如何阅读说明文？SAT阅读说明文例题解析
时光老人-小学校长个人总结
三立教育
如何区分说明文和议论文
Informative的文章目的在于inform the reader，文章不会支持关于一个
问题的任何一
方，尽管他们可能会在文章中讲其他人的观点;Argumentative的文章会讲解
作者自己的
观点，而且作者会用其他的信息来支持这个观点。文章的主要目的是用特定的证据以及逻辑<
br>框架来支持自己的论断。
2.2如何寻找说明文大意 (Big
picture)
为了寻找文章的Big picture, 这里强烈建议读者在阅读篇章
的过程中mark重要的内容。
对于不同类型的文章我们mark的内容当然也是不同的。
Narrative的文章：作者的Emotion(或Emotion发展变化的过程)
Informative—summary：具体的事物
Informative—analysis: the author‟s analysis,
tone, opinion
Argumentative—Argue for:
Main Point, ConclusionConcession
Argumentative—Argue Against: others‟ opinion,
the author‟s opinion
Paired
Passages—Common, Main Point or Emotion of each
passage
Informative(说明文)的篇章来源包括人文学，社会科学以及自
然科学。现在我们来看
Informative类的文章如何mark,寻找big
picture的例子。
例一：
In many
respects living Native Americans remain as
mysterious, exotic, and
unfathomable to their
contemporaries at the end of the twentieth century
as
they were to the Pilgrim settlers over
three hundred fifty years ago. Native
rights,
motives, customs, languages, and aspirations are
misunderstood by
Euro-Americans out of a
culpable ignorance that is both self-serving and
self-righteous. Part of the problem may well
stem from the long-standing
三立教育
tendency of European or Euro-American thinkers
to regard Native Americans
as fundamentally
and profoundly different, motivated more often by
mysticism than by ambition, charged more by
unfathomable visions than by
intelligence or
introspection.
This idea is certainly not
new. Rousseau‟s* “noble savages” wandered, pure of
heart, through a pristine world. Since native
people were simply assumed to be
incomprehensible, they were seldom
comprehended. Their societies were
simply
beheld, often through cloudy glasses, and rarely
probed by the tools of
logic and deductive
analysis automatically reserved for cultures
prejudged to
be “civilized.” And on those
occasions when Europeans did attempt to
formulate an encompassing theory, it was not,
ordinarily, on a
human-being-to-human-being
ancestor-descendant model.
basis,
Native
but rather through an
Americans, though obviously
contemporary
with their observers, were somehow regarded as
ancient,
examples of what Stone Age Europeans
must have been like.
It‟s a great story,
an international crowd pleaser, but there is a
difficulty:
Native Americans were, and are,
Homo sapiens sapiens. Though often equipped
with a shovel-shaped incisor tooth, eyes with
epicanthic folds, or an extra
molar cusp,
Native American people have had to cope, for the
last forty
thousand years or so, just like
everyone else. Their cultures have had to make
internal sense, their medicines have had to
work consistently and practically,
their
philosophical explanations have had to be
reasonably satisfying and
三立教育
dependable, or else the ancestors of those now
called Native Americans would
truly have
vanished long ago.
The reluctance in
accepting this obvious fact comes from the
Eurocentric
conviction that the West holds a
monopoly on science, logic, and clear thinking.
To admit that other, culturally divergent
viewpoints are equally plausible is to
cast
doubt on the monolithic center of Judeo-Christian
belief: that there is but
one of
everything—God, right way, truth—and Europeans
alone knew what
that was. If Native American
cultures were acknowledged as viable, then
European societies were something less than an
exclusive club. It is little
wonder,
therefore, that Native Americans were perceived
not so much as they
were but as they had to
be, from a European viewpoint. They dealt in
magic,
not method. They were stuck in their
past, not guided by its precedents.
Such
expedient misconception argues strongly for the
development and
dissemination of a more
accurate, more objective historical account of
native
peoples—a goal easier stated than
accomplished. Native American societies
were
nonliterate before and during much of the early
period of their contact
with Europe, making
the task of piecing together a history
particularly
demanding. The familiar and
reassuring kinds of written documentation found
in European societies of equivalent
chronological periods do not exist, and the
forms of tribal record preservation
available—oral history, tales, mnemonic
devices, and religious rituals— strike
university-trained academics as inexact,
unreliable, and suspect. Western historians,
culture-bound by their own
三立教育
approach to knowledge, are apt to declaim that
next to nothing, save the
evidence of
archaeology, can be known of early Native American
life. To them,
an absolute void is more
acceptable and rigorous than an educated
guess.
