2008-English Reading Comprehension for Postgraduate Entrance Examination: 100 Close Reading Passages

Author: Yin Jiankun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-02-01
Features: This book selects articles from The Economist, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and TIME according to the requirements and difficulty of the reading Part A in the postgraduate entrance exam English syllabus. The exercises after each article clearly indicate which year's postgraduate entrance exam English test paper they mimic, making this book highly targeted. Additionally, it includes sections such as "Text Analysis," "Vocabulary Notes," "Complex Sentence Breakdown," "Question Analysis," and "Reference Translation," explaining the core vocabulary, complex sentences, and article structure. This enables candidates to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the text, truly improving their reading ability... In this book, the author suggests using the "break it down into smaller parts" method to memorize English words during postgraduate entrance exam preparation. It is not recommended to memorize 100 or even hundreds of words in a single day, as this wastes valuable time and yields minimal results with a high forgetting rate. If you plan to memorize 20 words a day, you can distribute them across three different time slots in a day: memorize 6 upon waking up, 6 after lunch, and 8 before going to bed. This way, it won't interfere with other academic tasks. Repeat this process the next day. In fact, the vocabulary required for the postgraduate entrance exam English test is mostly high school level, plus less than 800 words from the CET-4 and CET-6. Therefore, you can easily memorize them quickly. However, during memorization, it is essential to review promptly, i.e., review the words memorized the previous day before memorizing new ones on the second day, and review the words from the previous two days before memorizing new ones on the third day, and so on. By the 30th day, you will have memorized the words for 30 days once and reviewed them 29 times, making it extremely difficult to forget. This method of memorizing words not only does not affect your daily work or studies but also yields more lasting results.
What vocabulary phrases should you review during postgraduate entrance exam preparation? The main sources for these phrases are two parts: first, the phrases encountered in the reading comprehension section of past test papers, and second, the phrases summarized in the cloze test analysis section of the annual exam syllabus interpretation. During the postgraduate entrance exam English test, long and complex sentences are the main obstacles to understanding the text and doing well in translation. To understand such sentences, you cannot read them word by word like regular reading; instead, you should use the "peeling an onion" sentence structure analysis method, which is often used subconsciously by native English speakers. The steps are as follows: First, determine how many "onions" (clauses) the sentence has. Second, "peel the skin" (break down each clause). Third, translate each layer of the "onion's skin" into Chinese. Fourth, combine the simple Chinese sentences into a longer Chinese sentence. Each article in this book clearly indicates which test paper the exercises mimic.