2015年GRE考试填空题：真题讲练

1. During the recent citizen-scientist event, the amateur astonished the organizer by having the schedule of the galaxies ahead of a long time. Buoyed by the alacrity, the scientists went on to ask more-complicated questions that led to studies they had never imagined.

考察词汇：astonished/ buoyed/ alacrity

2. Computers make it spectacularly easy to search for particular pieces of information in downloaded texts. And doing research in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach the book with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You, not the author, are the master.

考察词汇：empowering/ surrendering/ glean precisely what you want from it

3. There are two opposing theories about mountain formation and climate over the past 40 millions years: either the surge of mountain building caused the global cooling, or vice versa. The first of these two theories asserts that widespread mountain building cooled the earth as a result of the feedback between mountains and climate. For example, mountain glaciers tend to be self-perpetuating: once established, they increase the reflectivity of the surface, thus lowering the temperatures and allowing more ice to form.

考察词汇：caused/ feedback between/ self-perpetuating

4. Fossil “early whale” mother found, according to ScienceDaily 4 Feb 2009. A team of palaeontologists led by Philip Gingerich have found the fossil of “female whale with a fetus” in Pakistan. They also found a fossil male of the same species. The new fossil has been named Maiacetus inuus and is dated as 47.5 million years old. “Maiacetus”

means mother whale and “inuus” refers to a Roman fertility god. The unborn baby …whale? is orientated in the head down position, as occurs in land animals. Whales give birth tail first. Maiacetus is described as having “four legs modified for foot-powered swimming, and although these whales could support their weight on their flipper-like limbs, they probably couldn't travel far on land(此处原题换成了its flipper-like feat must have been clumsy for walking).” According to Gingerich and ScienceDaily, its “big teeth, well-suited for catching and eating fish, suggest the animals made their livings in the sea, probably coming onto land only to rest, mate and give birth.” Gingerich commented: "They clearly were tied to the shore. They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth."

考察词汇：adapted to/ in the sea / clumsy for

5. There were also few outlets for his wit and erudition, and even the reader acquainted with the bare outlines of Pushkin's biography (privileged upbringing, rebellious youth, exile, personal censorship by the tsar, marriage to a society beauty, untimely death in a duel) will be struck by the suffocating lack of creative freedom so vividly conveyed here. Pushkin's personal correspondence was intercepted, his movements monitored and his life closely tied to that of the court. Not only did Tsar Nicholas I's decision to oversee his career oblige him to submit all his manuscripts for inspection, but his perennially desperate finances entailed humiliating negotiations with the tsar's chief of secret police over his loans. And when Pushkin's wife caught Nicholas's eye, the increasingly beleaguered poet was coerced into becoming a junior courtier so that she could attend all the right balls.

考察词汇:stuck by/ suffocating lack of creative freedom/ monitored