2009年考研英语阅读真题来源分析 [复制链接]

    2009年考研尘埃方才落定，2010年考研销烟再起，古人云以史为镜可以知兴衰，今日哈尔滨新东方考研教研组李春亮，赵春雨，朱殿勇老师对考研真题进行了详尽的分析比较，希望能给各位2010年的考生起到明镜的作用！（注：红色文字为原文本有但是被考研阅读文章删除的部分，黑色文字为考研阅读原文部分，蓝色文字为考研阅读文章将来源文章的单词替换的部分）
考研英语扩展阅读系列（经济学人、科学美国人、纽约时报、时代周刊）
参考网址http://www.chuanmeiren.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=9494

2009年考研英语阅读理解第一篇
摘自纽约时报（http://www.nytimes.com/）2008年5月4日，原文标题为Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
链接地址：http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04unbox.html
Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

By JANET RAE-DUPREE
Published: May 4, 2008

HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”

All of us work through problems in ways of which we’re unaware, she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought. “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything,” explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will...” and Ms. Markova’s business partner. “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity（commonness）. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”

This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.

“I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” Ms. Ryan says. “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.”

Ms. Ryan and Ms. Markova have found what they call three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.

“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will... .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

She recommends practicing a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements.

“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

Simultaneously, take a look at how colleagues approach challenges, Ms. Markova suggests. We tend to believe that those who think the way we do are smarter than those who don’t. That can be fatal in business, particularly for executives who surround themselves with like-thinkers. If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are strong that the company lacks intellectual diversity.

“Try lacing your hands together,” Ms. Markova says. “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.”

AFTER the churn of confusion, she says, the brain begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections if the process is repeated enough.

But if, during creation of that new habit, the “Great Decider” steps in to protest against taking the unfamiliar path, “you get convergence and we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” she says.

“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”

Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.

还有3篇呢，新东方又是怎么解析的呢？

2009年考研英语阅读理解第二篇
摘自科学美国人（http://www.sciam.com/）2008年11月14日，原文标题为Who's Your Daddy? The Answer May Be at the Drugstore。
链接地址：
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=who-is-your-daddy-the-answer-may-be-at-the-drugstore

Who's Your Daddy? The Answer May Be at the Drugstore
Genetic testing is all the rage among genealogists and people looking for their blood relatives--but is it accurate?
By Tabitha M. Powledge

IT'S ALL RELATIVE: Can a simple mouth swab and an over-the-counter genetic test reveal our genealogical roots? Jonathan Parry/iStockphoto

It is a wise father that knows his own child, but today a man can boost his paternal （fatherly）wisdom—or at least confirm that he's the kid's dad. All he needs to do is shell out $30 for a paternity testing kit at his local drugstore—and another $120 to get the results.

More than 60,000 people have purchased the paternity testing kits（PTKs） since they first became available without prescriptions last year, according to Doug Fogg, chief operating officer of Identigene, which makes the over-the-counter kits. More than two dozen companies sell DNA tests directly to the public, ranging in price from a few hundred dollars to more than $2,500.

Among the most popular: paternity and kinship testing, which adopted children can use to find their biological relatives and families can use to track down kids put up for adoption. DNA testing is also the latest rage among passionate genealogists—and supports businesses that offer to search for a family’s geographic roots.

Most tests require collecting cells by swabbing（webbing）saliva in the mouth and sending it to the company for testing. All tests require a potential candidate with whom to compare DNA.

But some observers are skeptical. "There's a kind of false precision being hawked by people claiming they are doing ancestry testing," says Troy Duster, a New York University sociologist. He notes that each individual has many ancestors—numbering in the hundreds just a few centuries back. Yet most ancestry testing only considers a single lineage, either the Y chromosome inherited through men in a father's line or mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down only from mothers. This DNA can reveal genetic information about only one or two ancestors, even though, for example, just three generations back people also have six other great-grandparents or, four generations back, 14 other great-great-grandparents.

