gre阅读passage1-30

4:59min

Although social learning (the acquisition of specific behaviors by observing other individuals exhibiting those behaviors) is well documented among fish, few studies have investigated social learning within a developmental context in these taxa.

 

Rather than investigating the development of a particular skill, Chapman, Ward, and Krause investigated the role of group density during development in later foraging success in laboratory-housed guppies.

 

When raised with a small number of conspecifics (members of the same species), guppies were quicker to locate food by following a trained adult guppy than were guppies raised in large groups. This counterintuitive finding is explained by the fact that guppies reared in the high-density condition were less likely to shoal (swim in a group) with others and, therefore, were less likely to learn the benefits of social learning. Instead, fish reared in high-density situations may learn that conspecifics are to be viewed as competitors, rather than as potential sources of adaptive information. This finding suggests that at least for guppies, the early social environment may have an effect on the capacity for social learning, if not on the socially learned behaviors themselves.

describe a particular scientific study 

It required the observation of guppies under conditions that closely mimicked the conditions of guppies in the wild.  

passage2 3:23min

As it was published in 1935, Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston's landmark collection of folktales, may not have been the book that its author first had in mind. In this anthropological study, Hurston describes in detail the people who tell the stories, often even inserting herself into the storytelling scene. Evidently, however, Hurston had prepared another version, a manuscript that was recently discovered and published after having been forgotten since 1929. This version differs from Mules and Men in that it simply records stories, with no descriptive or interpretive information.

While we cannot know for certain why Hurston’s original manuscript went unpublished during her lifetime, it may have been because publishers wanted something more than a transcription of tales. Contemporary novelist and critic John Edgar Wideman has described Black literature as the history of a writing that sought to escape its frame, in other words, as the effort of Black writers to present the stories of Black people without having to have a mediating voice to explain the stories to a non-Black audience. In this, Hurston may have been ahead of her time.

passage3 2:20min

 

这是一个前提

A decrease in face-to-face social contact can precipitate depression.

然后就是说上网时间多了，面对面会少

Time spent using the Internet cannot be spent in face-to-face social contact, so psychologists have speculated that sharply increasing Internet use can cause depression. Studies of regular Internet users have found a significantly higher incidence of depression among those who had recently doubled the amount of time they spent using the Internet than among those whose use had not increased. Hence, the psychologists’ speculation is correct.

Using the Internet presents no opportunities for people to increase the amount of face-to-face social contact they experienced in their daily lives.
passage4 5:18min

African American drama has, until recently, been rooted in the mimetic tradition of modern American naturalism. The most distinctive attribute of this tradition is the mechanistic, materialistic conception of humanity. Naturalism sees each individual as inextricably bound to the environment and depicts each person as someone controlled by, instead of controlling, concrete reality. As long as African American drama maintained naturalism as its dominant mode, it could only express the “plight of African American people”. Its heroes might declare the madness of reality, but reality inevitably triumphed over them.

The surrealistic plays of Adrienne Kennedy mark one of the first departures from naturalism by an African American dramatist. The overall goal of her work has been to depict the world of the soul and the spirit, not to mirror concrete reality. Within this framework, Kennedy has been able to portray African American minds and souls liberated from their connections to the external environment.

The work of Kennedy suggests a shift away from a commitment to strict naturalism in African American drama.

internal rather than the external life of her character

 

passage5 6:13min

Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why some plant communities are more susceptible than others to invasion by nonnative species, results from field studies have been inconsistent and no general theory of invasibility has yet emerged. However, a theory based on fluctuating resource availability could integrate most existing hypotheses and successfully resolve many of the apparently conflicting and ambiguous results of previous studies. The suggested theory is that a plant community becomes more susceptible to invasion whenever there is an increase in the amount of unused resources. The diversity in the range of resource-release mechanisms could partly explain the absence of consistent ecological correlates of invasibility.

