一、大意判断题
（一） 大意判断题的主要题目形式
不管是在阅读理解中还是在快速阅读的略读中，大意判断题的形式都是一致的，概括起来有以下几种形式：
1. 用idea一词对文章重要内容进行提问，要求在四个选项中确定与文章主要内容有关的一个选项。有时在idea前面加上修饰语如general, principal, main等。有时，这种提问方式也考察文章中具体某一段的大意。提问形式有：
1) The general idea of the passage is that _____. 2) The principal idea of the article is _____.
3) Which of the following best states the main idea of the passage? 4) The general idea of the passage is about _____. 2. 考题中用purpose一词提问，提问的形式有：
1) The main purpose of the passage is to _____. 2) The main purpose of the article is to _____. 3) The purpose of the passage is to discuss _____.
4) The main purpose of the passage is to inform readers of _____. 5) The main purpose of the letter is to _____.
6) The main purpose of the pamphlet is to provide information on _____. 3. 考题中用topic, subject & theme一词提问，提问形式有：
1) The main topic of the passage is _____. 2) The main theme of the passage is _____. 3) What is the main subject of the passage? 此外，还有可能用discuss等动词提问，如：
4) The passage mainly discusses the effects of _____.
4. 考题中要求给文章一个恰当的标题。短文没有标题，要求给文章确定一个标题。一般说来，文章的标题反映文章的大意，所以，能否正确确定短文的标题，是检验是否理解文章大意的一个重要手段。一般的提问方式为：
1) The best title for this passage is _____.
2) The best title for this passage would be ____.
3) The title that best expresses the idea of the passage is _____. 4) What is the best title of the passage? 5. 以介词with & about进行提问，如：
1) The passage is mainly concerned with _____. 2) This passage is mostly concerned with _____. 3) The passage is mainly about _____. 4) The passage is mostly about _____. 6. 使用各种相关动词进行发问，这种形式比较隐蔽，常用的动词包括：inform, advertise, concern, suggest等。提问方式如：
1) The passage mainly concerns _____. 2) The passage discusses the aim of _____. 3) The passage informs you how to _____. 4) The passage advertises overseas _____. 5) The author mainly discusses _____. (二) 寻找主旨大意的方法 （三）干扰项特征
一般说来，大意判断题的干扰项有以下三点特征：一是选项所反映的是文中局部信息，欲“以篇概全”，不可取；二是选项概括范围过宽，“大帽子”不可戴；三是选项提供的是无关信息，不考虑。 （四）四级练习
Passage One
How we look and how we appear to others probably worry us more when we are in our teens or early twenties than at any other time in our life. Few of us are content to accept ourselves as we are, and few are brave enough to ignore the trends of fashion.
Most fashion magazines or TV advertisements try to persuade us that we should dress in a certain way or behave in a certain manner. If we do, they tell us, we will be able to meet new people with confidence and deal with every situation confidently and without embarrassment. Changing fashion, of course, does not apply just to dress. A barber today does not cut a boy’s hair in the same way as he used to, and girls do not make up in the same way as their mothers and grandmothers did. The advertisers show us the latest fashionable styles and we are constantly under pressure to follow the fashion in case our friends think we are odd or dull.
What causes fashions to change? Sometimes convenience or practical necessity or just the fancy of an influential person can establish a fashion. Take hats, for example. In cold climate, early buildings were cold inside, so people wore hats indoors as well as outside. In recent times, the late President Kennedy caused a depression in the American hat industry by not wearing hats: more American men followed his example.
There is also a cyclical pattern in fashion. In the 1920s in Europe and America, short skirts became fashionable. After world War Two, they dropped to ankle length. Then they got shorter and shorter until the miniskirt was in fashion. After a few more years, skirts became longer again.
Today, society is much freer and easier than it used to be. It is no longer necessary to dress like everyone else. Within reason, you can dress as you like or do your hair the way you like instead of the way you should because it is the fashion. The popularity of jeans and the “untidy” look seems to be a reaction against the increasingly expensive fashions of the top fashion houses.