A few companies offer a broader service, including 23andMe's $399 test that examines chromosomes 1 through 22 as well as mtDNA and the Y. That generates information on 90 traits and diseases but also on the continental origins of each DNA segment in a customer's genome.

"People are looking for more detail, and we're working hard to provide that detail," says Joanna Mountain, the company's senior research director.



"We really don't have a good handle on what companies are using," says Sandra Lee, senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics in Palo Alto, Calif.

The American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) in Bethesda, Md., yesterday called upon the industry to alert consumers to the limits of over-the-counter genetic tests and urged research on the accuracy of DNA databases and statistical methods the companies rely on.

Deborah Bolnick, anthropological geneticist at the University of Texas in Austin, praised the group for weighing in but said it should have provided specific guidelines for industry behavior.
Critics also argue that commercial genetic testing is only as good as the reference collections to which a sample is compared. Databases used by some companies don't rely on data collected systematically but rather lump together information from different research projects. This means that a DNA database may have a lot of data from some regions and not others, so a person's test results may differ depending on the company that processes the results. In addition, the computer algorithms（programs）a company uses to estimate relationships may be proprietary（patented）and not subject to peer review or outside evaluation.

考研阅读这下原形毕露啊

以前老师说是来自《经济人》，没想到还有来自英美大报啊

2009年考研英语阅读理解第三篇
摘自麦肯锡季刊（http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/）2003年12月，原文标题为Educating global workers
链接地址：http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Educating_global_workers_1375#

Educating global workers

Poor education in the developing world is not a barrier to improving productivity there. But economic growth is needed before education can progress.

DECEMBER 2003 • Wiiliam W. Lewis

As many of the articles in this issue of The McKinsey Quarterly demonstrate, companies in the developed world are outsourcing ever larger portions of their business to low-cost, highly skilled workers in the developing world. Driving this trend is the remarkable ability of the global workforce to learn on the job.

In fact, the relationship between formal education and economic growth in poor countries is widely misunderstood by economists and politicians alike. Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political, and intellectual development of these and all other societies; however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong. We are fortunate that it is, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations. The research of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) during the past decade（finding of a research institution）has consistently shown that workers in all countries can be trained on the job to achieve radically higher productivity and, as a result, radically higher standards of living. Brazil, India, and Russia could all double their GDP per capita with their present workforce??and without any additional investment in formal education.

Ironically, the first evidence for this idea appeared in the United States. Not long ago, with the country entering a recession and Japan at its prebubble apex（peak）, the US workforce was derided as poorly educated and one of the primary causes of the poor US economic performance. Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotive-assembly productivity. Yet MGI’s work（research） revealed that the US factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts??a result of the training that US workers received on the job. More recently, while examining housing construction, MGI（the researchers） discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry’s work. Once again, a poor education wasn’t a barrier to high economic performance.

More important, MGI also found ample evidence in the developing world to support this conclusion. In Brazil, for example, the two leading private retail banks are locally owned and staffed but achieve near-global levels of best-practice productivity. A Honda factory in Brazil performs almost as well as the company??s Japanese and US plants. In the same country, the French hypermarket chain Carrefour achieves about 90 percent of the productivity that it achieves at home. And, as the recent boom in outsourcing to the developing world clearly shows, the global workforce can take advantage of economic opportunity there without additional education.

What is the real relationship between education and economic development? I（We） have begun to suspect that continuing economic growth promotes the development of education even when governments don’t force it. After all, that’s how education got started. When our ancestors were hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, they didn’t have time for education. They didn’t have time to wonder much about anything besides finding food. Only when humanity began to get its food in a more productive way was there time for other things.

As education improved, humanity’s productivity potential increased as well. When the competitive environment pushed our ancestors to achieve that potential, they could in turn afford more education. This increasingly high level of education is probably a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the complex political systems required by advanced economic performance. Thus poor countries might not be able to escape their poverty traps without political changes that may be possible only with broader formal education. A lack of formal education, however, doesn’t constrain the ability of the developing world’s workforce to substantially improve productivity for the foreseeable future. On the contrary, constraints on improving productivity explain why education isn’t developing more quickly there than it is.

