2012空軍工程大學考博英語試題2【不是故意分開，實在文字太多】

Ⅲ.Reading comprehension (2*20)

Text A
America’s most relentless examiner, the Educational Testing Service, has developed computer software, known as E-Rater, to evaluate essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test. Administered to 200,000 business school applicants each year, the GMAT includes two 30-minute essays that test takers type straight into a computer. In the past, those essays were graded on a six-point scale by two readers. This month, the computer will replace one of the readers with the proviso that a second reader will be consulted if the computer and human-reader scores differ by more then a point.
It’s one thing for a machine to determine whether a bubble has been correctly filled in, but can it read outside the lines, so to speak? Well, yes and no. E-Rater “learns” what constitutes good and bad answers from a sample of pregraded essays. Using that information, it breaks the essay down to its syntax, organization and contents. The software checks basics like subject-verb agreement and recognizes phrases and sentence structures that are likely to be found in high-scoring essays.
Of course, the machine cannot “get” a clever turn of phrase or an unusual analogy. “If I’m unique, I might not fall under the scoring instructions,” concedes Frederic McHale, a vice president at the GMAT Council. One the other hand, E-Rater is mercilessly objective and never tired halfway through a stack of essays. The upshot: a pretrial tests, E-Rater and a human reader were just as likely to agree as were two readers. “It’s not intended to judge a person’s creativity,” says Darrel Laham, co-developer of the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a computer-grading system similar to E-Rater. “It’s to give students a chance to construct a response instead of just pointing at a bubble.”
That won’t reassure traditionalists, who argue that writing simply can’t be reduced to rigid adjective plus subject plus verb formulations. “Writing is a human act, with aesthetic dimensions that computers can only begin to understand,” says David Schaafsman, a professor of English education at Teachers Colleges of Columbia University. The Kaplan course, a leader in test prep, has taken a more pragmatic approach: it has issued a list of strategies for “the age of the computerized essay.” One of its tips: use transitional phrases like “therefore”, and the computers just might think you’re Dickens.
51. E-Rater is described as __________.
A. a substitute for GMAT
B. America’s most relentless examiner
C. a machine to grade bubble-filling papers
D. a computer-grading system
52. In paragraph two, the expression “read outside the lines” refers to the ability to __________.
A. understand student essays
B. report scores
C. recognize a wrong bubble
D. judge a person’s creativity

2012空軍工程大學考博英語試題2【不是故意分開，實在文字太多】

2012空軍工程大學考博英語試題2【不是故意分開，實在文字太多】