这样阅读外刊可以提高英语

相信很多学英语的人都知道，阅读外刊对我们的英语学习是大有裨益的。经常阅读此类外刊可以扩充词汇储备量、学习地道的语言使用方式、提高我们的阅读能力，还可以帮我们熟悉托福、雅思、SAT阅读考试话题。

外刊可以称得上是各种英语能力考试的选题库，无论是专八、考研，还是雅思、托福、SAT、GMAT 等各类国际英语水平测试，外刊都是最常被选用的阅读题库素材来源。如果我们能提前熟悉多种话题素材，提高外刊阅读技巧和能力，在考场上就能更加轻松的应对。所以接下来会跟大家一起来精读一些经典外刊文章。

今天给大家带来的是一篇关于霸王龙（Tyrannosaur）的文章。恐龙这个话题相信大家都不陌生，在托福听力阅读和SAT阅读中出现的频率都是很高的。霸王龙是生存于白垩纪末期的恐龙种类之一，也是最晚灭绝的恐龙之一。接下来我们一起精读这篇文章。

A truck barrels down a dusty desert road in southern Utah's vast Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, speeding through canyons and along cliffs toward a towering sandstone formation known as the Kaiparowits Plateau. Alan Titus, a Bureau of Land Management paleontologist here for nearly 20 years, is behind the wheel, his shaggy hair flapping in the July wind as Led Zeppelin blasts from the speakers.

Titus stops the truck on a shrubby hill. With his passenger, University of North Florida paleontologist Barry Albright, he sets off on a small foot path into the high desert.

The two men, longtime friends and collaborators, are heading to the scene of a catastrophe — and, possibly, the biggest find of Titus’ decades-long career.

【前三段主要描述了两位古生物学家Alan Titus和Barry Albright出场，他们正赶往考古现场，并且这可能是数十年来Titus的最大发现。】

In 2014, Titus was prospecting for dinosaurs when he kicked over a bit of bone beside a scraggly old juniper tree. It was a piece of skull from a tyrannosaur — animals that include Tyrannosaurus rex and dozens of related and ancestral species. Since that chance find, Titus and his team have recovered remains from four tyrannosaurs — an adult, a teenager and two juveniles — from a site about 1,000 square feet in size. Titus thinks these tyrannosaurs died together some 76 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. If he’s right, it could confirm a controversial idea about one of the most iconic dinosaurs that ever lived.

【交代Titus的考古发现、Titus的观点，以及这个观点可能会证实一个有争议的观点】

Tyrannosaurs have been found from the Arctic Circle to the subtropics. And for decades, paleontologists have debated whether these top predators were social creatures. 【指出争议的问题】 But fossil evidence has been hard to find. “That’s why this is exciting,” Titus says. He believes that “these animals are the direct ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex living in a complex social group.” 【Titus的观点】

But not everyone is convinced. “It’s hard to tell just from bones,” says Albright, who helped work the site. He pauses and adds, “Their brains are too small to hunt in packs.” 【Albright的观点】

Titus isn’t dissuaded. Even the site’s nickname is a nod to his enthusiastic optimism. Team members call it “Rainbows and Unicorns.” 【Titus的态度】

Pop culture usually portrays tyrannosaurs as loners ravaging the landscape (remember Jurassic Park?), not animals with complex social relationships. But a handful of recent discoveries may be prompting a revision. In 2014, for example, paleontologists announced a trio of tracks in British Columbia from adult tyrannosaurs, possibly Albertosaurus, walking together in the mud. The following year, a study in the journal PeerJ described fossil evidence that suggested tyrannosaurs often bit at each other’s faces, likely during competition. Titus and some of his colleagues believe that these finds suggest the predators may have moved in packs, jockeyed for social hierarchy and perhaps even cared for their young through adolescence. 【列举了一些新的发现，可能会改变霸王龙是独行者的通俗观点；以及Titus的观点】

【这一部分主要呈现对霸王龙是否是群居动物的不同观点】

Many modern predators exhibit these behaviors, but the long-standing dinosaur stereotype is that their brains just weren’t big enough for such sophisticated relationships. 【对恐龙的刻板印象】

“A lot of that is simple bias against reptiles,” says University of Maryland paleontologist and tyrannosaur expert Thomas Holtz Jr. “Crocodilians engage in play, deception and problem solving, things that people once thought they didn’t have the brains to do.” And because tyrannosaurs were brainier for their body size than any crocodile, it’s reasonable to expect they’d be capable of even more complex behaviors, Holtz says. It’s possible, in fact, that tyrannosaur brains explain their rise to dominance in the first place. 【Holtz认为霸王龙可以进行更复杂的活动】

【这两段其实在进一步对上文提出的问题进行探讨】

THE AGE OF TYRANNOSAURS

The first animals to be considered tyrannosaurs show up in the fossil record 170 million years ago. But if you were placing bets on a future superpredator, you wouldn’t have put your money on them. Proceratosaurus, shorter than a human and not particularly terrifying, was discovered in England a century ago but only identified as a tyrannosaur in 2010.