In particular, the theory predicts that there will be no necessary relationship between the species diversity of a plant community and its susceptibility to invasion, since near-complete exploitation can each occur in both species-rich and species-poor communities. Though Lonsdale found a positive association between species richness and invasion, this may arise from the tendency of diverse plant communities to be nutrient poor and therefore more responsive to the effects of human-caused influxes of nutrients.

passage6 2:29min

Although some skeptics points to Arctic places such as the high latitudes of Greenland, where temperatures seem to have fallen, a recent scientific report concludes that in recent decades average temperatures have increased faster in the Arctic than elsewhere. Scientists have long suspected that several factors lead to greater temperature swings at Earths polar regions than elsewhere. First, most of the Arctic is covered in snow and ice, which are highly reflective; if snow and ice melt, the exposed soil, which absorbs heat, serves to accelerate warming. Second, the polar atmosphere is thin, so little energy is required to warm it. Third, less solar energy is lost in evaporation at the frigid poles than in the tropics.

 

passage7

Among many historians a belief persists that Cotton Mather’s biographies of some of the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (published 1702) are exercises in hagiography, endowing their subjects with saintly piety at the expense of historical accuracy.

Yet modern studies have profited

both from the breadth of information that Mather provides in, for example, his discussions of colonial medicine

and from his critical observations of such leading figures as Governor John Winthrop.

Mather’s wry humor as demonstrated by his detailed descriptions of events such as Winthrop’s efforts to prevent wood-stealing is overlooked by those charging Mather with presenting his subjects as extremely pious.

The charge also obscures Mather’s concern with the settlers material, not just spiritual, prosperity.

一个是这种展示方式 另一个是这种关心

Further, this pejorative view underrates the biographies value as chronicles: Mather amassed all sorts of published and unpublished documents as sources, and his selection of key events shows a marked sensitivity to the nature of the colony’s development（the quantity and nature of the sources from which Mather obtained his information.）

2.The author of the passage implies that an argument for the historical accuracy of Mather’s works is most strongly supported by which of the following

3. Information in the passage best supports which of the following statements about Mather’s biographies of the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony?

 

passage8 1:53min

An alarming number of Mediterranean monk seals, an endangered species, have recently died. Postmortem analysis showed the presence of an as yet unidentified virus, as well as evidence of a know bacterial toxin. Seawater samples from the area where the seals died did contain unusually high concentrations of the toxic bacterium. Therefore, although both viruses and bacterial toxins can kill seals, it is more likely that these deaths were the result of the bacterial toxin.

 

Nearly all the recent deaths were among adult seals, but young seals are far more

susceptible to viruses than are adult seals.

这就是说，如果是因为viruses 的话 young seal 会死很多

 

passage9 2:36min

passage10 3:15min

A law has been proposed requiring the cargo boxes of trucks carrying gravel to be covered by a tarpaulin, because vehicles driving close behind open-topped gravel trucks can be damaged by gravel flying off these trucks.

argument

The law is unlikely to substantially reduce such damage, however: flying gravel is much less likely to come from the cargo box itself than from the grooves of the tires, in which gravel can become wedged during loading.

The drivers of vehicles behind a gravel truck are more likely to remain close behind the truck if the trucks cargo box is covered than if it is uncovered.

 

passage11 8:26min

Before feminist literary criticism emerged in the 1970s, the nineteenth-century United States writer Fanny Fern was regarded by most critics (when considered at all) as a prototype of weepy sentimentalism—a pious, insipid icon of conventional American culture.( It was not generally addressed by critics before the 1970s.)没有被全面的考虑

•… intrigued by the chance to address important issues …

Feminist reclamations of Fern, by contrast, emphasize her nonsentimental qualities, particularly her sharply humorous social criticism.

