阅读第一部分：近义词的搭配判断
Wang is 9 minutes into Reading Part 1 (15 items, 17-minute budget) and has finished 8. Item 9: 会议改到下午三点，请大家互相____一下。 Options: 通知 / 转告 / 汇报 / 宣布. He picks 通知, thinking 'notify each other' works in English. Item 10: 为了____交通拥堵，市政府决定增加三条公交线路。 Options: 缓解 / 减少 / 降低 / 解决. He knows all four characters and can translate each into English, yet two feel right. His accuracy on Part 1 is 11/15, while his Part 3 accuracy is 16/20, which suggests his problem is not vocabulary size but choosing under near-synonyms. Total reading time is 40 minutes for 45 items.
1. Resolve Item 9. State the rule that separates 转告 from 通知, 汇报 and 宣布, and say why 互相 is the decisive clue.
Read the worked answer
Answer: 转告.
The four verbs differ by direction and role, not by meaning alone:
- 转告 - a relay: A tells B something so that B can pass it to C. Because the relay can travel in both directions inside the same group, 互相转告 is a fixed and natural collocation: 'pass the word to each other'.
- 通知 - one-way, from the party that owns the information or the authority to the recipients. 互相通知 would make every member an official notifier, which is why it sounds wrong here even though it is not ungrammatical.
- 汇报 - upward, to a superior (向上级汇报). No upward direction in this sentence.
- 宣布 - public, one-way, usually formal (宣布决定、宣布名单). Cannot be mutual.
Decisive clue: 互相. It requires a two-way action performed by the same group on each other. Only 转告 has a relay structure that can be reciprocal. Wang's error is typical: he translated the English gloss 'notify' and ignored the subject-role information encoded in 互相.
2. Resolve Item 10 with a procedure Wang can reuse on any near-synonym verb item in under 40 seconds.
Read the worked answer
Answer: 缓解.
Procedure (40 seconds, works for any 动词+宾语 blank):
- Read the object first, not the verb (10 s). The object here is 交通拥堵 - a state, not a quantity and not a problem to be eliminated.
- Classify the object, then call the verb class (15 s).
- States and pressures (拥堵、压力、症状、情绪、矛盾) take 缓解.
- Measurable quantities (数量、成本、速度、温度、人数) take 减少 / 降低.
- 问题、困难、矛盾 as explicit problems take 解决 (解决问题), but 解决 does not take the phenomenon itself - you do not 解决拥堵, you 解决问题.
- If two verbs survive, read the second character (15 s). 缓 = to ease off; 解 = to untie. A state is eased, a knot is untied. 缓解压力 ✓, 解决压力 ✗.
Check with a substitute noun: if 缓解 also works with 压力, the verb is about easing; if only 降低 works with 成本, it is about quantity. Wang knows all four characters - the failure is that he translates each into 'reduce/improve' and stops. The fix is to store verbs with a noun class attached, not with an English gloss.
3. Wang is at 9:00 with 7 items and 8 minutes left in Part 1. What is the correct time decision, and how should he handle items he cannot resolve?
Read the worked answer
He is on pace - the arithmetic says so. 8 items in 9 minutes is 67 seconds each; 7 items in 8 minutes is 68 seconds each. The dangerous move is to 'speed up' to 40 seconds an item, because that is exactly the state in which near-synonym decisions get made by translation.
Rule:
- Keep 65–70 seconds per item. Part 1 is a discrimination task; below about 50 seconds, accuracy on 转告-type items collapses.
- 90-second cap. If one item is still unresolved at 90 s, mark the letter that best fits the object-verb frame and move. Never leave a blank - a guess is worth 25%, a blank is worth 0.
- Protect Part 2 and Part 3. After Part 1 ends at 17 minutes, roughly 23 minutes remain for 30 items. Do not borrow from that; Part 3 passages are worth more per minute than a single blank.
- Mark, do not revisit. Circle the item number and come back only if the section ends early. Re-reading a resolved item is the most common way candidates lose the last five minutes.