2005 reading comprehension cloze translation full breakthrough

Author: Yuan Bingzheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features: Although the format of the National Master's Degree Entrance Examination in English has changed several times, the assessment of students' abilities has not only remained the same but has also been strengthened year by year. The postgraduate entrance examination in English is an exam designed to assess students' English proficiency. English proficiency primarily refers to: reading comprehension, writing, and listening. In the postgraduate exam paper, in addition to the 4-5 articles specifically used to assess reading comprehension skills, cloze tests and English-Chinese translation are also used to assess students' reading comprehension abilities. A 100-point exam paper, with the reading comprehension section alone accounting for 65 points (reading 40 points, cloze 10 points, English-Chinese translation 15 points), clearly shows that the current focus of the postgraduate exam is reading comprehension. If students grasp and solve this difficulty, they grasp the main contradiction and can thus break through the postgraduate exam barrier.
The cloze test is primarily used to test students' reading comprehension skills based on their overall understanding of the passage. This exam format originated in the 1950s when a French teacher at Washington University in the United States removed one word out of every seven in an article and tested the reading comprehension skills of his 107 students. Later, others removed either the odd or even-numbered words in each sentence, and still later, removed words from the beginning, middle, and end of each sentence to test students' reading comprehension. This tradition has continued to this day, gradually evolving into the current format of removing key words and providing four answer choices. This is similar to reading an article from a Chinese newspaper, where some words have been removed, but we can still understand the article. Therefore, we can say that the cloze test is a more challenging form of assessing reading comprehension than simply reading several articles.
English-Chinese translation is not just an assessment of students' translation skills but primarily tests their ability to express key sentences in Chinese after fully understanding the entire passage. If students do not understand the entire passage or the key sentences, they cannot accurately and faithfully express them in Chinese. In other words, reading comprehension is the foundation, and translation is expression.