中央党校考博英语真题试卷（2009年）阅读理解5

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Section B
Directions: In this section, there is a passage with five questions. After you have read the passage, answer the questions B5, B6, B7, B8, B9 and B10 in English on Answer Sheet B.
Passage 5
The ideas that flourished during the early years of cognitive science had a strong influence on the creative mind of a young psychologist named Jerome Bruner. In 1956, with colleagues Jacqueline Goodnow and George Austin, Bruner, published an ingenious and important account of categorization called A Study of Thinking. In it, they analyzed categorizing and expressed their belief that it explains why humans are not overwhelmed by environmental complexity. Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin effectively showed that their research participants actively participated in the classification process. As you can imagine, the great value of Bruner’s work in the 1950s and 1960s lay in the energy it supplied to the renewed cognitive movement. Gardner noted that Bruner’s study participants were treated as active, constructive problem solvers, rather than as passive reactors to whatever stimuli were presented to them. The active construction of solutions to problems implies that students turn to their cultural environment for clues to aid them in their task.
According to Bruner and his associates, three types of concepts exist: conjunctive, disjunctive, and relational. Conjunctive concepts rely on the joint presence of several attributes. These attributes are abstracted from many individual experiences with an object, thing, or event. So there are categories, such as boy, car, book, and orange. Disjunctive concepts are composed of concepts, any one of whose attributes may be used in classification. That is, one or another of its attributes enables an object to be placed in a particular category. A good example of the disjunctive category is the strike in baseball. A strike may be a ball thrown by the pitcher that is over the plate and between a batter’s shoulders and knees, or a ball at which the better swings and misses, or a ball that the batter hits as a foul (outside the playing limits of the diamond). Any one of these attributes enables the observer to classify it as a strike. Relational concepts are formed by the relationship that exists among defining attributes. The authors illustrate this category by using income brackets. There are many income levels or classes, all of which exist because of the relationship among income, eligible expenses, and number of dependents. The combination of these properties determines an individual’s income class. These are relational categories.
Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin concluded that categorizing implies more than merely recognizing instances. Rules are learned and then applied to new situations. Students learn that a sentence—subject, object, predicate—is the basic unit in writing, in history class as well as in English class. The various categories (conjunctive, disjunctive, relational) are really rules for grouping attributes to define the positive instances of any concept. Bruner’s work on discovery learning, along with that of Piaget and Vygotsky, led to constructivism, the current prevailing approach to the study and application of cognitive psychology.

Answer the following questions briefly according to what you have just read.
B5. What is the most appropriate title for this passage?
B6. According to Bruner’s theory, why wouldn’t humans be overwhelmed by environmental complexity?
B7. What is mainly discussed in the second paragraph?
B8. What do Bruner and his associates want to illustrate by giving the example of the strike in baseball?
B9. What is the function of Bruner’s theory of categorization?
B10. What is most likely to be talked about in the following paragraph?