泛读英语四CLOZE文本.docVIP

Unit 1 The cloze procedure originated in the 1950s as a means of assessing the difficulty of a reading text for native speakers, but within three years its originator was suggesting that it could be used for assessing the progress of second and foreign language learners. The principle is that single words are taken out of a text at regular intervals, leaving gaps which students have to complete with appropriate “fillers,” one only for each gap. In order to do this the student has to refer to the text or either side of the gap so that he can judge what an appropriate filler might be, taking into account both meaning and structure. There are two types of gap: “function” gaps (such as conjunctions, preposition, articles) which have only one correct filler, and “semantic” gaps (such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs) that can be filled with any one of number of alternatives. The variation in acceptable filler leads to two main systems of marking: “exact” and “acceptable.” The first of these means that only the original word is counted as correct, and since there is only one right answer, the marking is objective and can be done quickly. In “acceptable” marking, decisions must be made about whether a student’s offering is good enough to be counted as correct or not. It has been shown, however, that the two systems of marking produce very similar result, in the sense that the students are sorted into roughly the same rank order. Unit 2 At the bottom of the world lies a mighty continent still wrapped in the Ice Age and, until recent times, unknown to man. Most of the continent is a complete blank on our maps. A 1,000-mile stretch of the coastline has never been reached by any ship. Man has explored, on foot, less than one per cent of its area. Antarctica differs fundamentally from the Arctic regions. The Arctic is an ocean, covered with drifting ice and surrounded by the land masses of Europe, Asia, and North America. The Antarctic is a continent almost as large as Eur