2009年 英语语言文学 英语综合 改错

A fairly standard consensual definition is "a relatively permanent change in behavior (sic.; it's American of course) that results from practise." This is of course arguable, particularly the "practice" criterion. Others would accept changes in "capability" or even simple "knowledge" or "understanding", even if it is not manifest in behaviour. It is however an important criterion that "learned" behaviour is not pre-programmed or wholly instinctive (not a word used much nowadays), even if an instinctual drive underpins it. Behaviour can also change as a result of maturation-simple growing-up-without being totally learned. Think of the changing attitude of children and adolescents to opposite-sex peers. Whatever the case, there has to be interaction with the environment.
Even if psychologists ever agree about what learning is, in practice educationalists won't, because education introduces prescriptive notions about specifying what ought to be learnt, and there is considerable dispute about whether this ought only to be what the teacher wants the learner to learn (implicit in behavioural models), or what the learner wants to learn (as in humanistic models).

2009英语语言文学 完形填空 全文
Obtaining Linguistic Data

Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a casual introspection about one\'s mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.
In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data - an informant. Informants are(ideally) native speakers of a language, who provide utterances for analysis and other kinds of information about the language(e.g. translations, comments about correctness, or judgements on usage). Often, when studying their mother tongue, linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity, acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. The convenience of this approach makes it widely used, and it is considered the norm in the generative approach to linguistics. But a linguist\'s personal judgements are often uncertain, or disagree with the judgements of other linguists, at which point recourse is needed to more objective methods of enquiry, using non-linguists as informants. The latter procedure is unavoidable when working on foreign languages, or child speech.
Many  factors must be considered when selecting informants - whether one is working with single speakers(a common situation when languages have not been described before), two people interacting, small groups or large-scale samples. Age, sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are known to influence the kind of language used. The topic of conversation and the characteristics of the social setting(e.g. the level of formality) are also highly relevant, as are the personal qualities of the informants(e.g. their fluency and consistency). For larger studies, scrupulous attention has been paid to the sampling theory employed, and in all cases, decisions have to be made about the best investigative techniques to use.
Today, researchers often tape-record informants. This enables the linguist\'s claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those claims more accurate(\'difficult\' pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly). But obtaining naturalistic, good-quality data is never easy. People talk abnormally when they know they are being recorded, and sound quality can be poor. A variety of tape-recording procedures have thus been devised to minimise the \'observer\'s paradox\'(how to observe the way people behave when they are not bening observed). Some recordings are made without the speaker being aware of the fact - a procedure that obtains very natural data, though ethical objections must be anticipated. Alternatively, attempts can be made to make the speaker forget about the recording, such as keeping the tape recorder out of sight, or using radio microphones. A useful technique is to introduce a topic that quickly involves the speaker, and stimulates a natural language style(e.g. asking older informants about how times have changed in their locality).
An audio tape recording does not solve all the linguist\'s problems, however. Speech is often  unclear and ambiguous. Where possible , therefore, the recording has to be supplemented by the observer\'s written comments on the non-verbal behaviour of the participants, and about the context in general. A facial expression, for example, can dramatically alter the meaning of what is said. Video recordings avoid these problems to a large extent, but even they have limitations(the camera connot be everywhere), and transcriptions always benefit from any additional commentary provided by an observer.
Linguists also make great use of structured sessions, in which they systematically ask their informants for utterances that describe certain actions, objects or behaviour. With a bilingual informant, or through use of an interpreter, it is possible to use translation techniques(\'How do you say table in your language?\'). A large number of points can be covered in a short time, using interview worksheets and questionnaires. Often, the researcher wishes to obtain information about just a single variable, in which case a restricted set of questions may be used: a particular feature of pronunciation, for example, can be elicited by asking the informant to say a restricted set of words. There are also several direct methods of elicitation, such as asking informants to fill in the blanks in a substitution frame(e.g I__see a car), or feeding them the wrong stimulus for correction(\'Is it possible to say I no can see?\').
A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic analysis, is known as a corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make unbiased statements about frequency of usage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researchers. Its range and size are variable. Some corpora attempt to cover the language as a whole, taking extracts from many kinds of text; others are extremely selective, providing a collection of material that deals only with a particular linguistic feature. The size of the porpus depends on practical factors, such as the time available to collect, process and store the data: it can take up to several hours to provide an accurate transcription of a few minutes of speech. Sometimes a small sample of data will be enough to decide a linguistic hypothesis; by contrast, corpora in major research projects can total millions of words. An important principle is that all corpora, whatever their size, are inevitably limited in their coverage, and always need to be supplemented by data derived from the intuitions of native speakers of the language, through either introspection or experimentation.

2009英语语言文学 英语综合 阅读理解Passage 1
BAKELITE
The birth of modern plastics

In 1907, Leo Hendrick Baekeland, a Belgian scientist working in New York, discovered and patented a revolutionary new synthetic material. His invention, which he named \'Bakelite\', was of enormous technological importance, and effectively launched the modern plastics industry.
The term \'plastic\' comes from the Greek plassein, meaning \'to mould\'. Some plastics are derived from natural sources, some are semi-synthetic (the result of chemical action on a natural substance), and some are entirely synthetic, that is, chemically engineered from the constituents of coal or oil. Some are \'thermoplastic\', which means that, like candlewax, they melt when heated and can then be reshaped. Others are \'thermosetting\': like eggs, they cannot revert to their original viscous state, and their shape is thus fixed for ever., Bakelite had the distinction of being the first totally synthetic thermosetting plastic.