[雅思机经]2017年6月3日雅思阅读真题回顾

考试日期

2017年6月3日

Reading Passage 1

Title

Decision making and happiness 决策制定与幸福

Question types

特征配对题 4题

TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN 4题

单选题 5题

文章内容回顾

本文讲述了一个社会现象：随着人们的选择越来越多，人们却没有变得越来越幸福。于是有一个科学家做了一个实验，去测试两类人，一类是maximisers, 一类是satisficers, 当他们在追求较好的选择时会有什么倾向。于是发现，maximisers往往会更加抑郁，更加不开心，因为他们会不断比较，不断纠结。作者在文中分析了maximisers这种心理产生的原因，并在较后给出了解决办法：如局限自己的选择等等。

1-4特征配对题

1. rated on… sale（实验名称）: both maximisers and satisficers

2. don’t spend much time to choose: satisfciers

3. maximisers

4. choose the most expensive product in the range: neither maximisers nor satisficers

5-8判断题

5. the wealthier the happier  FALSE

6. NOT GIVEN

7. losses hurt people more than gains  TRUE

8. men and women respond differently  NOT GIVEN

9-13单选题

9. 实验给的信息 C. how likely people to make good choices

10. 人们常常regret的原因 B. 选择越多，遗憾就越多

11. 文中一个theater ticket实验为了表明：D. 当人们投入较多时，就会避免lose

12. 作者建议人们如何去做？C. 为了减少选择的压力，limit the choices

13. 选一个标题：C. consequences of many choices

这是一篇典型的心理学类说明文，通过作对比的方式说明了某个心理特点，所以出题重点会放在二者之间的对比。一般心理学的文章会有实验，在*scan文章时要重点把握实验结果和结论。

相关英文原文阅读

Decision making and Happiness

A  Americans today choose among more options in more parts of life than has ever been possible before. To an extent, the opportunity to choose enhances our lives. It is only logical to think that if some choice is good, more is better; people who care about having infinite options will benefit from them, and those who do not can always just ignore the 273 versions of cereal they have never tried. Yet recent research strongly suggests that, psychologically, this assumption is wrong. Although some choice is undoubtedly better than none, more is not always better than less.

B  Recent research offers insight into why many people end up unhappy rather than pleased when their options expand. We began by making a distinction between maximizers (those who always aim to make the best possible choice) and satisficers (those who aim for good enough, whether or not better selections might be out there).

C  In particular, we composed a set of statements-the Maximization Scale-to diagnose people’s propensity to maximize. Then we had several thousand people rate themselves from 1 to 7 (from completely disagree to completely agree) on such statements as I never settle for second best. We also evaluated their sense of satisfaction with their decisions. We did not define a sharp cutoff to separate maximizers from satisficers, but in general, we think of individuals whose average scores are higher than 4 (the scale’s midpoint) as maximizers and those whose scores are lower than the midpoint as satisficers. People who score highest on the test-the greatest maximisers-engages in more product comparisons than the lowest scorers, both before and after they make purchasing decisions, and they take longer to decide what to buy. When satisficers find an item that meets their standards, they stop looking. But maximizers exert enormous effort to read labels, checking out consumer magazines and trying new products. They also spend more time comparing their purchasing decisions with those of others.

D  We found that the greatest maximizers are the least happy with the fruits of their efforts. When they compare themselves with others, they get little pleasure from finding out that they did better and substantial dissatisfaction from finding out that they did worse. They are more prone to experiencing regret after a purchase, and if their acquisition disappoints them, their sense of well-being takes longer to recover. They also tend to brood or ruminate more than satisficers do.

E  Does it follow that maximizers are less happy in general than satisficers? We tested this by having people fill out a variety of questionnaires known to be reliable indicators of well-being. As might be expected, individuals with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life and were less happy, less optimistic and more depressed than people with low maximization scores. Indeed, those with extreme maximization ratings had depression scores that placed them in the borderline clinical range.

F  Several factors explain why more choice is not always better than less, especially for maximizers. High among these are opportunity costs. The quality of any given option cannot be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the costs of making a selection is losing the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. Thus an opportunity cost of vacationing on the beach in Cape Cod might be missing the fabulous restaurants in the Napa Valley. Early decision-making research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people respond much more strongly to losses than gains. If we assume that opportunity costs reduce the overall desirability of the most preferred choice, then the more alternatives there are, the deeper our sense of loss will be and the less satisfaction we will derive from our ultimate decision.

