates, ideas of reciprocity and the use of specialised signals and rules. He believes that play creates a brain that has greater behavioural flexibility and improved potential for learning later in life. The idea is backed up by the work of Stephen Siviy of Gettysburg College. Siviy studied how boutscf play affected the brain’s levels of a particular chemical associated with the stimulation and growth of nerve cells. He was surprised by the extent of the activation. ‘Play just lights everything up,’ he says. By allowing link-ups between brain areas that might not normally communicate with each other, p[ay may enhance creativity.

 

I What might further experimentation suggest about the way children are raised in many societies today? We already know that rat pups denied the chance to play grow smaller brain components and fail to develop the ability to apply social rules when they interact with their peer. With schooling beginning earlier and becoming increasingly exam-orientated, play is likely to get even less of a look-in. Who knows what the result of that will be?

 

Questions 27-32

Reading Passage 3 has nine paragraphs labelled A-I.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-I in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

 

the way play causes unusual connections in the brain which are beneficial

insights from recording how much time young animals spend playing

a description of the physical hazards that can accompany play

a description of the mental activities which are exercised and developed during play

the possible effects that a reduction in play opportunities will have on humans

the classes of animals for which play is important

 

  1. 人物+理论
  • 定位人名,显著标注,顺便去掉人的称谓,另外注意人多的段子
  • 细读理论,划出关键字
  • 回文中人名定位处,寻找
    • 引号中的直接引语,搞清楚到底是谁说的
    • 下列动词引导的宾语从句,引导人物观点的动词:
  • concede 承认
  • acknowledge 宣称
  • refute反驳
  • Predict 预测
  • Note 特别提到
  • Remark评论
  • Propose 提出
  • conclude 结论
  • Summarize 总结
  • Assert 断言
  • 同时注意这些词
  • also
  • …too ….as well
  • Another
  • 一般标志此人的第二个理论即将出现

 

  • 比照题目中和文中的关键字,注意同义转述
  • 判断答案,注意:一个人名,最多使用次数是三次

 

练习二:

Lost for Words

Many minority languages are on the danger list

 

In the Native American Navajo nation which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the native language is dying Most of its speakers are middle-aged or elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo the schools are run in English. Street signs, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time.

 

Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations-that’s one language lost every ten days. Never city shrunk at such a pace. ‘At the three or four languages dominating the world, ’says Mark Pagel, an evolution-ary biologist at the University of Reading. ‘It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult

To know:

 

Isolation breeds linguistic diversity: as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people. Only 250 languages have more than a million speakers, and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500.It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000 speakers, what makes a language endangered is not just the number of speakers, but how old they are, if it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Center, in Fairbanks.

 

Why do people reject the language of their parents? It begins with a crisis of confidence, when a small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealth-ier society, says Nicholas Ostler, of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bathe. ‘People lose faith in their culture,’ he says.’ When the next generation reaches their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old traditions.’

 

The change is not always voluntary. Quite often, governments try to kill off a minority language by banning its use in public or discouraging its use in schools, all to promote national unity. The former US policy of running Indian reservation schools in English, for example, effectively put languages such as Navajo on the danger list, But Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the Linguistics Department at the University of Chicago, argues that the deadliest weapon is not government policy but economic globalization.’ Native Americans have not lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic pressures,’ he says.” They cannot refuse to speak English if most commercial activity is in English,” But are languages worth saving? At the very least, there is a loss of data for the study of languages and their evolution, which relies on comparisons between languages, both living and dead. When an unwritten and unrecorded language disappears, it is lost to science.

 

Language is also intimately bound up with culture, so it may be difficult to preserve one without the other.’ If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something,’ Mufwene says.’ Moreover the loss of diversity may also deprive us of different ways of looking at the world,’ says pagel. There is mounting evidence that learning a language produces physiological changes in the brain.’ Your brain and mine are different from the brain of someone who speaks French, for instance.’ Pagel says, and this could affect our thoughts and perceptions.’ The patterns and connections we make among various concepts may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community’.

