2020高考英语三模前阅读理解专题练05(学生版)三年真题研读专练

三年真题·研读专练

精品资源·战胜高考 三模前阅读理解专题练05

题组一

A

Historian Tom Holland is the award-winning author of Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium. He appears regularly

on radio, TV and in print. His latest book Dynasty is published in paperback by Abacus.

Moominsummer Madness By Tove Jansoon

What I love about this book, as a child and still today,

is its mix of the fantastical and normal. On the one hand,

it’s about a family and their friends all enjoying themselves,

quite happy not doing much. On the other hand, it’s about

characters that can change into odd shapes, magicians

coming down from the moon and peculiar creatures

emerging from the roof. That mix of the familiar and the

extraordinary informs all my writing.

The Histories By HerodoTus

By the time I was 12, I was obsessed by Ancient

Greece and Rome. At first, I found the early section of The

Histories a real grind because it’s like a long shaggy dog In the second half I was rewarded with the stories I’d

been waiting for, like the battles of Marathon,

Salamis and Thermopylae. Over the years, I come to

value the infectious curiosity of the first half and the

portrait of the world in the fifth century BC seen

through the eyes of this extraordinary Greek

historian.

A Distant Mirror By BarBara W TucHman

Tuchman’s book The Guns of August won the

Pulitzer Prize, but it’s this slightly less well-known

work that provided me with a role model for my own

writing. Both scholarly and interesting, it’s a portrait

of the 14th century in Western Europe and vividly

evokes medieval civilization buffeted by cataclysms:

the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt and the Great

Papal Schism. I felt I knew what it was to die of the

plague or to have a sword put through me— real 三年真题·研读专练

精品资源·战胜高考 story that never gets to the point. stories told remarkably

56. Tom Holland now finds the first half of The Histories _______.

A. off the point B. culture-centered C. really boring D. quite entertaining

57. Which book does Tom Holland appreciate and try to copy its style?

A. The Histories B. A Distant Mirror C. The Guns of August D. Moominsummer Madness

B

In Weapons of Math Destruction, data scientist Cathy O’Neil explains how big data exists everywhere in our

lives, and that we hardly even notice it until it affects us directly. One application that has become particularly

common is the use of algorithms(算法)to evaluate job performance.

She tells the story of Sarah Wysocki, a teacher who, despite being widely respected by her students, their

parents and her colleagues, was fired because she performed poorly according to an algorithm. When an algorithm

rates you poorly, you are immediately branded as an underperformer and there is rarely an opportunity to appeal

against those judgments. In many cases, methods are considered secrets and no details are shared. And data often

seems convincing.

As a matter of fact, the belief that school performance in America is declining is based on a data mistake. A

Nation at Risk is the report that rang the initial alarm bells about declining SAT(Scholastic Assessment Test)scores.

Yet if they had taken a closer look, they would have noticed that the scores in each smaller group were increasing.

The reason for the decline in the average score was that more disadvantaged kids were taking the test. However,

due to the data mistake, teachers as a whole were judged to be failing.

Wall Street is famous for its mathematicians who build complex models to predict market movements and

develop business plans. These are really smart people. Even so, it is not at all uncommon for their models to fail.

The key difference between those models and many of the ones being used these days is that Wall Street traders

lose money when their data models go wrong. However, as O’Neil points out in her book, the effects of

widely-used machine-driven judgments are often not borne by those who design the algorithms, but by everyone

else.

As we increasingly rely on machines to make decisions, we need to ask these questions: What assumptions are

there in your model? What hasn’t been taken into account? How are we going to test the effectiveness of the 三年真题·研读专练

精品资源·战胜高考 conclusions? Clearly, something has gone terribly wrong. When machines replace humans to make a judgment, we

should hold them to a high standard. We should know how the data was collected. And when numbers lie, we

should stop listening to them.

58. What does the example of Sarah Wysocki mainly show?

A. The drawback of big data. B. The popularity of big data.

C. The new challenge teachers face. D. The misunderstanding about algorithms.