At the same time, appearance is still important in certain circumstances and then we must choose our clothes carefully. It would be foolish to go to an interview for a job in a law firm wearing jeans and a sweater; and it would be discourteous to visit some distinguished scholar looking as if we were going to the beach or a night club. However, you need never feel depressed if you don’t look like the latest fashion photo. Look around you and you’ll see that no one else does either! 1. Which is the main idea of the last paragraph? a. Care about appearance in formal situations. b. Fashion in formal and informal situations. c. Ignoring appearance in informal situations. d. Ignoring appearance in all situations.
Passage Two
PROOF AGAINST HEART ATTACKS
Does a drink a day keep heart attacks away? Over the past 20 years, numerous studies have found that moderate alcohol consumption—say, one or two beers, glasses of wine or cocktails daily—helps to prevent heart disease. Last week a report in the New England Journal of Medicine added strong new evidence in support of that theory. More important, the work provided the first solid indication of how alcohol works to protect the heart.
In the study, researchers from Boston’s Brigham and women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School compared the drinking habits of 340 men and women who had suffered recent heart attacks with those of healthy people of the same age and sex. The scientists found that people who sip one to three drinks a day are about half as likely to suffer heart attacks as non-drinkers are. The apparent source of the protection: those who drank alcohol had higher blood levels of high-density lipoproteins, the so-called good cholesterol, which is known to repel heart disease.
As evidence has mounted, some doctors have begun recommending a daily drink for patients of heart diseases. But most physicians are not ready to recommend a regular happy hour for everyone. The risks of teetotal ling are nothing compared with the dangers of too much alcohol, including high blood pressure, strokes, and liver troubles, not to mention violent behavior and traffic accidents. Moreover, some studies suggest that even moderate drinking may increase the incidence of breast and colon cancer. Until there is evidence that the
benefits of a daily dose of alcohol outweigh the risks, most people won’t be able to take a doctor’s prescription to the neighborhood bar or liquor store.
2. The main theme of this passage is _____.
a. the change in recent drinking habits
b. the connection between cancer and alcohol c. Whether moderate drinkers outlive nondrinkers d. Whether alcohol may be good for your health
Passage Three
With its radiant color and plantlike, the sea anemone looks more like a flower than an animal. More specifically, the sea anemone is formed quite like the flower for which it is named, with a body like a stem and tentacles like petals in brilliant shades of blue, green, pink, and red. Its diameter varies from about six millimeters in some species to more than ninety centimeters in the giant varieties of Australia. Like corals, hydras, and jellyfish, sea anemones are coelenterates. They can move slowly, but more often they attach the lower part of their cylindrical bodies to rocks, shells, or wharf pilings. The upper end of the sea anemone has a mouth surrounded by tentacles that the animal uses to capture its food. Stinging cells in the tentacles throw out tiny poison threads that paralyze other small sea animals. The tentacles then drag this prey into the sea anemone’s mouth. The food is digested in the large inner body cavity. When disturbed, a sea anemone retracts its tentacles and shortens its body so that it resembles develops a lump on a rock. Anemones may reproduce by forming eggs, dividing in half, or developing buds that grow and break off as independent animals. 3. Which of the following is the main topic of the passage?
a. The varieties of ocean life.
b. The characteristics of the sea anemone. c. A comparison of land and sea anemone. d. The defenses of coelenterates.
Passage Four
Ultralight airplanes are a recent development in aviation that provide what aviation enthusiasts have long been seeking: an inexpensive airplane that is easy to fly. The ultralight plane was born of the marriage of the hang glider and the go-kart engine around 1974, when John Moody mounted a 12-horsepower go-kart engine on his Icarus II hang glider.
Today’s ultralights are not just hang gliders with engines; they are “air recreation vehicles”. Modern ultralight planes use snowmobile engines that let them cruise at about 50 miles per hour, climb at about 500 feet per minute, and carry combined payloads of pilot and fuel up to about 200 pounds, which is about equal to an ultralight plane’s weight when empty. More than ten thousand ultralight planes were sold last year at prices ranging from $2,800 to $7,000. But the main reason for the increasing popularity of these aircraft is not that they are inexpensive, but that they are fun to fly.
