第一篇：医疗检查
I spent the usual long afternoon at work doing little but ordering tests, far more than I honestly thought any patient needed, but that’s what we do these days. Guidelines mandate tests, and patients expect them; abnormal tests mean medication, and medication means more tests. My tally for the day: five hours, 14 reasonably healthy patients, 299 separate tests of body function or blood composition, three scans and a handful of referrals to specialists for yet more tests.
本文作者是一名医生，开篇即陈述了一个医疗行业的问题：医生开太多检查了，而且是Guideline(医疗指南)要求的，病人所期望的。
Teachers complain that primary education threatens to become a process of teaching to the test. They wince as the content of standardized tests increasingly drives their lesson plans, and the results of these tests define their accomplishments. We share their pain: Doctoring to the tests is every bit as dispiriting.
本段讲述了老师们遇到的类似问题，进行了一个类比：在教育行业，标准测试也变的越来越重要。两种情况都非常dispiriting(使人气馁)。
Some medical tests, like blood pressure checks, are cheap and simple. Some are pricier and more complicated, like mammograms or assays for various molecules in the blood that correlate with various diseases. We order them all at prescribed intervals, and if we happen to forget one, either by accident or design, electronic medical records nag us mercilessly until we capitulate. As in education, our test-ordering behavior and our patients’ results increasingly define our achievements, and in the near future our remuneration is likely to follow. Still, like all test-based quality control systems, ours can be gamed. Our tests can also inflict unnecessary psychic damage, and occasional physical damage as well. Most distressing: Ordering tests, chasing down and interpreting results, and dealing with the endless cycle of repeat testing to confirm and clarify problems absorb pretty much all our time.
本段进一步说明大量检查给医生带来压力：它作为评价医疗质量的标准，今后还可能与remuneration(薪酬)挂钩。不过检查可能给患者带来损伤，同时也耗费很多时间。
It is all in the name of good and equitable health care, a laudable goal. But if you reach age 50 and I cannot persuade you to undergo the colonoscopy or mammogram you really don’t want, am I a bad doctor? If you reach age 85 and I persuade you to take enough medication to normalize your blood pressure, am I a good one?
本段讨论：究竟什么样的医生才是好医生呢?
I am not the only one who wonders. A cadre of test skeptics at Dartmouth Medical School specialize in critically examining our test-based approach to well adult care. If you are confused about mammography, colonoscopy or the PSA test for prostate cancer, these folks deserve much of the blame: They have repeatedly demonstrated that these tests and many others do not necessarily make healthy people any healthier, any more than standardized testing in grade school improves a child’s intellect. Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a Vermont physician who is part of the Dartmouth group, has a new book that might serve as the test skeptic’s manifesto and bible. Its title, “Less Medicine, More Health,” sums up his trenchant, point-by-point critique of test-based health care and quality control.
有研究表明，利用开检查的数量来进行医疗质控是行不通的，算照指南做这些检查并不能使人们更加健康。
In medicine, “true quality is extremely hard to measure,” Dr. Welch writes. “What is easy to measure is whether doctors do things.” Only doing things like ordering tests generates data. Deciding not to do things and let well enough alone generates nothing tangible, no numbers or dollar amounts to measure or track over time. Dr. Welch points out that doctors get to become doctors because they are good with tests, and know instinctively how to behave in a test-focused universe. Rate them by how many tests they order, and they will order in profusion, often more than the guidelines suggest. They will do fine on assessments of their quality, but patients may not do so well. Even perfectly safe tests that are incapable of doing their own damage may, given enough weight, trigger catastrophe.
本段Dr. Welch进一步阐明，开许多检查是为了有效地保障医疗质量，但实际上这样做会使病人们过度检查，甚至造成伤害。
Yes, little blood pressure cuff over there in the corner, that means you. The link between very high blood pressure and disease is incontrovertible, and the drugs used to control blood pressure are among the cheapest and safest around. Even so, as Dr. Welch pointed out in a recent conversation, systems that rate doctors by how well their patients’ blood pressure is managed are likely to invite trouble. Doctors rewarded for treating aggressively are likely to keep doing so even when the benefits begin to morph into harm. That appears to happen in older adults, at least in those who avoid the common complications of high blood pressure and continue on medication. One study found that nursing home residents taking two or more effective blood pressure drugs did remarkably badly, withdeath rates more than twice that of their peers. In another, dementia patients taking blood pressure medication with optimal results nonetheless deteriorated mentally considerably faster.