Most feminist scholars find it difficult to reconcile Fern’s sardonic social critiques with her effusive celebrations of many conventional values. Attempting to resolve this contradiction, Harris concludes that Fern employed flowery rhetoric strategically to disguise her subversive goals beneath apparent conventionality. However, Tompkins proposes an alternative view of sentimentality itself, suggesting that sentimental writing could serve radical, rather than only conservative ends by swaying readers emotionally, moving them to embrace social change.

 passage12 1:41min

A plant-based automobile fuel has just become available in Ternland. A car can be driven as far on a gallon of the new plant-based fuel as a car can be driven on a gallon of gasoline, but a gallon of the plant-based fuel both costs less and results in less pollution. Therefore, drivers in Ternland who switch to it will reduce the amount they spend on fuel in a year while causing less environmental damage.

这里是说了另一个原因

 passage13 4:10min

Subsequently, most studies focused on limitations operating during chick rearing, particularly among altricial species (species in which the parents feed their young in the nest).

Lack later recognized that in precocial species (species in which young feed themselves), clutch size might be explained by different factors—the availability of food for egg-laying females, for example.

In altricial species, clutch size is determined primarily by factors operating after eggs are laid.

 passage14 4:00min 

 passage15 4:09min 

David Belasco’s 1912 Broadway production of The Governors Lady created a sensation with a scene set in a Childs cafeteria, a chain restaurant that was an innovator in food standardization and emblematic of modern everyday life.

While Belasco’s meticulously detailed reproduction of an immediately recognizable setting impressed the public, it was derided by progressive theater critics who championed the New Stagecraft theories of European artists like Max Reinhardt.

（It elicited responses that reflected a discrepancy between popular tastes in entertainment and the tastes of progressive theater critics.）

The New Stagecraft rejected theatrical literalism; it drew inspiration from the subjectivity and minimalism of modern painters, advocating simplified sets designed to express a dramatic texts central ideas. Such critics considered Belasco a craftsman who merely captured surface realities: a true artist eliminated the inessential to create more meaningful, expressive stage images.

(Theatrical productions that faithfully recreate the visual details of everyday life are unlikely to do justice to a good play’s central ideas.)

 passage16 2:18min 

Currently,

Sulandian television journalists are twice as likely as other workers to support the Blue Party,

 and Sulandian journalism students are significantly more likely to support the Blue Party than working television journalists are.

Therefore, assuming that these students do not change their political affiliations as they get older,

the disparity between the political affiliations of Sulandia’s television journalists and those of the rest of the working population will increase as current Sulandian journalism students enter the profession.

Support for the Blue party is not significantly less common

among those current Sulaidan journalism students who intend to become television journalists

than it is

among current Sulandian journalism students as a whole.

 passage17 4:38min 

Along deep rivers, where bank beavers are found, this problem seldom arises. But these beavers do know how to build dams, and do so if the need arises, as may occur if they are forced to relocate after felling and consuming all nearby trees.

When conditions permit, beavers are more likely to build dams than burrows or lodges

 passage18 8:56min

Massive projectiles striking much larger bodies create various kinds of craters, including multi-ring basins–the largest geologic features observed on planets and moons. In such collisions, the impactor is completely destroyed and its material is incorporated into the larger body.

所以不会有新的

The difficulty in recondensing this vapor in Earth’s orbit, and its subsequent loss to the vacuum of outer space, might account for the observed absence in lunar rocks of certain readily vaporized compounds and elements.

Unusual features of some other planets might also be explained by such impacts.

Such conjectures are tempting, but, since no early planet was immune to titanic impacts, they could be used indiscriminately to explain away in a cavalier fashion every unusual planetary characteristic; still, we may now be beginning to discern the true role of titanic impacts in planetary history.

 

 passage19 9:13min 

as represented in a modern stemma codicum: a diagram depicting the genealogical relationship of surviving manuscripts and those the stemmas editor believes existed at one time.

 

When a work survives in a single manuscript copy, editors call the manuscript, rather glamorously, the lone survivor–implying that all its (presumably rare) companions were destroyed sometime early in the Middle Ages by pillaging barbarians.