G  The problem of opportunity costs will be worse for a maximizer than for a satisficer. The latter’s good enough philosophy can survive thoughts about opportunity costs. In addition, the good enough standard leads to much less searching and inspection of alternatives than ‘the maximizer’s best standard. With fewer choices under consideration, a person will have fewer opportunity costs to subtract.

H  Just as people feel sorrow about the opportunities they have forgone, they may also suffer regret about the option they settle on. My colleagues and I devised a scale to measure proneness to feeling regret, and we found that people with high sensitivity to regret are less happy, less satisfied with life, less optimistic and more depressed than those with low sensitivity. Not surprisingly, we also found that people with high regret sensitivity tend to be maximizers. Indeed, we think that worry over future regret is a major reason that individuals become maximizers. The only way to be sure you will not regret a decision is by making the best possible one. Unfortunately, the more options you have and the more opportunity costs you incur, the more likely you are to experience regret.

I  In a classic demonstration of the power of sunk costs, people were offered season subscriptions to a local theater company. Some were offered the tickets at full price and others at a discount. Then the researchers simply kept track of how often the ticket purchasers actually attended the plays over the course of the season. Full-price payers were more likely to show up at performances than discount payers. The reason for this, the investigators argued, was that the full-price payers would experience more regret if they did not use the tickets because not using the more costly tickets would constitute a bigger loss. To increase sense of happiness, we can decide to restrict our options when the decision is not crucial. For example, make a rule to visit no more than two stores when shopping for clothing.

题型难度分析

*篇的题型包括配对、判断和单选。单选难度适中，配对和判断有点难度，对时间把握能力要求较高。

题型技巧分析

对于特征配对题（即A/B/A&B/AB无）应该在文章中把相关信息的所属段落给定位到，因为这种配对题通常集中在文章某两三段，然后*浏览这两三段，较后结合题目答题。

对于题量少的判断题（4-5道），考生要警惕，因为往往题量越少，题目越难，尤其要分清FALSE和NOT GIVEN的区别。

单选题由题干和4个选项构成，基本题干可以用来定位，如果题干无法准确定位，从选项反推即可。正确选项一般是对文章的改写，注意同义转换，错误的选项有的是干扰项，非常容易误选，也有的是文章未提及的内容，应排除。一般题目难度不大，考生比较好定位到，但要注意选标题题一定要从全文主旨大意出发，注重对较后一段的理解。

剑桥雅思推荐原文练习

剑10 Test 1 Passage 3

Reading Passage 2

Title

Biomimetic Design 仿生物学

Question types

段落信息配对题 5题

人名观点配对题 5题

Summary填空题 3题

文章内容回顾

本文主要叙述了在很早之前人类就开始模仿nature来创造发明了很多新产品、新科技，但是随着工业化、科技、基因等技术的发展，人类逐渐觉得人类可以脱离自然了。但是文章中数个科学家都谈论到自己的诸多创造发明都来自于自然。尽管科学可能有些优势，比如恒温控制等，但是人类还是跟自然不可分割的。

14-18段落信息配对题（有NB）

14. 一个自然发明比实际看起来简单  C

15. 人们觉得可以脱离自然的原因  B

16. 一个产生于自然的invention  A

17. 事实上人类不可以脱离自然的原因  C

18. E

19-23人名观点配对题（可以NB）

19. B

20. 相比较自然还是有很多优势  D

21. 很早以前人们就依赖自然进行创造发明  A

22. B

23. C

24-26 Summary填空题

24. compared to that of…mound

25. use water to cool

26. 科学家现在使用fans来降温

相关英文原文阅读

Biomimetic Design

What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering. Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, knelt in the baking red sand of the Australian out back just south of Alice Springs and eased the right hind leg of a thorny devil into a dish of water.

