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对于备考生而言，了解真题文章的题源非常重要。全国四、六级考试命题研究中心对历年真题中阅读三大题型的文章题源进行了系统的统计。↓ 本着全面吃透四六级的原则，星火君奉上精心挑选的题源文章，难度与四六级真题难度相近。更多题源文章请移步《简·四/六级阅读》 四级阅读题源文章 ◆ ◆ ◆ 题源时文一 ▎文章大意 苹果推出智能铅笔后，替代了传统手写笔，触屏代表着互动崭新时代。苹果铅笔可应用在平板电脑、手机、笔记本的触摸屏上，用智能铅笔直接在数字触屏上画画或写字，比手写或鼠标更便捷。苹果公司推出智能铅笔后，技术人员已经推出增加了音频功能的智能笔。本文作者对苹果的这一产品进行了测评，认为在平板电脑触摸屏上写字或画画，很像一块塑料，对许多用户来说，苹果智能铅笔更方便、直观、易于使用。
▎题源时文
The Apple Pencil: an illustrator's review
The Apple Pencil is a cursed product, haunted by a single Steve Jobsquote from 2010: “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” Jobs thought that thestylus, a pen-like device used to write or draw directly on a digital screen,was a useless appendage. If you couldn’t operate a device with only yourfingertips its design was flawed. This may be the real reason behind the veryliteral design of the Apple Pencil. Apple seems to have deliberately designedits latest accessory to look, feel and function like a creative tool – and notthe technological appendage that Jobs famously hated. The new Pencil is intended to let everyone from amateur artists tocreative professionals draw on their tablets as freely as if they were puttingpencil to paper. I tested it out and discovered that despite its simplepurpose, the Pencil could not be more complex; in its attempt to harness theeffortless beauty of the elementary writing and drawing instrument, Apple hascrafted its own magic wand. I have to admit, even though I drew illustrations on an iPad, they dolook a lot like real pencil drawings. But it didn’t feel like drawing with apencil. It felt a lot like drawing on an iPad, which is sort of like drawing ona sheet of glass with a piece of plastic while having bright light beamed intoyour eyes. It’s not even the best tool for digital illustration – that’s aWacom tablet, the gold standard used by professional artists and illustrators.But that doesn’t mean the Pencil is useless. For many amateur artists, Wacom isout of reach. It’s too expensive and intricate. Apple’s Pencil, in contrast, isaccessible, intuitive and easy to use. Apple need not be ashamed in coming second behind Wacom in the drawingtablet market. After all, the Wacom Cintiq Companion (which is its closestproduct to the iPad Pro and Pencil), retails for even more money than the Appleequivalent, and appeals to a much smaller demographic comprised of professionalartists. I use a Wacom for final art, and would very much like to have a CintiqCompanion or something like it to make working digitally more portable, but Iwouldn’t use it for sketching. For that I guess I’d prefer the Apple Pencil …But you know what is really great for sketching? A pencil and a piece of paper.It’s effortlessly portable, boasts a lag-time of 0%, and if you spring for thewhole HB range, the shading possibilities are virtually limitless. Apple’s Pencil is very impressive and precise, but at the end of theday, it’s a secondary tool designed to work with the newest incarnation of oneof their most profitable products. Which brings me to my biggest problem withthe Apple Pencil, which isn’t the Pencil at all, it’s the gigantic expensiveiPad Pro you need in order to use it. For me, the iPad Pro is the breaking point in an endless parade ofincrementally sized rectangles I need to resist buying. Looking at my iMac,beside my Macbook, beside my iPad mini, beside my iPhone, I cannot bear thethought of saving up to add one more step to this ridiculous Russian-dollcollection of Apple products. Not until, once again, they magically convince methat it is absolutely necessary.
