素材源：大西洋月刊 （原文有删改）
▲ Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition
IV. Summary Writing
Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world
On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients. An older woman placed a shoebox before him and lifted off its lid, revealing a bloody white parakeet（长尾鹦鹉）, the victim of a cat attack. The man in front of me in line held, in a small cage, a dove that had collided with a glass tower in the financial district. A girl no older than 7 came in behind me clutching, in her bare hands, a white hen with a slumped neck.
The hospital’s main ward is a narrow, 40-foot-long room with cages stacked four high along the walls and fans on the ceiling, their blades covered with grates, lest they ensnare a flapping wing. I strolled the room’s length, conducting a rough census. Many of the cages looked empty at first, but leaning closer, I’d find a bird, usually a pigeon, sitting back in the gloom.
The youngest of the hospital’s vets, Dheeraj Kumar Singh, was making his rounds in jeans and a surgical mask. The oldest vet here has worked the night shift for more than a quarter century, spending tens of thousands of hours removing tumors from birds, easing their pain with medication, administering antibiotics(抗生素). Singh is a rookie by comparison, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he inspects a pigeon, flipping it over in his hands, quickly but gently, the way you might handle your cellphone. As we talked, he motioned to an assistant, who handed him a nylon bandage that he stretched twice around the pigeon’s wing, setting it with an unsentimental pop.
The bird hospital is one of several built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals. A series of paintings in the hospital’s lobby illustrates the extremes to which some Jains take this prohibition. In them, a medieval king in blue robes gazes through a palace window at an approaching pigeon, its wing bloodied by the talons of a brown hawk still in pursuit. The king pulls the smaller bird into the palace, infuriating the hawk, which demands replacement for its lost meal, so he slices off his own arm and foot to feed it.
（60）
序列号 词数 体裁 题材 建议用时
Summary 388 记叙文 人与自然 ≤12min
【参考范文】
Last summer the author went to a rough animal hospital and saw people take their animals there and vets operate on the animals. The hospital was built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans but also against animals , and a picture there showed how an ancient king saved a pigeon. (60 words)
【要点解读】
这是一篇题材为人与鸟类的夹叙夹议类文章。本篇文章内容跳跃较大，可以说作者想到哪儿就写到哪儿，文章内容不难，但不容易找出集中要概括的点。该篇文章既然是记叙文，我们只需抓住记叙文的要素时间地点人物事件（when\where\who\what）即可。有了这个思路，写起来就不难了。
末段翻译：鸟类医院是耆那教信徒建造的几所医院之一。耆那教是一种古老的宗教，其最高戒律不仅禁止对人施暴，而且禁止对动物施暴。医院大厅里的一系列画作展示了耆那教徒对这一禁令的极端态度。在这些照片中，一位身着蓝色长袍的中世纪国王透过宫殿的窗户凝视着一只正在靠近的鸽子，它的翅膀被仍在追捕它的一只棕色鹰的爪子弄得鲜血淋漓。国王把这只小鸟拖进了宫殿，这激怒了老鹰，它要求国王赔偿它失去的食物，于是国王割下了自己胳膊和脚上的肉来喂它。
【vocabulary】
flap
n. 拍打，拍打声；神经紧张；[航] 襟翼
vt. 拍打；扔；拉下帽边；飘动
vi. 拍动；神经紧张；鼓翼而飞；（帽边等）垂下.
stroll
n. 漫步；闲逛；巡回演出
vt. 散步；闲逛
vi. 散步；闲逛；巡回演出
surgical
n. 外科手术；外科病房
adj. 外科的；手术上的
medieval
adj. 中世纪的；原始的；仿中世纪的；老式的素材源：大西洋月刊 （原文有删改）
▲ The Opportunity rover carved tracks into the Martian soil as it roamed
IV. Summary Writing
Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
NASA Declares a Beloved Mars Mission Over
The space agency will stop trying to contact the Opportunity rover, which was sent to Mars to search for evidence of water.