 

So despite linguists’ best efforts, many languages will disappear over the next century. But a growing interest in cultural identity may prevent the direst predictions from coming true.” The key to fostering diversity is for people to learn their ancestral tongue as well as the dominant language.’ Says Doug Whalen, founder and president of the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut.‘ Most of these languages will not survive without a large degree of bilingual-ism,’ he says . In New Zealand, classes for children have slowed the erosion of Maori and rekindled interest in the language. A similar approach in Hawaii has produced about 8,000 new speakers of Polynesian languages in the past few years. In California,’ apprentice’ programmer have provided life support to several indigenous languages. Volunteer ‘apprentices’ pair up with one of the last living speakers of a Native American tongue to learn a traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instruction exclusively in the endangered language. After about 300 hours of training they are generally sufficiently fluent to transmit the language to the next generation. But Mufwene says that preventing a language dying out is not the same as giving it new life by using it every day. ‘Preserving a language is more like preserving fruits in a jar’. He says.

 

However, preservation can bring a language back from the dead. There are examples of languages that have survived in written form and then been revived by later generations. But a written form is essential for this, so the mere possibility of revival has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems of writing where none existed before.

 

Questions 5-9

Look at the following statements (Questions 5-9) and the list of people in the box below.

Match each statement with the correct person A-E.

Write the appropriate letter A-E in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

5 Endangered languages cannot be saved unless people learn to speak more than one language.

6 Saving languages from extinction is not in itself a satisfactory goal.

7 The way we think may be determined by our language.

8 Young people often reject the established way of life in their community.

9 A change of language may mean a loss of traditional culture.

 

A Michael Krauss

B Salikoko Mufwene

C Nicholas Ostler

D Mark Pagel

E Doug Whalen

 

  1. 句首配句尾

一般来说按照顺序出题

找一个好定位的开始(或第一个)

不要先看选项

注意寻找同义词,一模一样是陷阱

解决一题过一遍选项

 

练习三:

GREYING POPULATION STAYS IN THE PINK

Elderly people are growing healthier, happier and more independent, say American scientists. The results of a 14-year study to be announced later this month reveal that the diseases associated with old age are afflicting fewer and fewer people and when they do strike, it is much later in life.

 

In the last 14 years, the National Long-term Health Care Survey has gathered data on the health and lifestyles of more than 20,000 men and women over 65. Researchers, now analysing the results of data gathered in 1994, say arthritis, high blood pressure and circulation problems -the major medical complaints in this age group – are troubling a smaller proportion every year. And the data confirms that the rate at which these diseases are declining continues to accelerate. Other diseases of old age – dementia, stroke, arteriosclerosis and emphysema – are also troubling fewer and fewer people.

 

‘It really raises the question of what should be considered normal ageing,’ says Kenneth Manton, a demographer from Duke University in North Carolina. He says the problems doctors accepted as normal in a 65-year-old in 1982 are often not appearing until people are 70 or 75.

 

Clearly, certain diseases are beating a retreat in the face of medical advances. But there may be other contributing factors. Improvements in childhood nutrition in the first quarter of the twentieth century, for example, gave today’s elderly people a better start in life than their predecessors.

 

On the downside, the data also reveals failures in public health that have caused surges in some illnesses. An increase in some cancers and bronchitis may reflect changing smoking habits and poorer air quality, say the researchers. ‘These may be subtle influences,’ says Manton, ‘but our subjects have been exposed to worse and worse pollution for over 60 years. It’s not surprising we see some effect.’

 

One interesting correlation Manton uncovered is that better-educated people are likely to live longer. For example, 65-year-old women with fewer than eight years of schooling are expected, on average, to live to 82. Those who continued their education live an extra seven years. Although some of this can be attributed to a higher income, Manton believes it is mainly because educated people seek more medical attention.

