2008 Graduate Entrance Exam English Reading Comprehension: In-depth Analysis of 100 Articles

Author: Yin Jiankun (Editor-in-Chief), Liu Min, Gao Li (Compiler)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: This book selects articles from The Economist, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and TIME based on the requirements and difficulty of the reading Part A in the postgraduate entrance exam English syllabus. The exercises after each article are clearly marked to indicate which specific question from which year's postgraduate entrance exam English test 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 helps candidates 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: 6 words upon waking up, 6 words after lunch, and 8 words before going to bed. This way, it won’t interfere with other academic tasks. The next day, you can repeat this process. In fact, the vocabulary required for the postgraduate entrance exam English test is mostly high school-level words, 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—reviewing the words learned the previous day before memorizing new ones on the second day, and reviewing the words learned over the past two days before memorizing new ones on the third day. Repeating this process, 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 won’t affect your daily work or studies but also ensures more lasting retention.
During postgraduate entrance exam preparation, which phrases should you review? The main sources for reviewing phrases are two: first, phrases encountered in the reading comprehension section of past exam papers, and second, phrases summarized in the cloze test analysis section of the annual exam syllabus explanation. In the postgraduate entrance exam English test, complex sentences are the main obstacle to understanding the text and performing translations well. To understand such complex 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" of each "onion" (clause); third, translate each layer of the "onion's" skin into Chinese; and fourth, combine the resulting simple Chinese sentences into a coherent Chinese long sentence.
Each article in this book clearly marks which exercise mimics the corresponding question from the postgraduate entrance exam English test.