Notes: Bill Lewis is director emeritus of the McKinsey Global Institute.

都有，不过文章太多，押不准的，只能平时多看类似的文章

2009年考研英语阅读理解第四篇
摘自Intellectual Life in America: A History
作者 Lewis Perry 出版社：芝加哥大学出版社1989年出版，文章出自原文第45页-46页

The most thoroughly studied intellectuals in the history of the New World are the ministers and political leaders of seventeenth-century New England. According to the standard history of American philosophy, nowhere else in colonial America was "so much importance attached to intellectual pursuits." According to many other books and articles, New England's leaders established the basic themes and preoccupations of an unfolding, dominant Puritan tradition in American intellectual life. To take this approach to the New Englanders normally means to start with the Puritans' theological innovations and their distinctive ideas about the church—important subjects that we may not neglect. But in keeping with our examination of southern intellectual life, we may consider the original Puritans as carriers of European culture, adjusting to New World circumstances. The New England colonies were the scenes of important episodes in the pursuit of widely understood ideals of civility and virtuosity.

The early settlers of Massachusetts Bay included men of impressive education and influence in England. Besides the ninety or so learned ministers who came to Massachusetts churches in the decade after 1629, there were political leaders like John Wimhrop, an educated gentleman, lord of the manor, lawyer, and official of the Crown before he journeyed to Boston. These men wrote and published extensively, reaching both New World and Old World audiences, and giving New England an aura（atmosphere） of intellectual earnestness. Samuel Willard, for example, devised a Compleat Body of Divinity in 250 sermons delivered on Tuesdays between 1687 and 1707. Not long after finishing the last one on the Lord's Prayer, he look to his bed and died.

We should not forget, however, that most New Engenders were less well educated. While few artisans or farmers, let alone dependents and servants, left literary compositions to be analyzed, it is obvious that their views were less fully intellectualized. Their thinking often had a traditional superstitious quality. A tailor named John Dane, who emigrated in the late 1630s, left an account of his reasons for leaving England that is filled with signs and portents. Sexual confusion, economic frustrations, and religious hope—all came together in a decisive moment when he opened the Bible, told his father that the first line he saw would settle his fate, and read the magical words: "Come out from among them, touch no unclean thing, and I will be your Cod and you shall be my people." One wonders what Dane thought of the careful sermons expounding Scripture（explaining the Bible） that he heard in Puritan churches. （Meanwhile）Many settlers had slighter religious commitments than Dane's, as one clergyman learned in confronting folk along the coast who jeered（mocked） that they had not come to the New World For religion. "Our main end was to catch fish."

以史为镜，可以知兴衰。
从下表中可以看出，考研命题所选用的文章，也开始与时俱进，08年考研选用的文章还都是3-4年前的文章，而09年考试中最新的文章已经是08年11月14日的了，距离考试还不到2个月。另外值得考生注意的是，09年考试中，在考研考试中长盛不衰的，经济学家杂志第一没有出现任何文章，从02到08几乎每年都有1-2篇文章选自经济学家杂志，08年的完型和阅读都有涉及，而09年一篇都没有，可见命题组也注意到了这个问题。

2008年                                                        来源                                               出版时间
第一篇                                                     探索频道                                           网站文章
第二篇                                                     经济学家                                            05年2月
第三篇                                                   科学美国人                                          01年7月
第四篇                                            美国新闻及世界报道                                 04年1月


2009年                                                      来源                                                  出版时间
第一篇                                                   纽约时报                                               08年5月
第二篇                                                 科学美国人                                             08年11月
第三篇                                                 麦肯锡季刊                                             03年12月
第四篇                      Intellectual Life in America: A History（专著）         1989年出版

道高一尺魔高一丈，呵呵，命题组和广大考生就是捉迷藏