文章作者的微信公众号：北美考试终结者

之前北美考试终结者推出了2016.5北美和亚洲的作文题目，2016.5月亚洲和北美的考试分析，今天给大家提供的是亚洲的阅读原文（Passage 1~3）。

Passage 1: This passage is adapted from NawabdinElectrician by DaniyaMueenuddin.

Anothermanmight have thrown up his hands—but not Nawabdin. The daughters acted as aspurto his genius, and he looked with satisfaction in the mirror each morningatthe face of a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course knew that hemust proliferate his sources of revenue—the salary he received from K. K.Harounifor tending the tube wells would not even begin to suffice. He set upaone-room flour mill, run off a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.Hetried his hand at fish-farming in a pond at the edge of one of hismaster’sfields. He bought broken radios, fixed them, and resold them. He didnot demureven when asked to fix watches, although that enterprise didspectacularlybadly, and earned him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he tookapart everkept time again.

K. K.Harounilived mostly in Lahore and rarely visited his farms. Whenever the oldman didvisit, Nawab would place himself night and day at the door leading fromthese rvants’ sitting area into the walled grove of ancient banyan trees wheretheold farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator glasses bent and smudged,Nawabtended the household machinery, the air-conditioners, waterheaters,refrigerators, and pumps, like an engineer tending the boilers on afounderingsteamer in an Atlantic gale. By his super human efforts, he almostmanaged tomaintain K. K. Harouni in the same mechanical cocoon, cooled andbathed andlighted and fed, that the land owner enjoyed in Lahore.

Harouni,of course, became familiar with this ubiquitous man, who not only accompaniedhimon his tours of inspection but could be found morning and night standing onthemaster bed rewiring the light fixture or poking at the water heater inthebathroom. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the psychologicalmoment,Nawab asked if he might say a word. The land owner, who was cheerfullyfilinghis nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him to go ahead.

“Sir,as youknow, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these lands arefullyseventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is butoneman, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray hairs”—herehebowed his head to show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties asIshould. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness. Betteradarkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.Releaseme, I ask you, I beg you.”

Theold man,well accustomed to these sorts of speeches, though not usually thisflorid,filed away at his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.“What’s thematter,Nawabdin?” “Matter, sir? Oh, what could be the matter in your service?I’veeaten your salt for all my years. But, sir, on the bicycle now, with myoldlegs, and with the many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery fellonme—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a bridegroom from farm to farm, asIcould when I first had the good fortune to enter your service. I beg you,sir,let me go.”

“Andwhat isthe solution?” Harouni asked, seeing that they had come to the crux. Hedidn’tparticularly care one way or the other, except that it touched on his comfort—amatterof great interest to him.

“Well,sir,if I had a motorcycle, then I could somehow limp along, at least until Itrainup some younger man.”

Thecrops that year had been good, Harouni felt expansive in front of the fire, andso,much to the disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received abrand-newmotorcycle, a Honda 70. He even managed to extract an allowance forgasoline.

Themotorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people begancallinghim Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knewabsolutely nothing. He could now range farther, doing much wider business.Bestof all, now he could spend every night with his wife, who early in themarriagehad begged to live not in Nawab’s quarters in the village but with herfamilyin Firoza, near the only girls’ school in the area. A long straight roadranfrom the canal head works near Firoza all the way to the Indus, throughtheheart of the K. K. Harouni lands. The road ran on the bed of an old highwaybuilt when these lands lay

withinaprincely state. Some hundred and fifty years ago, one of the princes hadriddenthat way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this remote district, felthot,and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade the passersby. Within afewhours, he forgot that he had given the order, and in a few dozen years heinturn was forgotten, but these trees still stood, enormous now, some ofthemdead and looming without bark, white and leafless. Nawab would fly downthisroad on his new machine, with bags and streamers hanging from every knobandbrace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be flappingnumeroussmall vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up towhichevertube well needed servicing, with his ears almost blown off, he shonewith thespeed of his arrival.