 

The survey also assessed how independent people over 65 were, and again found a striking trend. Almost 80% of those in the 1994 survey could complete everyday activities ranging from eating and dressing unaided to complex tasks such as cooking and managing their finances. That represents a significant drop in the number of disabled old people in the population. If the trends apparent in the United States 14 years ago had continued, researchers calculate there would be an additional one million disabled elderly people in today’s population. According to Manton, slowing the trend has saved the United States government’s Medicare system more than $200 billion, suggesting that the greying of America’s population may prove less of a financial burden than expected.

 

The increasing self-reliance of many elderly people is probably linked to a massive increase in the use of simple home medical aids. For instance, the use of raised toilet seats has more than doubled since the start of the study, and the use of bath seats has grown by more than 50%. These developments also bring some health benefits, according to a report from the MacArthur Foundation’s research group on successful ageing. The group found that those elderly people who were able to retain a sense of independence were more likely to stay healthy in old age.

 

Maintaining a level of daily physical activity may help mental functioning, says Carl Cotman, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Irvine. He found that rats that exercise on a treadmill have raised levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor coursing through their brains. Cotman believes this hormone, which keeps neurons functioning, may prevent the brains of active humans from deteriorating.

 

As part of the same study, Teresa Seeman, a social epidemiologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, found a connection between self-esteem and stress in people over 70. In laboratory simulations of challenging activities such as driving, those who felt in control of their lives pumped out lower levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. Chronically high levels of these hormones have been linked to heart disease.

 

But independence can have drawbacks. Seeman found that elderly people who felt emotionally isolated maintained higher levels of stress hormones even when asleep. The research suggests that older people fare best when they feel independent but know they can get help when they need it.

 

‘Like much research into ageing, these results support common sense,’ says Seeman. They also show that we may be underestimating the impact of these simple factors. ‘The sort of thing that your grandmother always told you turns out to be right on target,’ she says.

 

Questions 23-26
Look at the following cities (Questions 11-13) and the list of descriptions below.
Match each city with the correct description, A-F.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.

 

23 Home medical aids

24 Regular amounts of exercise

25 Feelings of control over life

26 Feelings of loneliness

 

List of Descriptions
A may cause heart disease.
B can be helped by hormone treatment.
C may cause rises in levels of stress hormones.
D have cost the United States government more than $200 billion.
E may help prevent mental decline.
F may get stronger at night.
G allow old people to be more independent.
H can reduce stress in difficult situations.

 

  1. 选各自特点

文中提到事物x和y,请问下列特点是

A.X only

B.Y only

C X+Y BOTH

D neither

 

解题窍门:

  • 对应文中三段
  • 注意连接词

 

表示共通点:

  • like
  • similar to
  • both
  • share
  • common points
  • same
  • also

 

表示不同点:

  • unlike
  • in contrast with
  • compared with
  • but
  • refute 反驳
  • contradict抵触

 

练习四:

Early Childhood Education

 

New Zealand’s National Party spokesman on education, Dr Lockwood Smith, recently visited the US and Britain. Here he reports on the findings of his trip and what they could mean for New Zealand’s education policy

 

A ‘Education To Be More’ was published last August. It was the report of the New Zealand Government’s Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group. The report argued for enhanced equity of access and better funding for childcare and early childhood education institutions. Unquestionably, that’s a real need; but since parents don’t normally send children to pre-schools until the age of three, are we missing out on the most important years of all?

 

B A 13-year study of early childhood development at Harvard University has shown that, by the age of three, most children have the potential to understand about 1000 words –most of the language they will use in ordinary conversation for the rest of their lives.

Furthermore, research has shown that while every child is born with a natural curiosity, it can be suppressed dramatically during the second and third years of life. Researchers claim that the human personality is formed during the first two years of life, and during the first three years children learn the basic skills they will use in all their later learning both at home and at school. Once over the age of three, children continue to expand on existing knowledge of the world.