其他的医疗质控方法，比如检测血压并且使用药物进行调控也不很有效。研究显示血压控制得好的老年人反而死亡率更高
Yet no quality control system that I know of gives a doctor an approving pat on the head for taking a fragile older patient off meds. Not yet, at least. Someday, perhaps, not ordering and not prescribing will mark quality care as surely as ordering and prescribing do today. Children go to school to learn. Adults go to the doctor … why? If they are sick, to get better, certainly. But for the average healthy, happy adult, let’s be honest: We really haven’t completely figured out why you are in the waiting room. And so we offer a luxuriant profusion of tests.
本文的结论是，目前并没有有效的医疗质控手段。而且很多时候，病人来医院除了接受检查也没什么可做的。
第二篇：Los Angeles Times
标题：Gatsby, literature’s party animal, turns 90 (文学)
I was in high school when I first fell for Gatsby, who turns 90 today — an “old sport” by any measure. He was 50 even then, but he appeared to me as Robert Redford in a pink Ralph Lauren suit and those “shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel” that set Daisy sobbing in Chapter 5. How could a freckle-faced, Catholic-raised virgin resist that kind of bad boy: rich and handsome, with the best party house in town, even if he never did mingle?
本文涉及英美文学内容，开篇第一句提及“盖茨比”。第一段采取“故事开篇”结构，从作者青少年时期的感受做切入点，简要回顾盖茨比的故事情节。考生需对“盖茨比”、“黛西”等《了不起的盖茨比》信息有简单的了解。
Gatsby seems the kind of guy who would always have been popular. But the truth is more complicated. “The Great Gatsby” was published on April 10, 1925. Max Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald's editor, thought it a masterpiece. The then-29-year-old Fitzgerald wrote of the novel before it was published, “It represents about a year's work and I think it's about ten years better than anything I've done.”
第二段深入介绍小说与作者信息，作为背景知识补充，可快速阅读。
And it did receive some praise in its early days, for sure. The New York Times called it “a curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today.” But others weren't enamored. The New York World ran a review under the headline “F. Scott Fitzgerald's Latest a Dud” (ouch!), and Perkins wrote at the time that so many people attacked him over the book that he felt “bruised.”
第三段展示媒体对小说的评论。注意文中“But”一词，转折词“but, yet, still, however, nevertheless”的出现意味着文意的转变。“And”句是对小说的赞赏，“But”句提出反面观点，认为小说乏善可陈，受到广泛攻击。
Sales were lackluster too. The first printing of Fitzgerald's debut novel, “This Side of Paradise,” had sold out in days, and Charles Scribner's Sons went back to press 11 more times in two years to sell almost 50,000 copies. Fitzgerald's follow-up, “The Beautiful and the Damned,” also sold well enough to put 50,000 copies into print. But the 20,000-copy first run of “The Great Gatsby” was followed by a mere 3,000 second print run, and no third. “Gatsby” was never out of print in the years before Fitzgerald died — at age 44, 15 years after its publication — only because Scribner's still had unsold copies from those first two printings.
第四段关注小说销售业绩。第一句中的“too”是个提示词，表示该段的观点与上一段相仿。“debut”首秀, “press”出版社, “first run”第一版等专业术语可做了解。
In fall 1940, Fitzgerald, writing to his wife, Zelda, of a new novel he was working on, lamented, “I don't suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I'll ever write.” The last Scribner's royalty check before he died that December was for $13.13.
本段介绍小说作者菲兹杰拉德写给妻子的最后一本小说。
Fitzgerald's friend, the literary and social critic Edmund Wilson — who said of Fitzgerald's death that he “felt robbed of some part of my own personality” — helped with the posthumous publication of Fitzgerald's unfinished “The Last Tycoon.” He and Perkins, together with other Fitzgerald friends and fans, worked to keep critical attention on Fitzgerald's work. Without them, “Gatsby” might have disappeared altogether from the American literary canon.
本段介绍菲兹杰拉德的朋友对他小说出版的帮助。段落中出现“双破折”，考察标点符号的阅读方式，“双破折”起解释说明、重复介绍的作用，可以省略。
It was World War II, though, that gave “The Great Gatsby” a real boost in readership. As the war came to a close, 150,000 pocket-sized “Armed Service Edition” paperbacks were sent to soldiers, men who were perhaps left dreaming of swapping their uniforms for all those monogrammed shirts, and almost certainly of Daisy.
