四级英语阅读原文

　　我们要学会分析文章的结构，其实就是要提高逻辑推理能力。在平时阅读练习中，第一遍读文章时，我们应当模拟考试的紧张气氛，尽量高质快速。以下是四级英语阅读原文，欢迎阅读。

四级英语阅读原文

　　Section B

　　Directions:In this section,you are going to read apassage with ten statements attached to it. Eachstatement contains information given in one of theparagraphs. Identify the paragraph from which theinformation is derived. You may choose a paragraphmore than once. Each paragraph is marked with aletter. Answer the questions by marking thecorresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.

　　Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break

　　[A] Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a gradefrom a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receivinga grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of beingdone with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to tryto improve your grade.

　　[B]EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology(MIT)to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and willmake its automated(自动的')software available free on the Web to any institution that wants touse it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short writtenanswers, freeing professors for other tasks.

　　[C] The new service will bring the educational consortium(联盟)into a growing conflict over therole of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice andtrue-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to gradeessay answers has not yet received widespread acceptance by educators and has manycritics.

　　[D] Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that theinstant-grading software would be a useful teaching tool, enabling students to take tests and writeessays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology wouldoffer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often waitdays or weeks for grades. “There is a huge value in leaning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwalsaid. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

　　[E] But skeptics(怀疑者)say the automated system is no match for live teachers. One longtimecritic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsenseessays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also beenhighly critical of studies claiming that the software compares well to human graders.

　　[F] He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition(呼吁)opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself ProfesssionalsAgainst MachineScoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly2,000 signatures, including some from famous people like Noam Chomsky.

　　[G] “Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read’.They cannot measure the essentials of effective writtencommunication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical(伦理的)position, convincing argument, meaningful organization, and clarity, among others.”.

　　[H] But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and universities. It offers freeonline classes from Harvard, MIT and the University of Californian-Berkeley; this fall, it will addclasses from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universitiesparticipate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans tocontinue to expand next year, including adding international schools.

　　[I] The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays oressay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itselfto be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantly. Thesoftware will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether itis a letter grade or numerical(数字的)rank.

　　[J] EdX is not the first to use the automated assessment technology, which dates to earlycomputers in the 1960s. There is now a range of companies offering commercial programs tograde written test answers, and four states—Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia—are using some form of the technology in secondary schools. A fifth, Indiana, hasexperimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader,”to check thereliability of the human graders.

　　[K] But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards is likely to give thetechnology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that is would work with EdX to developa joint educational system that will make use of the automated assessment technology.

　　[L] Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members tocreate “massive open online courses,”or MOOCs, are also committed to automatedassessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to getimmediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturallygravitating(吸引) toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, acomputer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

　　[M] Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one of theHewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 prizes aimed at improvingsoftware that grades essays and short answers. More than 150 teams entered each category.A winner of one of the Hewlett contests, Vik Paruchuri, was hired by EdX to help design itsassessment software.

　　[N] “One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,”said Victor Vuchic, a programofficer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choicetests. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and theytake a lot more time.”

　　[O] Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the HewlettFoundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. Inhis view, the technology—though imperfect—has a place in educational settings.

　　[P] With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give studentsmeaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technologyhave tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of teaching is muchbetter than at most schools.

　　[Q]“Often they come from very famous institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job ofproviding feedback than a machine ever could,”Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack ofappreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

　　注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。

　　46. Some professionals in education are collecting signatures to voice their opposition toautomated essay grading.

　　47. Using software to grade students’ essays saves teachers time for other work.

　　48. The Hewlett contests aim at improving essay grading software.

　　49. Though the automated grading system is widely used in multiple-choice tests, automatedessay grading is still criticized by many educators.

　　50. Some people don’t believe the software grading system can do as good a job as humangraders.

　　51. Critics of automated essay scoring do not seem to know the true realities in less famousuniversities.

　　52. Critics argue many important aspects of effective writing cannot be measured bycomputer rating programs.

　　53. As class size grows, most teachers are unable to give students valuable comments as tohow to improve their writing.

　　54. The automated assessment technology is sometimes used to double check the work ofhuman graders.

　　55. Students find instant feedback helps improve their learning considerably.

　　答案：46-50 FBMCE 51-55 QGPJD

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