2020年8月1日雅思考试听力回顾

场景话题：

S1 关于儿童活动介绍/ S2 新西兰海岛旅游介绍/ S3 论文讨论/ S4 员工的缺勤研究

S1填空+表格填空/ S2 选择+配对/ S3 单选+多选/ S4 填空

朗阁名师叶璇点评

本次考试难度正常，本场考试填空题出现在S1、S4。

答案（仅供参考）如下：

S1:

1 26.65

1. Weather
2. Lunch
3. Clothes
4. Lakes
5. Climbing
6. Mountain
7. long stick
8. Helmet

10 race

 

S4:

31.Gender

32. attitude

33. culture

34. industry

35. size

36.external

37. Efficiency

38. larger

39. Benefits

40. dismiss.

 

Section 1内容，据最近参加考试的同学反馈，语速匹配平时听力真题训练语速的1.25倍。这次section1的听力内容，是关于儿童活动介绍，涉及到活动要求，携带物品，以及注意事项等。此内容现有真题有类似的可以练手。例如，C12-5-1,部分答案与今天试题答案重合，建议花时间练习熟悉。Section 1采取了填空+表格填空的形式，信息密度性比较强，掌握好定位，答案很容易听出。Section2采取单选+配对的形式，是常见的考法，出现了高频的most，first等考点词的同义替换。配对题选项言简意赅，和C10-2-2以及C9-3-2题目出题形式和同义替换考点类似，学生可以针对性刻意练习。Section3是单选+多选的形式，考法和C11-4-3类似。单选题是学生论文内容讨论，涉及了当地文化的讨论。相关内容和C12-6-3相似，并不是新颖题材。多选题选项中出现了高频的考点词：data，options，surrounding，source，material字眼，很多现有真题中，选项都会大量包含这些替换，学生应该再次引起重视，做好考点积累。Section4讨论的社会性话题——员工缺勤研究。出现的词汇也是社会性话题常考的答案词。如果不熟悉相关内容和表达的，可以借鉴C12-5-4，C12-6-4,今天考的部分答案词和这两篇出现的同义替换词有所重合，如external，efficiency。最后的答案词dismiss，部分学生不是很熟，导致失分，因此各位同学在刷题练习的同时可以配场景单词来加强记忆和敏感度。

考试预测

1. 场景方面：场景方面依然是主流场景（咨询、旅游生活场景、课程讨论、学科探讨和讲座），在接下来的考试中，考生还应将重点放在S1咨询，租房，求职 ，S2旅游，活动及公共场所设施介绍，S3课程讨论及论文写作，S4各类学科探讨和讲座。

2. 题型：本次考试题型设置较常规。S1,S4填空为主；S2,S3单选/多选和配对为主。

3. 机经：如需参考机经，以2015-2018年机经为主。

2020年8月1日雅思考试阅读回顾

P1 土地沙漠化

P2 澳大利亚的鹦鹉

P3 多重任务

朗阁名师刘艳艳点评

1.8月份首场考试的难度总体中等，有出现比较多的配对题，没有出现Heading题，其余主要以常规的填空，判断和选择题为主。文章的话题和题型搭配也是在剑桥真题中都有迹可循，所以备考重心依然还是剑桥官方真题。

2. 整体分析：涉及环境类（P1）、动物类（P2）、社科类（P3）。

本次考试的P2和P3均为旧题。P2是动物类的话题，题型组合为：段落细节配对+单选+summary填空，难度中等。题型上也延续19年的出题特点，出现配对题，考察定位速度和准确度。P3也出现了段落细节配对，主要是段落细节配对+单选+判断。三种题型难度中等，但是文章理解起来略有难度。

3. 部分答案及参考文章：

Passage 1：土地沙漠化

题型及答案待确认

 

Passage 2：澳大利亚的鹦鹉

题型：段落细节配对+单选+Summary填空

技巧分析：由于段落细节配对是完全乱序出题，在定位时需要先做后面的单选题及填空题，最大化利用已读信息来确定答案，尽量避免重复阅读，以保证充分的做题时间。

文章内容及题目参考：

A 概况，关于一个大的生物种类

B 一些物种消失的原因，题干关键词：an example of one bird species extinct

C 一种鹦鹉不能自己存活，以捕食另一种鸟为生，吃该鸟类的蛋。题干关键词：two species competed at the expense of one another

D 吸引鹦鹉的原因以及鹦鹉嘴的特点。题干关键词：analysis of reasons as Australian landscape attract parrots

E 植物是如何适应鹦鹉。题干关键词：plants attract birds which make the animal adapt to the environment

F 南半球对英语的影响

G 两种鹦鹉从环境改变中获益并存活下来。题干关键词：two species of parrots benefit fromm the environment change

H 外来物种及本地鹦鹉

I 鸟类栖息地被破坏以及人类采取的措施

J 作者对于鹦鹉问题的态度

单选题：

why parrots in the whole world are lineal descendants of

选项关键词：continent split from Africa

the writer thinks parrots species beak is for

选项关键词：adjust to their suitable diet

which one is not mentioned

选项关键词：should be frequently maintained

 

填空题：分布在文章的前两段

one-sixth

16th century

mapmaker

John Gould

 

Passage 3：多重任务

题型：段落细节配对+单选+判断

参考答案及文章

28 F

29 I

30 C

31 B

32 G

33 C

34 B

35 A

36 YES

37 YES

38 NO

39 NOT GIVEN

40 NO

 

Passage3: multitasking

 

Multitasking Debate—Can you do them at the same time?