 

It is equally possible that the work survived far into the Middle Ages in numerous copies in monastic libraries but were unnoticed due to lack of interest.

（It is possible that fewer manuscripts were destroyed by barbarians in the early Middle Ages than scholars frequently suppose.）（Additional copies of some so-called lone survivor manuscripts may have existed well into the Middle Ages）

 

Quotations from a Roman text by a medieval author are another category of external evidence: but does the appearance of a rare word or grammatical construction—or even a short passage—really indicate a medieval author’s firsthand knowledge of this or that ancient work, or does such usage instead derive from some intermediate source, such as a grammar book or a popular style manual?（If an ancient Roman text is quoted in a work by a medieval author, then it is likely that at least one manuscript copy of that text survived into the Middle Ages.）

Conversely, the stemma can also bestow a semblance of separation on manuscripts written within a few months of one another or even in the same room.(低估)

 passage20 8:14min 

 passage21 9:30min 

Astell, like those who echoed her sentiments two and a half centuries later, must be credited for admirable zeal in setting out to right scholarly wrongs, but her supposition that historians were only male is inaccurate

要看清有几个人

另外，可以先大致过一遍题，简要记录，然后通读做题

这样能顺出题目的顺序

passage22 9:44min 

Until around 1930 few United States Civil War historians paid much attention to Southerners who opposed the 1861-1865 secession from the United States by a confederacy of Southern states.

This early-twentieth-century historiography nonetheless represented the leading research on dissent in the South until the 1960s and 1970s.

Only recently have some Civil War historians begun to make Unionists and their experiences, rather than the Confederate state, the center of inquiry

trace the evolution of a particular area of historical study

Only recently have some Civil War historians begun to make Unionists and their experiences, rather than the Confederate state, the center of inquiry. These scholars have done intensive community and local studies of dissenting groups that take into account a range of social and cultural, as well as military and political, factors at work on the Southern home front. Hoping to better understand who remained loyal to the Union during the war, these historians have sought to explain the Civil War’s underlying character, dimensions, and impact in particular counties or towns, especially in the upper South and Appalachia. This relatively new trend has stressed the particular, delved into the complexities of political allegiances on the home front, and, as Sutherland notes, highlighted “the gritty experience of real people”.（Their political allegiance must be understood in relation to specific local factors that affected their lives during the Civil War period）

Because the driving force behind such inquiries into loyalist history has been a desire to explain Confederate ideology, politics, and defeat, emphasis has been placed on the ways loyalist Southerners diverged from the political and economic mainstream of Confederate nationalism.

要有整体的结构去做题，类似有TOEFL做最后一个题的感觉

passage23 22:48min 

In his recent book, Louis Gerteis argues that nineteenth-century Northern reformers in the United States attacked slavery in the South by invoking the values of a utilitarian political economy: proper public policy requires government to endorse anything that gives all people the opportunity to maximize their individual pleasure and their material gain.

NR利用物质

Social good, according to this thinking, is achieved when individuals are free to pursue their self-interests. Gerteis argues that, since slavery in the South precluded individual autonomy and the free pursuit of material gain, major Northern reformers opposed it as early as the 1830s.

奴隶制阻碍

In making this argument, Gerteis offers the most persuasive formulation to date of the Growth of a Dissenting Minority interpretation, which argues that a slow but steady evolution of a broad-based Northern antislavery coalition culminated in the presidential victory of the antislavery Lincoln in 1860.

林肯上任，这个到顶峰

这目前都是G的观点

This interpretive framework, which once dominated antislavery historiography, had been discounted by historians for two basic reasons. First, it tended to homogenize the political diversity of Northern reformers; Northern reformers differed significantly among themselves and belonged to diverse political parties.