A  Its back is completely drenched! Sure enough, after 30 seconds, water from the dish had wicked up the lizard’s leg and was glistening all over its prickly hide. In a few seconds more the water reached its mouth, and the lizard began to smack its jaws with evident satisfaction. It was, in essence, drinking through its foot. Given more time, the thorny devil can perform this same conjuring trick on a patch of damp sand-a vital competitive advantage in the desert. Parker had come here to discover precisely how it does this, not from purely biological interest, but with a concrete purpose in mind: to make a thorny devil-inspired device that will help people collect lifesaving water in the desert. The water’s spreading out incredibly fast! he said, as drops from his eyedropper fell onto the lizard’s back and vanished, like magic. Its skin is far more hydrophobic than I thought. There may well be hidden capillaries, channeling the water into the mouth.

B  Parker’s work is only a small part of an increasingly vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings, while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito’s proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.

C  Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken on one of the biggest challenges of all: to create a miniature robotic fly that is swift, small, and maneuverable enough for use in surveillance or search-and-rescue operations. Fearing made his own, one of which he held up with tweezers for me to see, a gossamer wand some 11 millimeters long and not much thicker than a cat’s whisker. Fearing has been forced to manufacture many of the other minute components of his fly in the same way, using a micromachining laser and a rapid prototyping system that allows him to design his minuscule parts in a computer, automatically cut and cure them overnight, and assemble them by hand the next day under a microscope.

D  With the microlaser he cuts the fly’s wings out of a two-micron polyester sheet so delicate that it crumples if you breathe on it and must be reinforced with carbon-fiber spars. The wings on his current model flap at 275 times per second - faster than the insect’s own wings- and make the blowfly’s signature buzz. Carbon fiber outperforms fly chitin, he said, with a trace of self-satisfaction. He pointed out a protective plastic box on the lab bench, which contained the fly-bot itself, a delicate, origami-like framework of black carbon fiber struts and hairlike wires that, not surprisingly, looks nothing like a really. A month later it achieved liftoff in a controlled flight on a boom. Fearing expects the fly-bot to hover in two or three years, and eventually to bank and dive with flylike virtuosity.

E  Stanford University roboticist Mark Cutkosky designed a gecko-inspired climber that he christened Stickybot. In reality, gecko feet aren’t sticky—they’re dry and smooth to the touch—and owe their remarkable adhesion to some two billion spatula-tipped filaments per square centimeter on their toe pads, each filament only a hundred nanometers thick. These filaments so small, in fact, that they interact at the molecular level with the surface on which the gecko walks, tapping into the low-level van der Waals forces generated by molecules’ fleeting positive and negative charges, which pull any two adjacent objects together. To make the toe pads for Stickybot, Cutkosky and doctoral student Sangbae Kim, the robot’s lead designer, produced a urethane fabric with tiny bristles that end in 30-micrometer points. Though not as flexible or adherent as the gecko itself, they hold the 500-gram robot on a vertical surface.

F  Cutkosky endowed his robot with seven-segmented toes that drag and release just like the lizard’s, and a gecko-like stride that snugs it to the wall. He also crafted Stickybot’s legs and feet with a process he calls shape deposition manufacturing (SDM), which combines a range metals, polymers, and fabrics to create the same smooth gradation from stiff to flexible that is present in the lizard’s limbs and absent in most man-made materials. SDM also allows him to embed actuators, sensors, and other specialized structures that make Stickybot climb better. Then he noticed in a paper on gecko anatomy that the lizard had branching tendons to distribute its weight evenly across the entire surface of its toes. Eureka. When I saw that, I thought, Wow, that’s great! He subsequently embedded a branching polyester cloth tendon in his robot’s limbs to distribute its load in the same way.

G  Stickybot now walks up vertical surfaces of glass, plastic, and glazed ceramictile, though it will be some time before it can keep up with a gecko. For the moment it can walk only on smooth surfaces, at a mere four centimeters per second, a fraction of the speed of its biological role model. The dry adhesive on Stickybot’s toes isn’t self-cleaning like the lizard’s either, so it rapidly clogs with dirt. There are a lot of things about the gecko that we simply had to ignore, Cutkosky says. Still, a number of real-world applications are in the offing. The Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA), which funds the project, has it in mind for surveillance: an automaton that could slink up a building and perch there for hours or days, monitoring the terrain below. Cutkosky hypothesizes a range of civilian uses. I’m trying to get robots to go places where they’ve never gone before, he told me. I would like to see Stickybot have a real-world function, whether it’s a toy or another application. Sure, it would be great if it eventually has a lifesaving or humanitarian role...

