素材源：大西洋月刊 （原文有删改）
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.
My Wife Was Dying, and We Didn’t Tell Our Children
We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting.
They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.
Marla was my first and only girlfriend. We were introduced in October 1987, when we joined a coed intramural flag-football team in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
If you had asked me on our wedding day, I would have told you with confidence what our love would look like: We’d be a couple who jogged together in Scarsdale, danced in Nantucket together, carved through snow or lakes on skis together, spun the Hanukkah dreidel together with our children, and sang along together to Bruce Springsteen (her prescient favorite was “Tougher Than the Rest”). I would not have said we’d be a couple who fought a fatal illness together. Nor that this private act would be the thing that united us the most.
In 2009, Marla’s radiologist called to tell her that she had early-stage breast cancer. She was also BRCA-positive, meaning that she carried the inherited gene for the disease—a troublesome marker. After a double mastectomy (乳房切除手术)and ovary removal, she needed eight rounds of chemotherapy to clear the cancer found in her lymph nodes（淋巴结）.
Our kids were 8, 9, and 11 at the time, and though they understood then that she was undergoing treatment (wigs were hard to hide), we never told them the news we soon learned from Memorial Sloan Kettering’s head of breast-cancer oncology: Marla had a triple-negative cancer cell, the fiercest of them all. When linked with the BRCA mutation, it is commonly referred to as “the breast-cancer death sentence.” This specialist bluntly told her: “Go live your next 1,000 days in the best way you know how.”
Despite the fatigue and nausea of chemo, she continued to run long distances, for her own mental fitness, and more important, so her kids would see her strong. I knew these miles were a miracle. Marla earned and survived a little more than 3,500 days instead of 1,000 since her initial diagnosis. In her lifetime, she celebrated 25 anniversaries (about half the norm for a happily married couple), 57 children’s birthdays (parents average about 45 per child), three bat mitzvahs, three college acceptances, and two high-school graduations.
The next numbers make me numb:
Zero college graduations.
Zero weddings.
Zero grandchildren.
Marla said to me at the hospital, “No glory days for us. We almost had the kids out of the house, and now you’re alone. I’m so sorry.”
I replied, “Sorry about what You made life worth living. When you kissed me, I melted. I admired your pureness, your power. You outran science. Thank you for taking me on your magic carpet. Rest easy, my one and only girlfriend.”
（60）
序列号 词数 体裁 题材 建议用时
Summary 474 记叙文 哲理人生 ≤10min
【参考范文】
The writer’s wife, Marla ,suffered from breast cancer and was informed there were only 1000 days left. The couple didn’t tell their children about it for fear that it would disturbed their children’s daily life. However, Marla survived more than 3,500 days because of her keeping exercising. She experienced ,and also missed many meaningful moments of their family. (58 words)
【要点解读】
该篇是一篇以写人为主的记叙文，凄婉感人；文章信息比较散碎，很少有概括性句子出现，可以说作者是想到哪儿写到哪儿，因此在概括时，一定要把握其中心思想，把作者的写作目的表达出来。
【vocabulary】
inherit
vt. 继承；遗传而得
vi. 成为继承人
fatigue
n. 疲劳，疲乏；杂役
adj. 疲劳的
vt. 使疲劳；使心智衰弱
nausea
n. 恶心，晕船；极端的憎恶
outran
v. 超过；比…跑得快（outrun的过去式）素材源：大西洋月刊 （原文有删改）
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.
Will Trump Live to 500
--The president underwent an extensive physical exam this week.
His doctor’s rosy assessment is at odds with observable reality.
Six days passed between the president’s physical exam and the release of the doctors’ findings on Thursday. Even then, the anticlimactic unveiling raised only more speculation about the true state of Donald Trump’s health.
On February 8, Trump underwent a physical exam, according to the White House, which afterward released a brief press memo that said it was from the president’s new physician, Sean Conley. But the authorship of this report is questionable for several reasons, one of which is the sentence “The president is very grateful for the outstanding care he received today, and he especially wants to thank the doctors, nurses, enlisted and civilian staff who participated.”