▎题源分析 本文选自《卫报》
▎高频词汇及短语 stylus n. 触笔 appendage n. 附加品 magic wand 魔法棒 demographic n. 群体 the incarnation of ……的化身
题源时文二 ▎文章大意
想知道孩子在学校表现怎么样的家长很可能不能在孩子那里得到实话，但现在英国流行的一款软件很好地解决了这个问题。这款名为ClassDojo的追踪软件可以让老师及时了解孩子们的表现并给与奖惩，而也可以让孩子和家长看到，促使他们进行调整，从而提高成绩。但也有一些专家和学者对该软件的隐私问题提出了质疑。
▎题源时文
Good day at school? There’s an app for that
When a child is asked by parents what they got up to at school, theyprobably won’t confess that they were told off for talking in their Englishlesson, or that they didn’t do their maths homework. But now honesty may be the only option asbehaviour-tracking apps are becoming increasingly popular as an educationaltool. One of the most common apps, ClassDojo, is now used by at least oneteacher in half of all UK schools, according to its developers. The app allowsteachers to award points to students throughout the day for good behaviour ortake away points for bad behaviour. The students, who also have the app, cansee how well they are doing and parents can then see real-time updates. Thepoints for the entire class can even be displayed on screen during the lesson. Privacy experts and some educationalists have criticised the practice.Andy Phippen, professor of social responsibility in IT at Plymouth University,says many teachers and parents have not considered whether children’s data willbe kept private. “It’s something we’re sleepwalking into,” said Phippen. “With the roll-out of the academies programme and private sectorinvestors, you do start to ask questions: if you have someone who’s got accessto online data who might have third-party interest, where’s the policy thatprotects the kids’ data from that?” Tom Bennett, the government’s behaviour adviser, said that, whilerecording children’s behaviour digitally is useful, online reward systemsrequire a lot of effort and consistency from teachers if they are going towork. “If you’ve got a child who is misbehaving, you may want to see howthey’re doing in other classes so that you can see if there’s a pattern or ifit’s just you,” he said. “But the devil is in the detail – it depends on how you use it. In mostcases schools would probably be better to focus on developing an in-schoolculture that encourages good behaviour and discourages bad behaviour, ratherthan relying on treats and rewards.” Behaviour management systems that rely onpoints to incentivise children divide opinion. Some warn that they canencourage children only to work hard in order to get a reward while others saythe very children who struggle with behaviour risk being demotivated if theyare constantly ranked behind their peers. Displaying all students’ results on a screen in the classroom could riskhumiliating children, says Andy Christopher Miller, honorary professor ofeducational psychology at the University of Nottingham and the University ofWarwick. “One of the consequences of the public display of results is that youend up shaming kids if they’re not doing as well. That has knock-on effects interms of their self-esteem, as well as their motivation and behaviour.”
▎题源分析 本文选自《卫报》 ▎高频词汇及短语 confess v. 坦白 update n. 更新 consistency n. 连贯 incentivise v. 激励，鼓励 demotivate v. 使变得消极 六级阅读题源文章 ◆ ◆ ◆ 题源时文一 ▎文章大意
本文主要探讨了学生债务不断增加这一社会问题，该问题在发达国家尤其严重，华尔街抗议者建议要全面免除大学生债务偿还义务，但却遭到了一些人的反对。文章最后提出了有助于解决该问题的方法。
▎题源时文
Student loans are based on a simple idea: that a graduate's future flowof earnings will more than cover the costs of doing a degree. But with unemploymentrates in parts of the rich world at post-war highs, that may no longer holdtrue for many people.
All over the world student indebtedness is causing problems. In Britain,according to a recent report, rising university fees mean that student debt islikely to treble (增为三倍) to ￡70 billion by 2015. But, partly because higher education there is soexpensive, the scale of the problem is far greater in America. When the nextofficial estimates of outstanding student debt there are published, it is expectedto be close to $1 trillion, higher than credit-card borrowing. Credit qualityin other classes of consumer debt has been improving; delinquency (拖欠) rates onstudent loans are rising.
Many of the anti-Wall Street protesters push the idea of blanket debtforgiveness as a solution. But that is the wrong answer. Higher education isnot a guarantee of employment, but it improves the odds immensely. Unemploymentrates among university graduates stood at 4.4% on average across OECD countriesin 2009. People who did not complete secondary school faced unemployment ratesof 11.5%. Much of the debt that students are taking on is provided orguaranteed by the government. Imposing write-offs (勾销) on alltaxpayers to benefit those with the best job prospects is unfair, and rippingup contracts between borrowers and private lenders is usually a bad idea.