H  For all the power of the biomimetics paradigm, and the brilliant people who practice it, bio-inspiration has led to surprisingly few mass-produced products and arguably only one household word-Velcro, which was invented in 1948 by Swiss chemist George de Mestral, by copying the way cockleburs clung to his dog’s coat. In addition to Cutkosky’s lab, five other high-powered research teams are currently trying to mimic gecko adhesion, and so far none has come close to matching the lizard’s strong, directional, self-cleaning grip. Likewise, scientists have yet to meaningfully re-create the abalone nanostructure that accounts for the strength of its shell, and several well-funded biotech companies have gone bankrupt trying to make artificial spider silk.

题型难度分析

本篇文章题目难度较上一篇有所增加，近期考试几乎都有一篇是双道配对题，即一道段落信息配对再加上一道人名观点配对或类别特征配对等。通常双配对的文章为三篇文章中难度较大的，所以建议程度不太好的考生可以放在较后做。

题型技巧分析

对于段落信息配对题，一般先把题干的关键词（专有名词、特殊的名词等）全都圈出来，再判断大概在文章什么位置。由于此类题型是细节题，而且是无序的，所以难度比较大，建议考生放在后面做。

对于人名配对题，也是先把题干的关键词（专有名词、特殊的名词等）全都圈出来，再把选项人名在文中找出，然后*读人的观点，通常跟在think, argue, advocate, assert, state, suggest等跟着观点的词汇后，然后圈他们观点的关键词，再一一与题干配对。

对于Summary填空题一般把握三个关键信息：逻辑关系词，语法属性，定位。首先，观察空格前后语义间是否有逻辑关系的连接词；其次，题库空格处所填的语法属性；较后，根据顺序原则在空格前后找定位关键词回原文定位。

剑桥雅思推荐原文练习

剑10 Test 1 Passage 1

Reading Passage 3

Title

Ancient Viruses

Question types

段落信息配对题 7题

句子填空题 7题

文章内容回顾

文章主要讲了在阿拉斯加，北极地区，随着global warming的到来，除了气候变暖，海平面上升等有可能出现的问题以外，较大的危机可能是那些藏在glaciers and ice里的ancient viruses。作者分析冰川里可能隐藏的病毒，以及他们如何收集，如何确定它们的地理位置，以及它们可能引发的灾难，比如supervirus。

27-33段落信息配对题

27. 科学实验的提及  G

28. D

29. B

30. global warming可能带来的影响  A

31. E

32. 流感病毒的地理位置确定的原因  F

33. 病毒传播到ice的四种方法  C

34-40句子填空题

34. 病毒必须具有strong protein coast才能在极端条件下存活下来

35. influenza virus

36. 科学家C收集的两种方式：by drilling and melting

37. collective natural herd will diminish

38. 消灭病毒的自然过程叫做hibernation

39. 除了对人类、植物影响外，marine creatures也会受到影响

40. 新旧病毒结合产生supervirus

题型难度分析

生物类文章在雅思阅读考试中经常出现，本文难度适中。

题型技巧分析

对于段落信息配对题，一般先把题干的关键词（专有名词、特殊的名词等）全都圈出来，再判断大概在文章什么位置。由于此类题型是细节题，而且是无序的，所以难度比较大，建议考生放在后面做。

句子填空题一般难度不大，做题时应挑选特殊的名词作为定位词，注意and或but这种前后结构应根据其中一个去找另一个。题目顺序基本是按照文章的顺序。

剑桥雅思推荐原文练习

剑10 Test 4 Passage 3

考试趋势分析和备考指导：

本场雅思阅读考试2旧1新；两道段落信息配对题，一道人名配对题，一道单选题，一道判断题，一道summary填空题，一道句子填空题，没有LOH, 没有简答题，没有填图题，总体上还是符合2017年出题规律的，以配对、判断、summary为主，填空、选择为辅，淡化LOH。文章体裁还是社会科学论述文和自然科学说明文，话题涵盖心理、生物、自然，所以近期考试的考生在备考时要以主流题型的训练为主，平时的课外读物涵盖范围要广泛。