Directions:
In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)
How does your reading proceed? Clearly, you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual words and working out relationships between them, drawing on your implicit knowledge of English grammar. 1. ____________. You begin to infer a context for the text, for instance, by making decisions about what kind of speech event is evolved. Who is making the utterance, to whom, when and where?
The ways of reading indicated here are without doubt kinds of comprehension but they show comprehension to consist not just of passive assimilation but of active engagement in inference and problem-solving. You infer information you feel the writer has invited you to grasp by presenting you with specific evidence ad clues. 2. ____________.
Conceived in this way, comprehension will not follow exactly the same track for each reader. What is in question is not the retrieval of an absolute, fixed or “true” meaning that can be read off and checked for accuracy, or some timeless relationship of the text to the world. 3. ____________.
Such background material inevitably reflects who we are. 4. ____________. This does not, however, make interpretation merely relative or even pointless. Precisely because readers from different historical periods, places and social experiences produce different but overlapping readings of the same words on the page—including for texts that engage with fundamental human concerns—debates about texts can play an important role in social discussion of beliefs and values.
How we read a given text also depends to some extent on our particular interest in reading it. 5. ___________. Such dimensions of reading suggest—as others introduced later in the book will also do—that we bring an implicit (often unacknowledged) agenda to any act of reading. It does not then necessarily follow that one kind of reading is fuller, more advanced or more worthwhile than another. Ideally, different minds of reading inform each other, and act as useful reference points for and counterbalances to one another. Together, they make up the reading component of your overall literacy, or relationship to your surrounding textual environment.
[A] Are we studying that text and trying to respond in a way that fulfills the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply for pleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed are likely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room.
[B] Factors such as the place and period in which we are reading, our gender ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certain interpretations but at the same time obscure or even close off others.
[C] If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the context. On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities as well as possible links between them.
[D] In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meanings or effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: These might be the ones the author intended.
[E] You make further inferences, for instance, about how the text may be significant to you, or about its validity—inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which the author will inevitably be far less responsible.
[F] In plays, novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by the author, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author’s own thoughts.
[G] Rather, we ascribe meanings to texts on the basis of interaction between what we might call textual and contextual material: between kinds of organizations or patterning we perceive in a text’s formal structures (so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, social knowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.
该空在句末，所以要参考上文。空格前面提到阅读理解时我们会“active engagement in inference and problem-solving（主动推测，解决问题）”，会对文中留下的“specific evidence and clues（证据和线索）”进行推测。E段承接此话题，并用for instance具体举例描述我们会对文章信息做什么样的推测。而且该空前一句中主句谓语动词是infer，与E中的宾语inferences对应。因此E段正确。