本段介绍二战对小说出版的推动力。第一句为主题句，“a real boost”, 高频词“boost”再次出现，同义词“promote”, “thrust”, “hoist”等均为促进的含义。
How the almost-forgotten novel ended up being chosen for this distribution isn't clear. Maureen Corrigan, in her book about “Gatsby,” “So We Read On,” speculates that Nicholas Wreden, a member of the book industry's Council on Books in Wartime who also happened to be the manager of Scribner's bookstore, may have had a hand in it, a hand perhaps guided by Perkins. The cover of the soldiers' edition, in selling Gatsby as “the greatest of the ‘racketeers' in American fiction,” may have led some to open it expecting Dashiell Hammett. That idea was perpetuated by the movie tie-in edition released by Bantam a few years later; on its cover, Howard Da Silva, as the character George Wilson, points a gun at a bare-chested and very buff Alan Ladd as Gatsby — a paperback that was reprinted five times by 1954.
The Bantam success influenced Scribner's reissue of the novel, first in collected-work volumes, then in a 1957 student paperback. Sales of the latter — designed for baby boomers needing something beyond textbook excerpts to test their literary mettle — rose from 12,000 in its first year to 36,000 in 1958, 100,000 each year by 1960, and three times that before Robert Redford donned that pink Lauren suit.
多段落评讲《了不起的盖茨比》小说获得成功的原因。段落内结合部分金融知识，如“baby boomers”出自美国二战后著名的“baby boom”婴儿潮一词，大量的数字作证小说的销售进步。
Were students reading “Gatsby” because of its literary heft or because it was teachable? Likely both, but in any event the result was an explosion of scholarly analysis paralleling the growth in sales and the dawning recognition of an American classic. This week, 90 years after its publication, “The Great Gatsby” is a phenomenon, having spent 476 weeks — more than nine years in total — on one national bestseller list, and “timed out” of most of the others. Internationally it has sold more than 25 million copies. It's impossible to say how many scholarly articles it has given rise to, but a Google search of “Gatsby” returns 34 million hits.
Happy 90th, Old Sport. And many more.
末尾总结升华，强调《了不起的盖茨比》的成功经历了时间的考验，展示出全文的“积极正面”态度，与对该小说的肯定观点。
第三篇：《贫困、犯罪、教育、贫民窟的悖论》
来源：经济学人标题：Poverty, crime and education.
The paradox of the ghetto.THE poorest people in Leicester by a wide margin are the Somalis who live in the St Matthews housing estate. Refugees from civil war, who often passed through Sweden or the Netherlands before fetching up in the English Midlands, they endure peeling surroundings and appalling joblessness. At the last census the local unemployment rate was three times the national average. But Abdikayf Farah, who runs a local charity, is oddly upbeat. Just look at the children, he says.
第一段开篇点题，介绍文章主题为穷苦的难民在英国面临的艰难处境。出现的词汇多为当下国际热门词汇，如“refugee, joblessness, civil war, unemployment”。
Close to Mr Farah's office is Taylor Road Primary School—which, it turns out, trumps almost every school in Leicester in standardized tests. Its headmaster, Chris Hassall, credits the Somali immigrants, who insist that their children turn up for extra lessons at weekends and harry him when they seem to fall behind. Education is their ticket out of poverty. Poor district, wonderful school, well-ordered children: in Britain, the combination is not as unusual as one might suppose.
第二段将话题导向教育层面，以一所小学为例，介绍难民儿童在英国的新生活，提出教育对孩童的影响。
Britain has prized the ideal of economically mixed neighbourhoods since the 19th century. Poverty and disadvantage are intensified when poor people cluster, runs the argument; conversely, the rich are unfairly helped when they are surrounded by other rich people. Social mixing ought to help the poor. It sounds self-evident—and colors planning regulations that ensure much social and affordable housing is dotted among more expensive private homes. Yet “there is absolutely no serious evidence to support this,” says Paul Cheshire, a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics (LSE).
第三段为观点议论，不同经济水平的人比邻而居，利大于弊。对于这一观点，作者在简单介绍后，提出了质疑。“Yet”这一转折词，需引起大家的注意。
And there is new evidence to suggest it is wrong. Researchers at Duke University in America followed over 1,600 children from age five to age 12 in England and Wales. They found that poor boys living in largely well-to-do neighbourhoods were the most likely to engage in anti-social behavior, from lying and swearing to such petty misdemeanors as fighting, shoplifting and vandalism, according to a commonly used measure of problem behavior. Misbehavior starts very young (see chart 1) and intensifies as they grow older. Poor boys in the poorest neighbourhoods were the least likely to run into trouble. For rich kids, the opposite is true: those living in poor areas are more likely to misbehave.