统一内部不一致

Second, it seemed incompatible with emerging scholarship on the slaveholding South, which held that Northern abolitionists of the 1830s did not succeed in mobilizing Northern public opinion and paving the way for Lincoln in 1860.

这帮人并没有帮上L

Instead, Southern slaveholders misconstrued abolitionist views of the 1830s as main- stream rather than marginal Northern public opinion, and castigated Northerners generally for opposing slavery.

In this view, it was the castigation by Southerners that gradually caused widespread antislavery feeling throughout the North.

这种观点是S起作用了

Gerteis revives the Growth interpretation by asserting that, rather than Southern attitudes, the unified commitment of Northern reformers to utilitarian values served to galvanize popular political support for abolitionism. 这种U value起作用

However, unlike earlier proponents of the Growth interpretation, Gerteis does not reduce the Northern reformers to a homogeneous group or try to argue that the reformers shared views undermined their differing party loyalties. 就是没有之前的弊端

Members of the two major political parties still attacked each other for ideological differences. Nevertheless, Gerteis argues, these disparate party affiliations did not diminish the actuality of reformer unity, most prominent in the 1830s.

这种不一致，没关系

At this time, Northern reformers, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Samuel Chase, portrayed the framers of the United States Constitution as proponents of individual autonomy and capitalist values.

This vision of the founders served as a basis for asserting that freedom was a national moral imperative, and that the United Sates Constitution was an antislavery document.

Gerteis differs from traditional adherents of the Growth framework by asserting that the basic elements in the antislavery coalition were firmly in place and accepted by all elements in the Northern reform community as early as the late 1830s.

 

passage24 12:09min 

Historian E.H Carr’s thesis that all debates concerning the explanation of historical phenomena revolve around the question of the priority of causes is so familiar to historians as to constitute orthodoxy within their profession. The true historian, as Carr puts it, will feel a professional obligation to place the multiple causes of a historical event in a hierarchy by means of which the primary or ultimate cause of the event can be identified. In the Marxist mode of historical explanation (historical materialism), a universal hierarchy of causes is posited in which economic factors are always primary.

 In the classic, more widely accepted alternative ultimately derived from Weberian sociology, hierarchies of causes are treated as historically specific: explanatory primacy in any particular historical situation must be established by empirical investigation of that situation, not by applying a universal model of historical causation.

While the need to rank historical causes in some order of importance may seem obvious to most historians, such hierarchies raise serious philosophical difficulties.

If any historical event is the product of a number of factors, then each of these factor is indispensable to the occurrence of the event. But how can one cause be more indispensable than another? And if it cannot, how can there be a hierarchy of indispensable causes? It was this problem that first led Weber himself to argue for the impossibility of any general formula specifying the relative importance of causes; we cannot, for example, conclude that in every capitalist society religious change has been more significant than economic change (or vice versa) in explaining the rise of capitalism.

Runciman offers a different argument leading to the same conclusion. He points out that it is possible to identify specific factors as the primary causes of a particular historical event only relative to an initial set of background conditions. For instance, if we accept English defeats after 1369 in the Hundred Years War as a given, then we may identify the high levels of taxation necessitated by these military reverses as the main cause of the Peasants Revolt of 1381. If instead we regard the financing of warfare by taxation in this period as a background condition, then we will see the English reverses themselves as the main cause of the revolt.

However, neither ordinary life nor historical practice offer reliable criteria by which to distinguish causes from background conditions and thus to resolve historical debates about the relative importance of causes. And this difficulty casts doubt not only on the Marxist effort to identify a universal hierarchy of causes, but also on any attempt to identify an objective hierarchy of causes–even of the historically specific kind favored by non-Marxists.

passage25 17:28min 

Modern feminism has brought the reputation of the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) to something approaching the luster it deserves. While she enjoyed a certain celebrity among political radicals in the years just after her death, beginning in the nineteenth century her fame as a writer was hidden by disproportionate attention to her unconventional and, at the time, shocking personal life. When, therefore, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1925 of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that they felt like books so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in them, it was more a wishful than an accurate statement of the case. Wollstonecraft’s advances in moral thinking still have the power to shock position-takers of every party. The importance of gender even today is said to cut across other criteria for judging the conduct of men and women in society; Wollstonecraft, by contrast, believed that the shared morality of men and women should cut across all specifications of gender.