That said, student-loan systems in America and elsewhere are often badlydesigned for an extended period of high unemployment. In contrast to the housingcrash, the risk from student debt is not of a sudden explosion in losses but ofgradual financial chocking. The pressure needs to be eased.
One option is to change the bankruptcy laws. In America, Britain andelsewhere, these treat student debt as a special case: unlike other forms ofdebt, it cannot be wiped out. If student debt is not to restrict existinggraduates and put off future ones, the rules could be changed so that it isdischargeable in bankruptcy. Yet the reasoning behind the current bankruptcyprovisions is logical enough: education is a property that cannot berepossessed and that keeps on benefiting the individual through his or herlifetime. Some worry that graduates would rush to declare bankruptcy, handinglosses to taxpayers.
So a second option is preferable. Manycountries, America included, have designed student debt primarily as a mortgagelike obligation: it is repaid to a fixed schedule. Other places, like Britainand Australia, make student-loan repayments depend on reaching an incomethreshold so that the prospect of taking on debt is more acceptable to peoplefrom poorer backgrounds. That approach makes sense, especially when jobs arescarce. Income-based repayment ought to become the norm.
▎题源分析
本文选自《经济学人》
▎高频词汇及短语
bankruptcy n. 破产 indebtedness n. 债务 preferable a. 更好的，更可取的 repossess v. 收回 threshold n. 门槛；临界值 rip up 撕碎，撕毁 wipe out 消灭，彻底摧毁 题源时文二 ▎文章大意
本文主要叙述了沃尔玛女雇员以歧视女性员工为由发起了一场大规模的集体诉讼。文章开头先解释了集体诉讼的定义，接着阐述了沃尔玛女员工提起诉讼的原因，以及诉讼请求被联邦上诉法院否决的原因。
▎题源时文
In the American legal system, people generally bring civil claims asindividuals. But if a lot of people have similar claims, they may try to bringa class action lawsuit. “A class action is a procedural device under U.S. lawthat allows a large group of people to bring their individual claims togetheras a group,” said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Cornell University.
But groups need permission to bring a class action, and that can bedenied. That happened this week to a million and a half current and formeremployees of America's largest private employer. The women accuse
Wal-Mart of discriminating against femaleemployees in its stores. But the United States Supreme Court voted to block ahuge class action against Wal-Mart in federal court.
The women were seeking billions of dollars. They say men were offeredmore jobs and more chances to move up in the company. They accuse Wal-Mart ofviolating part of a federal law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The case started about ten years ago. A federal district court inCalifornia agreed that the case could go forward as a class action. Wal-Martagain lost in a federal appeals court. But on Monday Wal-Mart won its appeal inthe nation's highest court.
Prof. Dorf—who was not involved in the case—says the justicesdisagreed about whether there was a “common question”. A commonquestion, according to the court, is the sort of question which the plaintiffs(原告) can prove and thereby go a long way to winning the case.
He says most of the justices found that Wal-Mart was not being accusedof one kind of discrimination or one policy, but many different acts. The keyto being able to bring a class action here and the issue that divided ourSupreme Court was whether all of these different claims—by over a millionpeople—had enough in common to justify a single class action.
Wal-Mart has a policy barring discrimination. But the women accused thecompany of unfair policies and permitting bad behavior by some store managers.
The court was divided five to four in its ruling. Yet all nine justicesagreed that the case could not go forward. The women needed to meet additionallegal requirements because they were seeking payment for harm they say wasdone. All the justices agreed these requirements had not been met.
Boston University law professor Michael Harper says the decision waswidely expected. He says the class action failed because it did not target asingle action or policy by Wal-Mart. But the ruling does not bar the women frombringing individual cases. They can also seek class actions at the statelevel.
▎题源分析
本文选自《华盛顿邮报》
▎高频词汇及短语
additional a. 额外的，附加的 bar v. 禁止，阻拦 block v. 阻止，禁止 claim n. 要求；索赔 discrimination n. 歧视 procedural a. 程序上的 class action 集体诉讼；共同诉讼 ◆ ◆ ◆ 更多题源文章戳↓   |
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