It would be unheard-of for a doctor to praise himself in such a statement. Odder still is the subsequent assertion that Trump is “in very good health and I anticipate he will remain so for the duration of his Presidency, and beyond.” This sort of long-term prediction is atypical for any physician, much less one whose only charge is to assess the president’s ability to execute the duties of the office.
It would inspire more confidence in the objectivity of the process if just once a doctor would simply share Trump’s test results in a transparent way. This has not been the case at any point in Trump’s presidency, during which his health reports have been inconsistent and sprinkled with—if not entirely written in—sensational prose. As a result, the credibility of the presidential health-assessment process and the professionals involved have entered a free fall.
Trump’s first physical as a candidate was reportedly performed by his former doctor, Harold Bornstein. After a year of journalistic scrutiny and national ire over the odd assessment (in which Trump was declared “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”), Bornstein accused the president last year of dictating the assessment—and of sending associates to “raid” his office and take possession of his medical records.
What we do know: The president is 72 years old, and he is widely reported to sleep little. He avoids exercise because of his erroneous belief that it “depletes energy.” He has evidence of coronary artery disease（冠状动脉疾病）, atherosclerosis, according to a coronary arterial calcium score done last year. He takes a cholesterol-lowering medication because of a history of high cholesterol. He is obese and eats a lot of junk (specifically the Filet-O-Fish). He is regularly described in palace-intrigue stories as “increasingly isolated,” and he is under as much professional stress as it’s possible for a person to be.
There is no suggestion here that he’s physically unfit to execute the duties of the office, but it’s also unclear on what basis any doctor could deem that “very good health.” As in the past, there’s little evidence that this assessment is not primarily about good publicity—about outcome, not process.
（60）
序列号 词数 体裁 题材 建议用时
Summary 490 议论文 政治时事 ≤10min
【参考范文】
A statement about president Trump’s physical exam result from the president’s new physician raised speculation about the true state of Trump’s health because it wasn’t shared in a transparent way, which thus led to the credibility of the presidential health-assessment process’s dramatical fall. There was no suggestion that Trump was physically unfit nor was he “very good health.”
(58 words)
【要点解读】
该篇围绕总统健康评测结果的客观性展开议论，文章的核心是该份评测结果过分夸赞总统良好的健康状况，可信度有待于商榷，故而引起民众对其总统健康评测进程的怀疑，对其的信任度也直线下滑，这些内容如果都概括出来，要点就不会遗漏了。
【vocabulary】
unveiling
n. 除去遮盖物；公开；揭幕式
v. 揭示；除去面纱（unveil的ing形式）
adj. 揭幕的
speculation
n. 投机；推测；思索；投机买卖
authorship
n. （书等的）原创作者，来源；作者的身份；著述业
enlisted
v. 征募；参军（enlist的过去分词）
adj. 应募入伍的
anticipate
vt. 预期，期望；占先，抢先；提前使用
duration
n. 持续，持续的时间，期间
[语音学]音长，音延
atypical
adj. 非典型的；不合规则的
inconsistent
adj. 不一致的；前后矛盾的
sprinkle
n. 撒，洒；少量
vt. 洒；微雨；散置
vi. 洒，撒；下稀疏小雨；喷撒
scrutiny
n. 详细审查；监视；细看；选票复查
coronary
adj. 冠的；冠状的；花冠的
cholesterol
n. [生化] 胆固醇
intrigue
n. 阴谋；诡计；复杂的事；私通
vt. 用诡计取得；激起...的兴趣
vi. 私通；密谋素材源：大西洋月刊 （原文有删改）
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.
Is the Insect Apocalypse（启示） Really Upon Us
In 1828, a teenager named Charles Darwin opened a letter to his cousin with “I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.” Almost two centuries on, Darwin would probably be thrilled and horrified: People are abuzz about insects, but their discussions are flecked with words such as apocalypse and Armageddon.
