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 English Examination 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 English examination is an exam designed to assess students' English proficiency. English proficiency mainly 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 evaluate students' reading comprehension abilities. A full-mark paper of 100 points, the reading comprehension section alone accounts for 65 points (reading 40 points, cloze 10 points, English-Chinese translation 15 points). It is not difficult to see that the current focus of postgraduate entrance exams is reading comprehension. If students grasp and solve this difficulty, they grasp the main contradiction and can thus break through the postgraduate entrance exam barrier.
The cloze test is primarily used to assess students' reading comprehension ability based on their overall understanding of the passage. This exam format originated in the 1950s with a French teacher at Washington University in the United States. At that time, the teacher removed one word from every seventh word in an article and tested the reading comprehension skills of 107 students. Later, others removed either the odd or even-numbered words from each sentence in an article, and still later, removed words from the beginning, middle, and end of a sentence to test students' reading comprehension. This practice has continued to this day, gradually evolving into the current exam format of removing key words and providing four multiple-choice options. 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 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 express the original text in Chinese in a faithful manner. It can be said that reading comprehension is the foundation, and translation is expression.