英语阅读：找准“标杆词” 快速定位

　　考研英语阅读文章一般在400～500字左右，如此短的文章中夹杂着生僻的单词和疑难句，从而使得阅读工作变得异常困难。那么在这其中，我们应当怎么做呢? 在此跨考教育英语教研室张老师建议大家使用如下的方法：

　　1、扫读文章，了解基本内容、作者立场和文章结构。一般而言，我们所要阅读的内容集中在文章首段、各段首尾句和转折句处。

　　2、仔细读题目，划出“标杆词”——最独特的词组、数字或符号(如生词、拼写较长或很短的词、大写的词、斜体词、百分比、年代或日期、货币代号等)。

　　3、扫视全文，一旦找到和题目相对应的信息，立马放慢速度，直到所读意群表达意思与题目无关为止。

　　4、对比选项，选出最适合的答案。

　　5、在定位的同时，要结合自然段定位的原则辅助定位。

　　下面我们结合真题来进行一下具体讲解。

　　真题解析(2000年 Text1)

　　A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap， but， if properly handled， it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War， it had a market eight times larger than any competitor， giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world‘s best， its workers the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.

　　It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably， the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries， such as consumer electronics， had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left， Zenith. (Now there is none： Zenith was bought by South Korea’s LG Electronics in July.) Foreign made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America‘s machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors， which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age， was going to be the next casualty.

　　All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing， and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America’s industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.

　　How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self doubt has yielded to blind pride. “American industry has changed its structure， has gone on a diet， has learnt to be more quick witted，” according to Richard Cavanagh， executive dean of Harvard‘s Kennedy School of Government. “It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity，” says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute， a think tank in Washington， DC. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as “a golden age of business management in the United States.”