However, it is naïve to assume that
any culture‟s history is perceived without
subjective prejudice. Every modern observer,
whether he or she was schooled in
the
traditions of the South Pacific or Zaire, of
Hanover, New Hampshire, or
Vienna, Austria,
was exposed at an early age to one or another form
of folklore
about Native Americans. For some,
the very impressions about Native
American
tribes that initially attracted them to the field
of American history
are aspects most firmly
rooted in popular myth and stereotype. Serious
scholarship about Native American culture and
history is unique in that it
requires an
initial, abrupt, and wrenching demythologizing.
Most students do
not start from point zero,
but from minus zero, and in the process are often
required to abandon cherished childhood
fantasies of superheroes or
larger-than-life
villains.
读者可以自行用3分钟的时间来寻找一下这篇文章的Big
picture。
这是一篇偏Informative—Analysis的一篇文章。
Problemà Causeà Deep Analysis of
CauseàSolution
这是一篇典型的“问题分析+问题解决”类型的文章
Problem: (Paragraph 1) remain as mysterious,
exotic, and unfathomable to
their
contemporaries
Cause: (Paragraph 1) Part
of the problem may well stem from
三立教育
Deep Analysis: (Paragraph
2—5)
Paragraph 3: through an ancestor-
descendant model
Paragraph 4: Eurocentric
conviction
Paragraph 5: misconception of
European Historians
Solution:
demythologizing
例二：
Aviation
belonged to the new century in part because the
engineering that
went into flying machines was
utterly different from that of the Industrial
Revolution. Nineteenth-century engineering
revolved around the steam engine.
It was about
weight and brute power—beautifully machined heavy
steel,
burnished bronze, polished copper
pipes, ornamental cast iron—everything
built,
with no expense spared, to withstand great
pressures and last any
number of lifetimes.
Airplane construction was the opposite of all
that; it was
about lightness.
The
Wright brothers, who created one of the first
airplanes, started out
making bicycles, which
were all the rage at the turn of the century. They
knew
about thin-wall steel tubes, wire-spoked
wheels, chain droves, and whatever
else it
took to construct efficient machines that weighed
as little as possible. In
effect, they were
practical engineers at the cheap end of the
market, but they
happened to be fascinated by
flight. Says one writer, “Wilbur [Wright] spent
his time studying the flight of vultures,
eagles, ospreys, and hawks, trying to
discover
the secret of their ability to maneuver with their
wings in unstable air.
To those who later
asked him how he learned to fly, he loved to reply
through
三立教育
his scarcely
opened lips: „Like a bird.‟” This is the point at
which engineering
intersects with the
imagination, with humanity‟s ancient dream of
freeing
itself from gravity. Until the first
fliers got to work, the body was earthbound,
but it enclosed a soul that flew—in
meditation, in poetry, and, as the
seventeenth-century English poet Andrew
Marvell showed, sometimes
spectacularly in
both:
Casting the body‟s vest aside
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a Bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
At the beginning of this century, the new
light engineering that allowed people
to fly
seemed to the uninitiated a kind of poetry. In
1913, a writer in the
Atlantic Monthly claimed
that “machinery is our new art form” and praised
“the engineers whose poetry is too deep to
look poetic” and whose gifts “have
swung their
souls free … like gods.” One of Wright‟s most
eloquent admirers
called him a poet and
compared him to one of “those monks of Asia Minor
who
live perched on the tops of inaccessible
mountain peaks. The soul of Wilbur
Wright is
just as high and faraway” Wright was, in fact,
“deeply middle-class
and unheroic,” writes one
biographer, but those obsessed with the glamour of
flight pretended not to notice.
三立教育
以上黑体加粗的地方是这篇文章所出现的事物:
aviation, airplane, Wright brothers,
poetry,
new light engineering, a writer……，所有这些事物都表明这篇文章是一个
Informative—summary.