 

C It is generally acknowledged that young people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds tend to do less well in our education system. That’s observed not just in New Zealand, but also in Australia, Britain and America. In an attempt to overcome that educational under-achievement, a nationwide programme called ‘Headstart’ was launched in the United States in 1965. A lot of money was poured into it. It took children into pre-school institutions at the age of three and was supposed to help the children of poorer families succeed in school.

 

Despite substantial funding, results have been disappointing. It is thought that there are two explanations for this. First, the programme began too late. Many children who entered it at the age of three were already behind their peers in language and measurable intelligence. Second, the parents were not involved. At the end of each day, ‘Headstart’ children returned to the same disadvantaged home environment.

 

D As a result of the growing research evidence of the importance of the first three years of a child’s life and the disappointing results from ‘Headstart’, a pilot programme was launched in Missouri in the US that focused on parents as the child’s first teachers. The ‘Missouri’ Programme was predicated on research showing that working with the family, rather than bypassing the parents, is the most effective way of helping children get off to the best possible start in life. The four-year pilot study included 380 families who were about to have their first child and who represented a cross-section of socio-economic status, age and family configurations. They included single-parent and two-parent families, families in which both parents worked, and families with either the mother or father at home.

 

The programme involved trained parent-educators visiting the parents’ home and working with the parent, or parents, and the child. Information on child development, and guidance on things to look for and expect as the child grows were provided, plus guidance in fostering the child’s intellectual, language, social and motor-skill development. Periodic check-ups of the child’s educational and sensory development (hearing and vision) were made to detect possible handicaps that interfere with growth and development. Medical problems were referred to professionals.

 

Parent-educators made personal visits to homes and monthly group meetings were held with other new parents to share experience and discuss topics of interest. Parent resource centres, located in school buildings, offered learning materials for families and facilitators for child care.

 

E At the age of three, the children who had been involved in the ‘Missouri’ programme were evaluated alongside a cross-section of children selected from the same range of socio-economic backgrounds and family situations, and also a random sample ofchildren that age. The results were phenomenal. By the age of three, the children in the programme were significantly more advanced in language development than their peers, had made greater strides in problem solvingand other intellectual skills, and were further along in social development. In fact, the average child on the programme was performing at the level of the top 15 to 20 per cent of their peers in such things as auditory comprehension, verbal ability and language ability.

 

Most important of all, the traditional measures of ‘risk’, such as parents’age and education, or whether they were a single parent, bore little or no relationship to the measures of achievement and language development. Children in the programme performed equally well regardless of socio-economic disadvantages. Child abuse was virtually eliminated. The one factor that was found to affect the child’s developmentwas family stress leading to a poor quality of parent-child interaction. That interaction was not necessarily bad in poorer families.

 

F These research findings are exciting. There is growing evidence in New Zealand that children from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are arriving at school less well developed and that our school system tends to perpetuate that disadvantage. The initiative outlined above could break that cycle of disadvantage. The concept of working with parents in their homes, or at their place of work, contrasts quite markedly with the report of the Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group. Their focus is on getting children and mothers access to childcare and institutionalized early childhood education. Education from the age of three to five is undoubtedly vital, but without a similar focus on parent education and on the vital importance of the first three years, some evidence indicates that it will not be enough to overcome educational inequity.

 

Question 5-10

Classify the following features as characterizing

 

A the ‘Headstart’ programme

B the ‘Missouri’ programme

C both the ‘Headstart’ and the ‘Missouri’ programmes

D neither the ‘Headstart’ nor the ‘Missouri’ programme

 

Write the correct letter A, B, C or Din boxes 5-10 on your answer sheet.

 

5 was administered to a variety of poor and wealthy families

6 continued with follow-up assistance in elementary schools

7 did not succeed in its aim

8 supplied many forms of support and training to parents

9 received insufficient funding

10 was designed to improve pre-schoolers’ educational development

 

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