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新东方口译研究中心 阅读课题组 祁慧

中口阅读第二篇文章The Early Bird Gets the Bad Grade取自于新东方课堂上经常提到的英美主流报刊New York Times(2008年1月14日) 话题属于教育类和医疗健康类交叉话题。从体裁上看，依然没有逃离Research研究类型文章的大体框架。文章内容是有违传统的早期的鸟儿有虫吃的思路，而是一反常规，提出了学生早期会影响到他们的学习效率，建议能够推迟上课时间。所以第10题文章主旨是starting the first class late is advantageous in more than one way.

IT’S Monday morning, and you’re having trouble waking your teenagers. You’re not alone. Indeed, each morning, few of the country’s 17 million high school students are awake enough to get much out of their first class, particularly if it starts before 8 a.m. Sure, many of them stayed up too late the night before, but not because they wanted to. 第一段是以一个现象导入，不需要细读，直接去找下面一段的对例子的总结句。

Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin.

在研究类型文章中，文章的总结句多是以research/result/expert shows为开头，第6题的出题点也恰恰是在这二段里，人的body clock是受到了一种叫做melatonin的人体分泌物的影响，所以第6题应该选择A。

The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.

第三段的重点依然是落在了the result is that…这样一个结论句上面，说明起得早会影响第一节课的效率，对于有数字出现的内容则不用祥读。

Here’s an idea: stop focusing on testing and instead support changing the hours of the school day, starting it later for teenagers and ending it later for all children. Indeed, no one does well when they’re sleep-deprived, but insufficient sleep among children has been linked to obesity and to learning issues like attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. You’d think this would spur educators to take action, and a few have.

考生应该非常熟悉这一个词组 “Here’s an idea”后面提到了具体的解决方法：停止应试教育，把学校的上课时间和下课时间推迟。第七题的细节题依然也是围绕着主题：缺乏睡眠产生的影响，诸如obesity肥胖和attention scant注意力不集中的问题。

In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 a.m., from 7:30 a.m. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. Districts in Virginia and Connecticut have achieved similar success. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minn., which instituted high school start times of 8:40 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. respectively in 1997, students’ grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreased. Later is also safer. When high schools in Fayette County in Kentucky delayed their start times to 8:30 a.m., the number of teenagers involved in car crashes dropped, even as they rose in the state.

第8题根据题型考的是并列考点，应该选择的是C选项，虽然C选项在该段中出现了，但是C是误选项，因为推迟上课时间是导致青少年事故率下跌，但是整体的事故率还是上升的。

So why hasn’t every school board moved back that first bell? Well, it seems that improving teenagers’ performance takes a back seat to more pressing concerns: the cost of additional bus service, the difficulty of adjusting after-school activity schedules and the inconvenience to teachers and parents.

But few of these problems actually come to pass, according to the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota. In Kentucky and Minnesota, simply flipping the starting times for the elementary and high schools meant no extra cost for buses.

There are other reasons to start and end school at a later time. According to Paul Reville, a professor of education policy at Harvard and chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, “Trying to cram everything our 21st-century students need into a 19th-century six-and-a-half-hour day just isn’t working.” He says that children learn more at a less frantic pace, and that lengthening the school day would help “close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better-off peers.”