基本上文章的BP很简单，包括：为什么Wright
Brothers发现飞机、飞机的发现对人们
想象力的影响、人们对Wright
Brothers的过于神化。
上海新托福精讲班多少钱？
一、整体情况
培训对象：英语基础薄弱大学生或未接触过托福考试的高中生
培训目的：通过对托福基础听说读写的巩固及强化训练，帮助学员提高托福基础和应试技巧，
顺利通过考试。
目标分数：80-90分
课程时长：根据学员需要而定
课程学费：依照学员学习水平而定
二、课程安排
课程课程：主讲托福词汇、托福语法、托福听力、托福阅读、托福口语、托福写作；
辅导课程：梳理课程知识，解疑答惑，查漏补缺；
测评课程：托福全真模考及考试分析点评；
三、模考安排
第一次：课程中间，安排一次托福全真模拟考试及点评
第二次：课程结束，安排一次托福全真模拟考试及点评
备
注：除以上安排，学员结课后可根据自己的考试时间自行预约TPO小站模考
三立教育
【看不懂？更多问题请留言咨询在线备考顾问】
三立教育
如何区分说明文和议论文
Informative的文章目的在于inform
the reader，文章不会支持关于一个问题的任何一
方，尽管他们可能会在文章中讲其他人的观
点;Argumentative的文章会讲解作者自己的
观点，而且作者会用其他的信息来支持这个观
点。文章的主要目的是用特定的证据以及逻辑
框架来支持自己的论断。
2.2如何寻找说明文大意 (Big picture)
为了寻找文章的Big
picture, 这里强烈建议读者在阅读篇章的过程中mark重要的内容。
对于不同类型的文章我
们mark的内容当然也是不同的。
Narrative的文章：作者的Emotion(或Emotion发展变化的过程)
Informative—summary：具体的事物
Informative—analysis: the author‟s analysis,
tone, opinion
Argumentative—Argue for:
Main Point, ConclusionConcession
Argumentative—Argue Against: others‟ opinion,
the author‟s opinion
Paired
Passages—Common, Main Point or Emotion of each
passage
Informative(说明文)的篇章来源包括人文学，社会科学以及自
然科学。现在我们来看
Informative类的文章如何mark,寻找big
picture的例子。
例一：
In many
respects living Native Americans remain as
mysterious, exotic, and
unfathomable to their
contemporaries at the end of the twentieth century
as
they were to the Pilgrim settlers over
three hundred fifty years ago. Native
rights,
motives, customs, languages, and aspirations are
misunderstood by
Euro-Americans out of a
culpable ignorance that is both self-serving and
self-righteous. Part of the problem may well
stem from the long-standing
三立教育
tendency of European or Euro-American thinkers
to regard Native Americans
as fundamentally
and profoundly different, motivated more often by
mysticism than by ambition, charged more by
unfathomable visions than by
intelligence or
introspection.
This idea is certainly not
new. Rousseau‟s* “noble savages” wandered, pure of
heart, through a pristine world. Since native
people were simply assumed to be
incomprehensible, they were seldom
comprehended. Their societies were
simply
beheld, often through cloudy glasses, and rarely
probed by the tools of
logic and deductive
analysis automatically reserved for cultures
prejudged to
be “civilized.” And on those
occasions when Europeans did attempt to
formulate an encompassing theory, it was not,
ordinarily, on a
human-being-to-human-being
ancestor-descendant model.
basis,
Native
but rather through an
Americans, though obviously
contemporary
with their observers, were somehow regarded as
ancient,
examples of what Stone Age Europeans
must have been like.
It‟s a great story,
an international crowd pleaser, but there is a
difficulty:
Native Americans were, and are,
Homo sapiens sapiens. Though often equipped
with a shovel-shaped incisor tooth, eyes with
epicanthic folds, or an extra
molar cusp,
Native American people have had to cope, for the
last forty
thousand years or so, just like
everyone else. Their cultures have had to make
internal sense, their medicines have had to
work consistently and practically,
their
philosophical explanations have had to be
reasonably satisfying and
三立教育
dependable, or else the ancestors of those now
called Native Americans would
truly have
vanished long ago.
The reluctance in
accepting this obvious fact comes from the
Eurocentric
conviction that the West holds a
monopoly on science, logic, and clear thinking.
To admit that other, culturally divergent
viewpoints are equally plausible is to
cast
doubt on the monolithic center of Judeo-Christian
belief: that there is but
one of
everything—God, right way, truth—and Europeans
alone knew what
that was. If Native American
cultures were acknowledged as viable, then
European societies were something less than an
exclusive club. It is little
wonder,
therefore, that Native Americans were perceived
not so much as they
were but as they had to
be, from a European viewpoint. They dealt in
magic,
not method. They were stuck in their
past, not guided by its precedents.
Such
expedient misconception argues strongly for the
development and
dissemination of a more
accurate, more objective historical account of
native
peoples—a goal easier stated than
accomplished. Native American societies
were
nonliterate before and during much of the early
period of their contact
with Europe, making
the task of piecing together a history
particularly
demanding. The familiar and
reassuring kinds of written documentation found
in European societies of equivalent
chronological periods do not exist, and the
forms of tribal record preservation
available—oral history, tales, mnemonic
devices, and religious rituals— strike
university-trained academics as inexact,
unreliable, and suspect. Western historians,
culture-bound by their own
三立教育
approach to knowledge, are apt to declaim that
next to nothing, save the
evidence of
archaeology, can be known of early Native American
life. To them,
an absolute void is more
acceptable and rigorous than an educated
guess.