 

Talking on the phone while driving isn't the only situation where we're worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking are probably just underperforming in all-or at best, all but one -of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time.

 

The problem, according to René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there's a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say "ba"; an electronic sound should elicit a "ko", and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort. The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they're flummoxed. "If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed," he says. In fact,if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens (See Diagram).

 

There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we're looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognise a second item. This limitation is known as the "attentional blink": experiments have shown that if you're watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it. Interestingly, if you don't expect the first event, you have no trouble responding to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.

 

A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It's estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called "change blindness". Show people pairs of near-identical photos -say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other -and they will fail to spot the differences (if you don't believe it, check out the clips at http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download). Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?

 

A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus -braking when you see a child in the road, for instance,or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she's thinking of leaving your dad -also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the "response selection bottleneck" theory, first proposed in 1952.

 

Last December, Marois and his colleagues published a paper arguing that this bottleneck is in fact created in two different areas of the brain: one in the posterior lateral prefrontal cortex and another in the superior medial frontal cortex (Neuron, vol 52, p 1109). They found this by scanning people's brains with functional MRI while the subjects struggled to choose among eight possible responses to each of two closely timed tasks. They discovered that these brain areas are not tied to any particular sense but are generally involved in selecting responses, and they seemed to queue these responses when presented with multiple tasks concurrently.

 

Bottleneck? What bottleneck?

 

But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, doesn't buy the bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers. He has written papers with titles like "Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck" (Psychological Science, vol 12, p101). His experiments have shown that with enough practice -at least 2000 tries -some people can execute two tasks simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other. He suggests that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates all this and, what's more, he thinks it uses discretion: sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another.

 

Even with practice, not all people manage to achieve this harmonious time-share, however. Meyer argues that individual differences come down to variations in the character of the processor -some brains are just more "cautious", some more "daring". And despite urban legend, there are no noticeable

 

differences between men and women. So, according to him, it's not a central bottleneck that causes dual-task interference, but rather "adaptive executive control", which "schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order".

 

Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. He has found that with just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteers show a huge improvement at managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in what the brain is doing to achieve this. Marois speculates that practice might give us the chance to find less congested circuits to execute a task -rather like finding trusty back streets to avoid heavy traffic on main roads -effectively making our response to the task subconscious. After all, there are plenty of examples of subconscious multitasking that most of us routinely manage: walking and talking, eating and reading, watching TV and folding the laundry.

 

But while some dual tasks benefit from practice, others simply do not. "Certain kinds of tasks are really hard to do two at once," says Pierre Jolicoeur at the University of Montreal, Canada, who also studies multitasking. Dual tasks involving a visual stimulus and skeletal-motor response (which he dubs "in the eye and out the hand") and an auditory stimulus with a verbal response ("in the ear and out the mouth") do seem to be amenable to practice, he says. Jolicoeur has found that with enough training such tasks can be performed as well together as apart. He speculates that the brain connections that they use may be somehow special, because we learn to speak by hearing and learn to move by looking. But pair visual input with a verbal response, or sound to motor, and there's no dramatic improvement. "It looks like no amount of practice will allow you to combine these," he says.

 

For research purposes, these experiments have to be kept simple. Real-world multitasking poses much greater challenges. Even the upbeat Meyer is sceptical about how a lot of us live our lives. Instant-messaging and trying to do your homework? "It can't be done," he says. Conducting a job interview while answering emails? "There's no way you wind up being as good." Needless to say, there appear to be no researchers in the area of multitasking who believe that you can safely drive a car and carry on a phone conversation. In fact, last year David Strayer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City reported that people using cellphones drive no better than drunks (Human Factors, vol 48, p 381). In another study, Strayer found that using a hands-free kit did not improve a driver's response time. He concluded that what distracts a driver so badly is the very act of talking to someone who isn't present in the car and therefore is unaware of the hazards facing the driver.

 

“No researchers believe it's safe to drive a car and carry on a phone conversation”

 

It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worse at multitasking as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the decline is slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young drivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers.

 

It's not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit from practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, brain scans showed that underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active.

While it's clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering. "We have this impression of an almighty complex brain," says Marois, "and yet we have very humbling and crippling limits." For most of our history, we probably never needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven't evolved to be able to. Perhaps we will in future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of true multitaskers.

考试预测

1. 本场考试整体难度中等，话题相对容易理解，基本还是延续19年的考试趋势，篇章搭配类型也都能够在剑桥真题中找到对应的练习，所以认真做剑桥真题是高分必备。本场考试配对题不多，类型上也只出现了最简单的人名观点配对，下场考试除了常规的填空，判断，选择题之外，要重点预警段落细节配对和前后句的配对，注意这两种题目的定位，题干信息分析和与原文的替换点，同时控制做题时间，保证第三篇文章有充分的时间。19年List of Headings出现的频率大概是1-2次/月，如果对Heading题还是存在疑问的同学，注意下场考试前也要再去复习和巩固Heading题的中心句确定或者段落重心的确定，保证正确题量稳定在目标分数内。

2. 下场考试的话题可能有关历史类，考古类和管理类。

3. 重点浏览2015和2018年机经。

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