Passage 2: This passage is adapted from PublicTrustIn The News: A constructivist study of the social life of the newsbyStephen Coleman, Scott Anthony and David E. Morrison

Thenews is aform of public knowledge. Unlike personal or private knowledge (suchas thehealth of one’s friends and family; the conduct of a private hobby; asecretliaison), public knowledge increases in value as it is shared by morepeople.The date of an election and the claims of rival candidates; the causesand consequences of an environmental disaster; a debate about how to frameaparticular law; the latest reports from a war zone—these are all examplesofpublic knowledge that people are generally expected to know in order to beconsidered informed citizens. Thus, in contrast to personal orprivateknowledge, which is generally left to individuals to pursue or ignore,public knowledge is promoted even to those who might not think it matters tothem. Inshort, the circulation of public knowledge, including the news, isgenerallyregarded as a public good which cannot be solely demand-driven.

Theproduction,circulation and reception of public knowledge is a complex process.It isgenerally accepted that public knowledge should be authoritative, butthere isnot always common agreement about what the public needs to know, whois bestplaced to relate and explain it, and how authoritative reputations should bedetermined and evaluated.

Historically,newspaperssuch as The Times and broadcasters such as the BBC were widely regarded as thetrusted shapers of authoritative agendas and conventional wisdom. They embodiedthe Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of authorityas the ‘power over, ortitle to influence, the opinions of others’. As part of the general process ofthe transformation of authority whereby there has been a reluctance touncritically accept traditional sources of public knowledge, the demand hasbeen for all authority to make explicit the frames of value which determinetheir decisions. Centres of news production, as our focus groupsshow, have notbeen exempt from this process. Not surprisingly perhaps some news journalistsfeel uneasy about this renegotiation of their authority:

Editorsare increasingly casting a glance at the ‘most read’ lists on their own andother websites to work out which stories matter to readers and viewers. And nowthe audience—which used to know its place—is being asked to act as a kind ofjournalistic ombudsman, ruling on our credibility. (Broadcast journalist, 2008)

Theresult of democratising access to TV news could be political disengagement bythe majority and a dumbing down through a popularity contest of stories.(Onlinenews editor, 2007)

Despitethe rhetorical bluster of these statements, they amount to more thanstraightforward professional defensiveness. In their reference to an audience‘which used to know its place’ and conflation between democratisationand‘dumbing down’, they are seeking to argue for a particular mode of publicknowledge: one which is shaped by experts, immune from populist pressures;anddisseminated to attentive, but mainly passive recipients. It is a viewofcitizenship that closes down opportunities for popular involvement inthemaking of public knowledge by reinforcing the professional claims ofexperts.The journalists quoted above are right to feel uneasy, for there is, atalmost every institutional level in contemporary society, scepticism towardsthe epistemological authority of expert elites. There is a growing feeling, asexpressed by several of our focus group participants, that the news mediashouldbe ‘informative rather than authoritative’ (FG1); the job of journalists shouldbe to ‘give the news as raw as it is, without putting their slant on it’(FG5)and people should be given ‘sufficient information’ from which ‘we wouldbe ableto form opinions of our own’ (FG1).

Atstake here are two distinct conceptions of authority. The journalists we havequoted are resistant to the democratisation of news: the supremacy of theclickstream (according to which editors raise or lower the profile of storiesaccording tothe number of readers clicking on them online); the parity ofpopular culture with ‘serious’ news; the demands of some audience members forraw news rather than constructed narratives.

Passage 3: This passage is from Decoding aFlower’sMessage by Elsa Youngsteadt as published in American Scientist.

Texasgourd vines unfurltheir large, flared blossoms in the dim hours before sunrise.Until they closeat noon, their yellow petals and mild, squashy aroma attractbees that gathernectar and shuttle pollen from flower to flower. But “when youadvertise [topollinators], you advertise in an open communication network,”says chemicalecologist Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for ChemicalEcology inGermany. “You attract not just the good guys, but you also attractthe badguys.” For a Texas gourd plant (Cucurbita pepo variety texana), stripedcucumber beetles (Acalymmavittatum) are among the very bad guys. They chewuppollen and petals, defecate in the flowers and transmit the dreadedbacterialwilt disease, an infection that can reduce an entire plant to a heapofcollapsed tissue in mere days.