“The reason [tyrannosaurs] took over as the dominant predator is still a question,”【 提出问题：霸王龙成为主导的原因】says Joseph Sertich of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who worked with Titus on Rainbows and Unicorns. “They seemed to be in the right place at the right time.”

That right time began about 100 million years ago, when a period of intense volcanic activity caused a mini-mass extinction in the Northern Hemisphere, killing many of the larger dinosaurs, including allosaurs, the apex predators of their day. 【解释1】

There’s a gap in the tyrannosaur fossil record of several million years, but it appears that, after this event, tyrannosaurs began their climb to the top of the food chain — and, some researchers speculate, their smarts may have helped them do it. 【解释2】

In 2016, paleontologists described a well-preserved skull from a tyrannosaur that lived in Uzbekistan 90 million years ago. The fossils suggested that this horse-sized tyrannosaur, Timurlengia euotica, had keen senses. 【解释3】Its large inner ears would have allowed it to hear low-frequency sounds, a common trait in predators that hunt larger animals over long distances. The researchers believe it’s evidence that the tyrannosaur brain allowed it to become an apex predator long before the animals reached their peak in size: By the time an asteroid wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, an adult T. rex could weigh 10 tons and stretch some 40 feet from nose to tail, one of the largest predators ever to walk the Earth.

【这一部分主要讲了霸王龙时代到来的几种可行的原因】

1. 文章结构

我们在精读时首先需要弄清楚文章在讲什么，并通过分析段落与段落之间的关系，了解作者的行文思路。细心的朋友会发现这篇文章是有小节标题的，所以整个文章的结构应该是很清晰的。

那么，我们需要做的就是先快速扫读，对每个小节内部的主要结构和大意进行梳理。两个古生物学家出场 → 提出问题：霸王龙是否群居 → 各种不同观点。提出问题：霸王龙时代到来的原因 → 几种不同的解释及发现。（具体更详细的分析见文本）

2. 段内逻辑

节选部分段落都不长，但我们今后在外刊精读过程中肯定会遇到更长的段落，所以我们需要理清段内的逻辑，我以下面这个段落为例：

Pop culture usually portrays tyrannosaurs as loners ravaging the landscape (remember Jurassic Park?), not animals with complex social relationships. But a handful of recent discoveries may be prompting a revision. In 2014, for example, paleontologists announced a trio of tracks in British Columbia from adult tyrannosaurs, possibly Albertosaurus, walking together in the mud. The following year, a study in the journal PeerJ described fossil evidence that suggested tyrannosaurs often bit at each other’s faces, likely during competition. Titus and some of his colleagues believe that these finds suggest the predators may have moved in packs, jockeyed for social hierarchy and perhaps even cared for their young through adolescence.

① 提出通俗观点：霸王龙是loners

② 抓关键词but：新发现可能会改变这一看法

③ 抓关键词for example: 列举一些新的发现

④ Titus及其同事的观点

3. 句与词

长难句可能会对我们的阅读造成一些障碍，但是我们只需要能区分主干和修饰成分，把句子的主干拎出来，理解起来就不难了。节选部分很少有长难句，相信大家读起来不会有太大难度。

接下来我们一起看看文章中的一些重点词汇。

① barrel：这个词我们熟知的意思是“桶”，如two barrels of oil。它还可以作动词，表示“高速行驶”，如：A truck barrels down a dusty desert。

② prospect：我们都知道这个词表示“前景”，比如a good career prospect。而在文中prospect作动词，表“勘探”，如prospect for gold。

③ dissuade：“劝阻”；-suad这个词缀表示“劝说”，如persuade；前面加一个否定前缀dis-就构成“劝阻”这层含义了。如：to dissuade him from giving up his job。

这篇文章（节选）的精读我们就到这儿啦，下周我们会继续奉上精彩的外刊文章精读哦~