The standardized educational or psychological tests, which are widely used to aid in selecting, assigning or promoting students, employees and military personnel, have been the target of recent attacks in books, magazines, the daily press, and even in Congress. The target is wrong, for, in attacking the tests, critics divert attention from the fault that lies with ill-informed or incompetent users. The tests themselves are merely tools. Whether the results will be valuable, meaningless, or even misleading depends partly upon the tool itself but largely upon the user.
All informed predictions of future performance are based upon some knowledge of relevant past performance. How well the predictions will be validated by later performance depends upon the amount, reliability and appropriateness of the information used and on the skill and wisdom with which it is interpreted. Anyone who keeps careful score knows that the information available is always incomplete and that the predictions are always subject to error.
Standardized tests should be considered in this context: they provide a quick, objective method of getting some kind of information about what a person has learned, the skills he has
developed, or the kind of person he is. The information so obtained has, qualitatively, the same advantages and shortcomings as other kinds of information. Whether to use tests, other kinds of information, or both in a particular situation depends, therefore, upon the empirical evidence concerning comparative validity and upon such factors as cost and availability.
In general, the tests work most effectively when the traits or qualities to be measured can be most precisely defined ( for example, ability to do well in a particular course of training program ) and least effectively when what is to be measured or predicted cannot be well defined, for example, personality or creativity. Properly used, they provide a rapid means of getting comparable information about many people. Sometimes they identify students whose high potential has not been previously recognized.
The modern sailing ship was developed by a man who never went to sea.
He was Prince Henry of Portugal,the younger son of the Partuguese king and an English princess.
Prince Henry lived in the fifteenth a boy he became devoted to the sea,and he dedicated himself to improving the design of ships and the methods of sailing 1416,when he was twentytwo,Henry founded a school for mariners, to which he invited
everyone
who and
could Spanish
help sailors,
him—Jewish and
Arab
astronomers,Italian
mathematicians and map makers who knew to use the crude compass of the day and could improve it.
Henry’s goal was to design and equip vessels that would be capable of making long ocean voyages without having to hug the caravel carried more sail and was longer and slimmer than any ship then made,yet was tough enough to withstand gales at also developed the carrack,which was a slower ship,but one that was capable of carrying more cargo.
To Prince Henry the world owes credit for development of craft that made oceanic exploration lives in history as Henry the Navigator.
The modern sailing ship was developed by a man who never went to sea.
He was Prince Henry of Portugal,the younger son of the Partuguese king and an English princess.
Prince Henry lived in the fifteenth a boy he became devoted to the sea,and he dedicated himself to improving the design of ships and the methods of sailing 1416,when he was twentytwo,Henry founded a school for mariners, to which he invited
everyone
who and
could Spanish
help sailors,
him—Jewish and
Arab
astronomers,Italian
mathematicians and map makers who knew to use the crude compass of the day and could improve it.
Henry’s goal was to design and equip vessels that would be capable of making long ocean voyages without having to hug the caravel carried more sail and was longer and slimmer than any ship then made,yet was tough enough to withstand gales at also developed the carrack,which was a slower ship,but one that was capable of carrying more cargo.
To Prince Henry the world owes credit for development of craft that made oceanic exploration lives in history as Henry the Navigator.
十 Now let us look at how we read. When we read a printed text, our eyes move across a page in short, jerky movement. We recognize words usually when our eyes are still when they fixate. Each time they fixate, we see a group of words. This is known as the recognition span or the visual span. The length of time ofr which the eyes stop ---the duration of the fixation ----varies considerably from person to person. It also vaies within any one person according to his purpose in reading and his familiarity with the text. Furthermore, it can be affected by such factors as lighting and tiredness.
Unfortunately, in the past, many reading improvement courses have concentrated too much on how our eyes move across the printed page. As a result of this misleading emphasis on the purely visual aspects of reading, numerous exercises have been devised to train the eyes to see more words at one fixation. For instance, in some exercises, words are flashed on to a screen for, say, a tenth or a twentieth of a second. One of the exercises has required students to fix their eyes on some central point, taking in the words on either side. Such word patterns are often constructed in the shape of rather steep pyramids so the reader takes in more and more words at each successive fixation. All these exercises are very clever, but
大学英语四级阅读理解试题及答案
