教你读懂GRE长阅读

  GRE阅读中的长阅读是很多同学眼中的难点。短阅读是字数在100字左右，一段话，有两道题；长阅读400-500字，分为3-4段，有四道题。相比起来长阅读的难度是比较高的。其实不一定长阅读一定比短阅读难，关键在于我们对于考点的把握。

举例：

Historian E.H Carr’s thesis that all debates concerning the explanation of historical phenomena revolve around the question of the priority of causes is so familiar to historians as to constitute orthodoxy within their profession. The true historian, as Carr puts it, will feel a professional obligation to place the multiple causes of a historical event in a hierarchy by means of which the primary or ultimate cause of the event can be identified. In the Marxist mode of historical explanation (historical materialism), a universal hierarchy of causes is posited in which economic factors are always primary. In the classic, more widely accepted alternative ultimately derived from Weberian sociology, hierarchies of causes are treated as historically specific: explanatory primacy in any particular historical situation must be established by empirical investigation of that situation, not by applying a universal model of historical causation.

While the need to rank historical causes in some order of importance may seem obvious to most historians, such hierarchies raise serious philosophical difficulties. If any historical event is the product of a number of factors, then each of these factor is indispensable to the occurrence of the event. But how can one cause be more indispensable than another? And if it cannot, how can there be a hierarchy of indispensable causes? It was this problem that first led Weber himself to argue for the impossibility of any general formula specifying the relative importance of causes; we cannot, for example, conclude that in every capitalist society religious change has been more significant than economic change (or vice versa) in explaining the rise of capitalism.

Runciman offers a different argument leading to the same conclusion. He points out that it is possible to identify specific factors as the primary causes of a particular historical event only relative to an initial set of background conditions. For instance, if we accept English defeats after 1369 in the Hundred Years War as a given, then we may identify the high levels of taxation necessitated by these military reverses as the main cause of the Peasants Revolt of 1381. If instead we regard the financing of warfare by taxation in this period as a background condition, then we will see the English reverses themselves as the main cause of the revolt. However, neither ordinary life nor historical practice offer reliable criteria by which to distinguish causes from background conditions and thus to resolve historical debates about the relative importance of causes. And this difficulty casts doubt not only on the Marxist effort to identify a universal hierarchy of causes, but also on any attempt to identify an objective hierarchy of causes–even of the historically specific kind favored by non-Marxists.

这篇文章的主要内容是关于历史学研究的，其中有大量的学者的学术分析，理解起来比较有难度。

但是我们在做GRE长阅读的时候不必每句话每个词都要理解，做长阅读的关键在于能否准确找到主旨句，在于我们是否可以准确的抓到考点。这就考察考生是否能够正确判断文章主次。

这篇文章是三段的主旨句都是第一句，第一段的主旨是历史学家的共性是研究priority of causes，即历史事件的原因的主次等级。第二段说这种主次等级hierarchy很难建立，是要否定第一段之前所有历史学家的研究角度。第三段说Runciman这个历史学家也得出同样的结论，即第三段支持第二段、反对第一段。

这篇文章的四道题目，第一题和第四题考察全文的主旨，按全文三段话的主旨句结合起来做。

二三两题则分别考察了不同段落的主旨，第二题考察第一段的主旨句，第三题考察第二段。

在理解了长文章的考点后，实际需要精读的句子只有三句话。

那么下面这题关于文章主旨的题目，你能做对吗？

1. The primary purpose of the passage is to

A. compare two prominent models of historical explanation

B. undermine non-Marxist objections to the historical-materialist explanatory model of historical causation

C. analyze ways in which the question of historical causation can be illuminated by Weberian sociology

D. challenge an orthodox position concerning historical explanation

E. argue that historical analysis should rely more on empirical investigation than on philosophical reflection

答案：D。 解析：第一段提出了之前历史学家的共性，也是之前的正统立场orthodox position，二三两段都反驳第一段。

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