Wollstonecraft considered gender-based morality a relic of a barbarous age: part of that specialization of virtues by which every sexual feeling was expected to express itself as libertinism (in men) or false modesty (in women). In her view, there ought to be one criterion of morals for men and women alike, with both sexes cultivating the same virtues. Wollstonecraft rebelled against the copious sentimental literature of her own time, which she felt patronized women by insisting that it was to their advantage to affect chastity and modesty and that such virtues were their own reward.

In The Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft explores this double Bulosan standard from an unexpected angle. It was the first major response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), appearing less than a month after the impassioned defense of the deposed French monarchy. A defender of Burke called Wollstonecraft’s book an incoherent mass of treacherous candour, interested generosity, and, if not false, at least unnecessary accusation. But Wollstonecraft nonetheless managed to show how the traditionally feminine virtues of sentimental morality had been transferred by Burke to the aristocracy. Burke’s rhapsody on the queen of France (glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy) was, for Wollstonecraft, an example of the argument that beauty and instinct must often prevail over reason, the argument on which Burke took his stand as a defender of the old order. Like women, Burke thought, and from a similar greatness and delicacy in their nature, the aristocracy were understood at once to require deference and to solicit compassion. To Wollstonecraft, Burke’s argument linked sympathy and power in a dangerous alliance; she insisted that aristocrats do not deserve to be treated in the way that women have traditionally been treated any more than women themselves do.

3. The passage suggests that which of the following is true concerning Virginia Woolf’s appraisal of A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman?

B. Woolf favored the advances proposed by Wollstonecraft and mistakenly assumed that they had become self-evident in the twentieth century.

C. Woolf miscalculated the practical effects that the advances proposed by Wollstonecraft would have on society.

4. The author of the passage suggests that modern feminism has treated the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in which of the following ways?

A. Modern feminism has emphasized the progressive aspects of Wollstonecraft’s writings, while separating her work from her personal reputation.

D. Modern feminism has embraced Wollstonecraft’s relative importance as a theorist, while rejecting certain elements of her theories of gender-based morality.

passage26 2:30min

passage27 12:15min

Based on evidence from tree rings, pollen samples and other records, scientists have for a long time assumed that interglacials—warm interludes between ice ages—were as mild and uniform as the Holocene, the present interglacial, has been for all of its 8,000 to 10,000 years. But new research in Greenland has put this assumption into question.

这是质疑一个惯有的观点

3. According to the passage, which of the following is the most accurate statement of what scientists believed, prior to the GRIP findings, about Earth’s climate?

A. Over the course of Earth’s history, interglacials have become progressively milder这种变化是没有的

Findings from the upper sections of the cores have confirmed what scientists already knew climate during the last ice age fluctuated rapidly.

During ice ages, Earth’s climate has been highly variable, whereas during interglacials it has been mild and stable

passage28 3:52min

explain the original function of life insurance agents是来讲的机制

describe how life insurance was first introduced这个应该是说，经过了什么交涉，然后形成的

In short, the initial purpose of the agency system was not to actively solicit customers, but, rather, to recreate the glass-bowl mentality associated with small towns or city neighborhoods表达的意思

They offered a high degree of transparency about a resident's personal history and character.

passage29 3:57min

passage30 5:03min

If water flowed for an extended period, researchers reasoned, it should have altered and weathered the volcanic minerals, creating clays or other oxidized, hydrated phases (minerals that incorporate water molecules in their crystal structure) .

这个就是直接说

It correctly identifies a consequence of water flowing on the Martian surface.