However, it is naïve to assume that
any culture‟s history is perceived without
subjective prejudice. Every modern observer,
whether he or she was schooled in
the
traditions of the South Pacific or Zaire, of
Hanover, New Hampshire, or
Vienna, Austria,
was exposed at an early age to one or another form
of folklore
about Native Americans. For some,
the very impressions about Native
American
tribes that initially attracted them to the field
of American history
are aspects most firmly
rooted in popular myth and stereotype. Serious
scholarship about Native American culture and
history is unique in that it
requires an
initial, abrupt, and wrenching demythologizing.
Most students do
not start from point zero,
but from minus zero, and in the process are often
required to abandon cherished childhood
fantasies of superheroes or
larger-than-life
villains.
读者可以自行用3分钟的时间来寻找一下这篇文章的Big
picture。
这是一篇偏Informative—Analysis的一篇文章。
Problemà Causeà Deep Analysis of
CauseàSolution
这是一篇典型的“问题分析+问题解决”类型的文章
Problem: (Paragraph 1) remain as mysterious,
exotic, and unfathomable to
their
contemporaries
Cause: (Paragraph 1) Part
of the problem may well stem from
三立教育
Deep Analysis: (Paragraph
2—5)
Paragraph 3: through an ancestor-
descendant model
Paragraph 4: Eurocentric
conviction
Paragraph 5: misconception of
European Historians
Solution:
demythologizing
例二：
Aviation
belonged to the new century in part because the
engineering that
went into flying machines was
utterly different from that of the Industrial
Revolution. Nineteenth-century engineering
revolved around the steam engine.
It was about
weight and brute power—beautifully machined heavy
steel,
burnished bronze, polished copper
pipes, ornamental cast iron—everything
built,
with no expense spared, to withstand great
pressures and last any
number of lifetimes.
Airplane construction was the opposite of all
that; it was
about lightness.
The
Wright brothers, who created one of the first
airplanes, started out
making bicycles, which
were all the rage at the turn of the century. They
knew
about thin-wall steel tubes, wire-spoked
wheels, chain droves, and whatever
else it
took to construct efficient machines that weighed
as little as possible. In
effect, they were
practical engineers at the cheap end of the
market, but they
happened to be fascinated by
flight. Says one writer, “Wilbur [Wright] spent
his time studying the flight of vultures,
eagles, ospreys, and hawks, trying to
discover
the secret of their ability to maneuver with their
wings in unstable air.
To those who later
asked him how he learned to fly, he loved to reply
through
三立教育
his scarcely
opened lips: „Like a bird.‟” This is the point at
which engineering
intersects with the
imagination, with humanity‟s ancient dream of
freeing
itself from gravity. Until the first
fliers got to work, the body was earthbound,
but it enclosed a soul that flew—in
meditation, in poetry, and, as the
seventeenth-century English poet Andrew
Marvell showed, sometimes
spectacularly in
both:
Casting the body‟s vest aside
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a Bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
At the beginning of this century, the new
light engineering that allowed people
to fly
seemed to the uninitiated a kind of poetry. In
1913, a writer in the
Atlantic Monthly claimed
that “machinery is our new art form” and praised
“the engineers whose poetry is too deep to
look poetic” and whose gifts “have
swung their
souls free … like gods.” One of Wright‟s most
eloquent admirers
called him a poet and
compared him to one of “those monks of Asia Minor
who
live perched on the tops of inaccessible
mountain peaks. The soul of Wilbur
Wright is
just as high and faraway” Wright was, in fact,
“deeply middle-class
and unheroic,” writes one
biographer, but those obsessed with the glamour of
flight pretended not to notice.
三立教育
以上黑体加粗的地方是这篇文章所出现的事物:
aviation, airplane, Wright brothers,
poetry,
new light engineering, a writer……，所有这些事物都表明这篇文章是一个
Informative—summary.
基本上文章的BP很简单，包括：为什么Wright
Brothers发现飞机、飞机的发现对人们
想象力的影响、人们对Wright
Brothers的过于神化。
上海新托福精讲班多少钱？
一、整体情况
培训对象：英语基础薄弱大学生或未接触过托福考试的高中生
培训目的：通过对托福基础听说读写的巩固及强化训练，帮助学员提高托福基础和应试技巧，
顺利通过考试。
目标分数：80-90分
课程时长：根据学员需要而定
课程学费：依照学员学习水平而定
二、课程安排
课程课程：主讲托福词汇、托福语法、托福听力、托福阅读、托福口语、托福写作；
辅导课程：梳理课程知识，解疑答惑，查漏补缺；
测评课程：托福全真模考及考试分析点评；
三、模考安排
第一次：课程中间，安排一次托福全真模拟考试及点评
第二次：课程结束，安排一次托福全真模拟考试及点评
备
注：除以上安排，学员结课后可根据自己的考试时间自行预约TPO小站模考
三立教育
【看不懂？更多问题请留言咨询在线备考顾问】