The Mars probe came barreling in. It streaked through the planet’s atmosphere at about 12,000 miles per hour. With the surface in sight, the parachute unfurled. The probe fired its rockets to slow itself down, and inflated its airbags to cushion the landing. Touching down gently, it bounced across the clay-colored terrain .
When the dust settled, the probe unwound itself, like a flower opening towards the sun, and revealed its cargo: a rover, no bigger than a golf cart.
The rover, named Opportunity, was sent to study what the Martian surface was made of. If there had ever been life on this other planet, the composition of the alien dust, soil, and rock might hint at its nature. The rover’s work was slow and precise. For years, it rolled over plains and craters, digging into the ground and relaying its findings to Earth.
Then, last summer, it stopped. On Tuesday, following months of attempts to regain contact, the Opportunity team sent a final set of commands to the rover. After receiving no response, NASA declared that the Opportunity mission, after nearly 15 years, is officially over.
“I was there with the team, as the commands went out into the deep sky. And I learned this morning that we had not heard back,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science division, in a press conference. “It is therefore that I’m standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete.”
In June 2018, an enormous dust storm clogged the Martian atmosphere, blocking sunlight from reaching the surface. Opportunity, a solar-powered rover, couldn’t charge its batteries in the darkness and entered a deep sleep.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made more than 1,000 attempts to rouse Opportunity. The rover did not respond, even as the storm passed in September. The team held out for a windy season in January, which could wipe off any dust coating the rover’s solar panels. They ran out of options. Engineers transmitted a final set of commands to Opportunity on Tuesday night—one last chance—and received nothing but silence in return.
During its years on Mars, Opportunity crept along at a tiny fraction of a mile per hour. A robotic arm burrowed into the surface, exposing fresh rock, and scooped soil samples for analysis. Scientists back on Earth delighted as Opportunity returned detailed images of the landscape, and when the rover found evidence that Mars once had water, enough to support microbial life. The engineers sent the commands, directing the rover where to drive and what to inspect, but it seemed, at times, as if Opportunity was doing the work on its own. The rover’s communication with mission control felt less like data transmissions from a mindless robot, and more like dispatches from a curious explorer.
（60）
序列号 词数 体裁 题材 建议用时
Summary 472 说明文 天文科学 ≤12min
【参考范文】
The rover Opportunity was sent to study what the Martian surface was made of，but it lost touch with the earth because an enormous dust storm clogged the Martian atmosphere, blocking sunlight from reaching the surface. Opportunity couldn’t charge its batteries in the darkness and lost touch with scientists . Opportunity made great contributions to scientists’ Mars research.
(60 words)
【要点解读】
本文为天文学类说明文，难度一般，细节信息比较多，对概括能力要求比较高，围绕说明对象Opportunity概括即可。
末段翻译：在火星上的岁月里，机遇号以每小时不到一英里的速度缓慢前进。一只机械手臂钻到地表，露出新鲜的岩石，铲起土壤样本进行分析。“机遇号”传回了详细的火星地貌图像，当“机遇号”发现火星曾经有水的证据，足以支持微生物的生存时，科学家们非常高兴。工程师们发出指令，指示探测车开到哪里，检查什么，但有时似乎“机遇号”在独自完成这项工作。漫游者与任务控制中心的通信感觉不太像是来自一个没有大脑的机器人的数据传输，而更像是来自一个好奇的探索者的发送。
【vocabulary】
barrel
n. 桶；枪管，炮管
vt. 把……装入桶内
vi. 快速移动
rover
n. 漫游者；流浪者；漂泊者；巡视器
scoop
n. 勺；铲子；独家新闻；凹处
vt. 掘；舀取；抢先获得；搜集
dispatch
n. 派遣；急件
vt. 派遣；分派素材源：大西洋月刊 （原文有删改）
▲ Waymo autonomous vehicles lined up in Phoenix, Arizona
IV. Summary Writing
Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
Waymo’s Robots Drove More Miles Than Everyone Else Combined
But in newly released numbers from California regulators, the challengers in the self-driving-car race are looking better.