The modern ultralight plane would look very familiar to the earliest pioneers of aviation. Otto Lilienthal made more than 2000 flights in Germany in the 10’s in what were actually hang gliders. Octave Chanute designed and built many early hang gliders. Augustus Herring, Chanute’s assistant, used these gliders as models for a glider that he built for himself. On this glider, Herring installed a compressed-air motor and flew 267 feet in 18. The Wright brother’s Flyer was the grandfather of today’s ultralight plane. The pilot sat right out in the open, just as in modern ultralights, and used controls that were much the same as those used in today’s machines.
Though most ultralight planes are used for pleasure flying, some are also used for crop dusting, aerial photography, and even military observation service. The likelihood is that further uses will be found for ultralight planes, but their greatest use will continue to be as air recreational vehicles. 4. The best title for this passage is _____.
a. The Flying Snowmobile
b. The History of Recent Aviation
c. How the Ultralight Plane Flies
d. The Ultralight Plane, a Recent Development Passage Five
Nature’s Gigantic Snow-plough
On January 10, 1962, an enormous piece of glacier broke away and tumbled town the side of a mountain in Peru. A mere seven minutes later, when cascading ice finally came to a stop ten miles down the mountain, it had taken the lives of 4,000 people.
This disaster is one of the most devastating examples of a very common event: an avalanche of snow or ice. Because it is extremely cold at very high altitudes, snow rarely melts. It just keeps piling up higher. Glaciers are eventually created when the weight of the snow is so great that the lower layers are pressed into solid ice. But most avalanches occur long before this happens. As snow accumulates on a steep slope, it reaches a critical point at which the slightest vibration will send it sliding into the valley below.
Even an avalanche of light power can be dangerous, but the Peruvian catastrophe was particularly terrible because it was caused by a heavy layer of ice. It is estimated that the ice that broke off weighted three million tons. As it crashed down the steep mountainside like a gigantic snow-plough, it swept up trees, boulders and tons of topsoil, and completely crushed and destroyed the six villages that lay in its path.
At present there is no way to predict or avoid such enormous avalanches, but, luckily, they are very rare. Scientists are constantly studying the smaller, more common avalanches, to try to understand what causes them. In the future, perhaps dangerous masses of snow and ice can be found and removed before they take human lives.
5. The passage is mostly about _____.
a. avalanches b. glaciers c. Peru d. Mountains Passage Six
Did you know that all human beings have a “comfort zone” regulating the distance they stand from someone when they talk? This distance varies in interesting ways among people of different cultures.
Greeks, others of the Eastern Mediterranean, and many of those from South America normally stand quite close together when they talk, often moving their faces even closer as they warm up in a conversation. North Americans find this awkward and often back away a few inches. Studies have found that they tend to feel most comfortable at about 21 inches apart. In much of Asia and Africa, there is even more space between two speakers in conversation. This greater space subtly lends an air of dignity and respect. This matter of space is nearly always unconscious, but it is interesting to observe.
This difference applies also to the closeness, with which people sit together, the extent to which they lean over one another in conversation, how they move as they argue or make an emphatic point. In the United States, for example, people try to keep their bodies apart even in crowded elevator. In Paris they take it as it comes.
Although North Americans have a relatively wide “comfort zone” for talking, they communicate a great deal with their hands—not only with gesture but also with touch. They put a sympathetic hand on a person’s shoulder to demonstrate warmth of feeling or an arm around him in sympathy; they nudge a man in the ribs to emphasize a funny story; they pat an arm in reassurance or stroke a child’s head for affection. To many people—especially those from Asia or the Moslem countries—such bodily contact is unwelcome, especially if inadvertently done with the left hand (The left hand carries no special significance in the U.S.. Many Americans are simply left-handed and use that hand more.). 6. The passage mainly concerns _____.
a. distance and bodily contact b. body language
c. cultural differences between the East and West d. hand signal
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