第四段佐证了第三段作者的质疑。“And”这一连接词的作用，表明前后观点一致。前文质疑比邻而居的好处，该段则用实际数字和案例证明，贫富相互依靠而住，有高概率引起不良行为与少年犯罪。段落中出现了如 “anti-social behavior,” “vandalism”, “misbehave”等社会、法律词汇。
The researchers suggest several reasons for this. Poorer areas are often heavily policed, deterring would-be miscreants; it may be that people in wealthy places are less likely to spot misbehavior, too. Living alongside the rich may also make the poor more keenly aware of their own deprivation, suggests Tim Newburn, a criminologist who is also at the LSE. That, in turn, increases the feelings of alienation that are associated with anti-social conduct and criminalbehavior.
本段分析前一段结论诞生的原因。
Research on England's schools turns up a slightly different pattern. Children entitled to free school meals—a proxy for poverty—do best in schools containing very few other poor children, perhaps because teachers can give them plenty of attention. But, revealingly, poor children alsofare unusually well in schools where there are a huge number of other poor children. That may be because schools have no choice but to focus on them. Thus in Tower Hamlets, a deprived east London borough, 60% of poor pupils got five good GCSEs (the exams taken at 16) in 2013; the national average was 38%. Worst served are pupils who fall in between, attendingschools where they are insufficiently numerous to merit attention but too many to succeed alone (see chart 2).
第六段提出新观点，从英格兰学校中贫困学生的表现指出，当贫困学生有足够多关爱和照顾的时候，他们往往表现良好。“GCSE”这一词汇为高频词，指英国中学考试，多次在教育话题中出现。
Mr Cheshire reckons that America, too, provides evidence of the limited benefits of socialmixing. Look, he says, at the Moving to Opportunity program, started in the 1990s, through which some poor people received both counseling and vouchers to move to richer neighbourhoods. Others got financial help to move as they wished, but no counselling. A third group received nothing. Studies after 10-15 years suggested that the incomes and employmentprospects of those who moved to richer areas had not improved. Boys who moved showed worse behavior and were more likely to be arrested for property crime.
第七段跳出英国，从美国角度证明混合社会有局限性。
In Britain, this pattern might be partly explained by the existence of poor immigrant neighbourhoods such as St Matthews in Leicester. The people who live in such ghettos are poor in means, because they cannot speak English and lack the kind of social networks that lead to jobs, but not poor in aspiration. They channel their ambitions through their children.
Another probable explanation lies in the way that the British government hands out money. Education funding is doled out centrally, and children in the most indigent parts tend to get the most cash. Schools in Tower Hamlets receive 7,014 ($10,610) a year for each child, for example,compared with the English average of 4,675. Secondary schools also get 935 for each poor child thanks to the “pupil premium” introduced by the coalition government. Meanwhile Teach First sends top graduates into poor schools. In America, by contrast, much school funding comes from local property taxes, so those in impoverished areas lose out.
“In Britain”, “Another”, 属并列结构，两段为并列段落，主题句皆为第一句话。
As the Duke University researchers are keen to point out, all this does not in itself prove that economically mixed neighbourhoods are a bad thing. They may be good in other ways—making politicians more moderate, for example. But the research does suggest that the benefits of such districts are far from straightforward. Patterns of social segregation reflect broadersocial inequality, argues Mr Cheshire, who has written a book about urban economics and policy. Where mixed neighborhoods flourish, house prices rise, overwhelmingly benefiting the rich. Spending more money on schools in deprived areas and dispatching the best teachers there would do more to help poor children. Assuming that a life among wealthy neighbors will improve their lot is too complacent.
最后一段反向分析，杜克大学研究者指出，上述论述并不能证明，经济混合社区必然带来害处。全文为正反论述，提出多项数据与案例进行辨析，作者的态度ambivalent，模棱两可。
第二部分question and answer的三篇文章，前两篇为美国社会问题的探讨。第一篇为美国孩童在没有父母监控下单独玩耍，美国警方未通知孩子家长的情况下，就将孩子逮捕入狱，揭示了美国警方的冷漠强硬。
第二篇介绍一名美国人意图自杀，遭到大量围观，且没有人上前制止，文章批判现代美国人缺乏同情心，为人处世过于冷漠无情的现实。
最后一篇文章为经济话题，介绍沃尔玛对员工进行涨薪这一话题，并且将沃尔玛与多年前的美国福特汽车涨薪事件进行对比，指出两家公司都没有能解决目前美国面临的宏观经济问题。2008年后美国经济迅速滑坡，失业率飙升，各大公司深陷经济危机，至今仍受到极大影响，因此经济金融的话题经久不衰。