Self-driving cars promise to change cities, mint billionaires, and push robots into the everyday lives of millions of people. The only problem is, no one knows quite when or how. And with all the research and development locked up inside private companies, the public has little information to judge the progress of the technology, aside from the occasional PR reveal or disaster.
We have one (imperfect) yardstick, however: the numbers that the California Department of Motor Vehicles requires that any company testing an autonomous vehicle in the state file every month. Those are rolled up and released in January of each year. Though people in the industry don’t like what they see as the uneven comparisons between companies, this is the best we’ve got. The data include two primary numbers: the number of autonomous miles driven, which gives a rough indication of the scale of a program in the state, and the number of disengagements, or when a human driver takes over for the computer.
For every year of these disclosures, Waymo, the self-driving-car project within Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been the leader by a wide margin.
The year 2018 was no different. Waymo drove 1.2 million miles in the state, which is not even its primary testing ground. Its cars disengaged 114 times, for a rate of 0.09 disengagements per 1,000 miles. That’s down from 0.18 in 2017. GM Cruise cemented its position as the key challenger to Waymo supremacy, logging nearly 448,000 miles with 162 disengagements, for a rate of 0.19 per 1,000 miles, and that’s on San Francisco’s difficult streets, a fact that GM Cruise’s Kyle Vogt is fond of pointing out. Together, the two companies’ cars drove 86 percent of the autonomous miles in the state.
Apple, whose self-driving program is less high-profile, came in at No. 3 in miles driven, with nearly 80,000 autonomous miles. However, the company’s disengagement rate was 871.65 disengagements per 1,000 miles, according to the DMV methodology—the highest of the 27 companies that submitted data.
Apple’s cover letter to the DMV indicates that the company changed its reporting methodology halfway through the year, and that after July 2018, the company’s rate of “important disengagements” would land it in the realm of 0.5 disengagements per 1,000 miles, which would be in the top tier of performances.
That enormous discrepancy highlights what the various companies don’t like about the reporting processes. They don’t have a true standard for what must count as a “disengagement,” leaving room for companies to make their numbers look better (or even worse) than they might otherwise be. Where the miles are driven obviously matters, too: It’s harder to drive in Manhattan than Palo Alto. And these cars are trying to learn, which means you don’t necessarily want to encourage drives on empty highways, where the learning rate per mile is low.
Nonetheless, no other state requires any kind of disclosure about miles driven or disengagements. These numbers are all we have, in large part because none of these companies want to self-report, nor do their interactions with the DMV seem to indicate that they’d like more stringent standards.
（60）
序列号 词数 体裁 题材 建议用时
Summary 522 说明文 汽车技术 ≤12min
【参考范文】
Self-driving cars has changed many people’s lives. The public has little information to judge the progress of the technology. According to the data on the number of autonomous miles driven and the number of disengagements released by California Department of Motor Vehicles, Waymo has been the leader by a wide margin, and then GM Cruise which’s followed by Apple.(59 words)
【要点解读】
本文介绍了美国自动汽车驾驶技术的发展状况。其中提到了三家相关的科技公司。由于官方没有具体标准要求这些公司披露驾驶里程或脱离接触的情况，以及这些公司中没有想要自我报告具体情况，民众对这一技术的发展知之甚少。概括时需要包括：目前无人驾驶汽车的发展状况和三家公司的大概情况。
末段翻译：尽管如此，没有其他州要求披露任何驾驶里程或脱离接触的情况。这些数字是我们所拥有的全部，很大程度上是因为这些公司中没有一家想要自我报告，也没有一家公司在与机动车管理局的信息互通中表明他们想要更严格的标准。
【vocabulary】
mint
n. 薄荷；[金融] 造币厂，巨款
vt. 铸造，铸币
adj. 完美的
aside from
除…以外
autonomous
adj. 自治的；自主的；自发的
methodology
n. 方法学，方法论
stringent
adj. 严格的；严厉的；紧缩的；短缺的