Thegourd vine’sproblem—how to attract enough pollinators but not too manybeetles—is aspecific case of a floral dilemma that biologists first noticedmany decadesago. In 1879, Austrian botanist Anton Kerner von Marilaun publisheda treatisetitled The Protective Means of Flowers against Unbidden Guests, inwhich he describedglands and sticky hairs that seemed to help keep harmfulinsects at bay. But acentury later, scientists had still barely begun toconsider the contributionof a flower’s scent to those interactions; to do sowould require a convergenceof fieldwork, chemistry and molecular biology.“We’re just beginning to trainthe type of biologists who can use those tools,”Baldwin says. The resulting experiments have begun to reveal the many ways thatfloral fragrances maymanipulate animal behavior.

In onerecent study,published in the February issue of Ecology, Nina Theis and LynnAdler took onthe specific problem of the Texas gourd. Its main pollinators arehoney bees(Apismellifera) and specialized squash bees (Peponapispruinosa),which respondto its floral scent. The aroma includes 10 compounds, but the mostabundant—andthe only one that lures squash bees into traps—is1,4-dimethoxybenzene.

Intuitionsuggests thatmore of that aroma should be even more appealing to bees. “We havethisassumption that a really fragrant flower is going to attract a lotofpollinators,” says Theis, a chemical ecologist at Elms College in Chicopee,Massachusetts. But, she adds, that idea hasn’t really been tested—andextrascent could well call in more beetles, too. To find out, she and Adlerplanted168 Texas gourd vines in an Iowa field and, throughout the Augustflowering season, made half the plants more fragrant by tuckingdimethoxybenzene-treatedswabs deep inside their flowers. Each treated floweremitted about 45 times morefragrance than a normal one; the other half of theplants got swabs withoutfragrance.

Theresearchers alsowanted to know whether extra beetles would impose a double costby bothdamaging flowers and deterring bees, which might not bother to visit (andpollinate)a flower laden with other insects and their feces. So every halfhour throughoutthe experiments, the team plucked all the beetles off of halfthefragrance-enhanced flowers and half the control flowers, allowing beestorespond to the blossoms with and without interference by beetles.

Finally,they pollinatedby hand half of the female flowers in each of the fourcombinations offragrance and beetles. Hand-pollinated flowers should developinto fruits withthe maximum number of seeds, providing a benchmark to seewhether thefragrance-related activities of bees and beetles resulted inreducedpollination.

“Itwas very laborintensive,” says Theis. “We would be out there at four in themorning, three inthe morning, to try and set up before these flowers open.” Assoon as they did,the team spent the next several hours walking from flower toflower, observingeach for two-minute intervals “and writing down everything wesaw.”

Whatthey saw was double the normal number of beetles on fragrance-enhanced blossoms.Pollinators, totheir surprise, did not prefer the highly scented flowers.Squash bees wereindifferent, and honey bees visited enhanced flowers less oftenthan normal ones. Theis thinks the bees were repelled not by the fragranceitself, but bythe abundance of beetles: The data showed that the more beetleson a flower,the less likely a honey bee was to visit it.

Thatadded up to less reproduction for fragrance-enhanced flowers. Gourds thatdeveloped from those blossoms weighed 9 percent less and had, on average, 20fewer seeds than those from normal flowers. Hand pollination didn’t rescue theseed set, indicatingthat beetles damaged flowers directly—regardless of whetherthey also repelledpollinators. (Hand pollination did rescue fruit weight, ahard-to-interpretresult that suggests that lost bee visits did somehow harmfruit development.)

Thenew results providea reason that Texas gourd plants never evolved to produce astronger scent: “Ifyou really ramp up the odor, you don’t get more pollinators,but you can reallyget ripped apart by your enemies,” says Rob Raguso, achemical ecologist atCornell University who was not involved in the Texas gourdstudy. “It’s kind oflike asking ‘What if antlers were longer or larger orheavier? Is there somethreshold above which they’re actually a burden?’” ForTexas gourd, thereis—and Raguso, with ecologist Candace Galen and theircoauthors, reached asimilar conclusion in February 2011, in an AmericanNaturalist paper on alpineskypilot (Polemoniumviscosum). Too much fragrancecould harm those flowers, too,but for a completely different reason.

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