The drumbeats of doom began in late 2017, after a German study showed that the total mass of local flying insects had fallen by 80 percent in three decades. The alarms intensified after The New York Times Magazine published a masterful feature on the decline of insect life late last year. And panic truly set in this month when the researchers Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, having reviewed dozens of studies, claimed that “insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” The Guardian, in covering the duo’s review, wrote that “insects could vanish within a century”—a crisis that Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys believe could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”
I spoke with several entomologists about whether these claims are valid, and what I found was complicated. The data on insect declines are too patchy, unrepresentative, and piecemeal to justify some of the more hyperbolic alarms. At the same time, what little information we have tends to point in the same worrying direction. How, then, should we act on that imperfect knowledge It’s a question that goes beyond the fate of insects: How do we preserve our rapidly changing world when the unknowns are vast and the cost of inaction is potentially high
First, some good news: The claim that insects will all be annihilated within the century is absurd. Almost everyone I spoke with says that it’s not even plausible, let alone probable. “Not going to happen,” says Elsa Youngsteadt from North Carolina State University. “They’re the most diverse group of organisms on the planet. Some of them will make it.” Indeed, insects of some sort are likely to be the last ones standing. Any event sufficiently catastrophic to scour the world of insects would also render it inhospitable to other animal life. “If it happened, humans would no longer be on the planet,” says Corrie Moreau from Cornell University.
The sheer diversity of insects makes them, as a group, resilient—but also impossible to fully comprehend. There are more species of ladybugs than mammals, of ants than birds, of weevils than fish. There are probably more species of parasitic wasps than of any other group of animal. In total, about 1 million insect species have been described, and untold millions await discovery. And having learned of a creature’s existence is very different from actually knowing it: Most of the identified species are still mysterious in their habits, their proclivities, and—crucially for this discussion—their numbers.
Few researchers have kept running tallies on insect populations, aside from a smattering of species that are charismatic (monarch butterflies), commercially important (domesticated honeybees), or medically relevant (some mosquitoes). Society still has a lingering aversion toward creepy crawlies, and entomological research has long been underfunded. Where funds exist, they’ve been disproportionately channeled toward ways of controlling agricultural pests. The basic business of documenting insect diversity has been comparatively neglected, a situation made worse by the decline of taxonomists—species-spotting scientists who, ironically, have undergone their own mass extinction.
（60）
序列号 词数 体裁 题材 建议用时
Summary 561 议论文 生物科学 ≤10min
【参考范文】
The sharp decline of insect life was reported and caused panic. But the author, an entomologist， found it lame because the data on insect were patchy, unrepresentative and piecemeal. Besides , few researchers kept running tallies on insect populations and entomological research has long been underfunded. The decline of species-spotting scientists also worsened the basic business of documenting insect diversity. (60 words)
【要点解读】
议论文概括时抓论点论据是需要重点留意的地方。文章开头通过列举达尔文的轶事，引入议论对象昆虫，继而写昆虫数量急剧下降，引起人们恐慌，但作者认为这些报道有待商榷，因为这些结论的数据不充分，而且对昆虫的研究以及资金投入都很不足。我们在概括时，最后一段往往隐含关键信息点，因此需要特别留意。
【vocabulary】
abuzz
adj. 嗡嗡的；嘁嘁喳喳的；呈现忙碌状况(的)；议论纷纷(的)
flecked
adj. 有斑点的；有污点的
v. 使有斑点（fleck的过去分词）
doom
n. 厄运；死亡；判决；世界末日
vt. 注定；判决；使失败
intensify
vt. 使加强，使强化；使变激烈
vi. 增强，强化；变激烈
masterful
adj. 专横的，傲慢的；主人派头的；熟练的
entomologist
n. 昆虫学者
patchy
adj. 不调和的；拼凑成的；有补丁的
piecemeal
n. 片；块
adj. 零碎的；逐渐的
vt. 粉碎
hyperbolic
adj. 双曲线的；夸张的
tally
n. 计数器；标签；记账
vi. 一致；记分
vt. 使符合；计算；记录
charismatic
adj. 超凡魅力的；神赐能力的
lingering
v. 徘徊；缓慢消失；沉思（linger的ing形式）
adj. 拖延的
creepy
adj. 诡异的；令人毛骨悚然的；爬行的
disproportionately
adv. 不成比例地
