SAT考试注重批判性思维能力考察

 博雅教育是美国大学教育中很重要的部分，而博雅教育的精髓是批判性思考，它也是美国大学在选拔学生、培养学生时的主要标尺和目标。美国大学入学考试SAT考试是公认的智力测试，SAT考试的阅读部分本身就叫做批判性阅读。

新东方VIP老师一直向学生不断强调通过阅读来提升批判性思考能力这一重要理念。然而，我们何必舍近求远，何不把备考SAT的过程中也当成是一个享受阅读乐趣，提升批判性思考的过程呢?下面就以一篇SAT阅读文章为例来说明什么是批判性思考，以及如何通过阅读来提升批判性思考。想要了解更 多SAT考情和课程信息，请致电400-720-6868咨询。英文原文如下：

The following passage is from a 1992 publication in which the author, a physicist, discusses “reality” and the models that human beings use to understand the universe.

Perhaps you’ve seen the painting: a pipe, depicted with photographic realism, floats above a line of careful script that reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”- “This is not a pipe.” Rene Magritte painted The Treachery of Images in the 1920s, and people have been talking ever since about what it means.

Did Magritte intend to remind us that a representation is not the object it depicts- that his painting is “only” a painting and not a pipe? Such an interpretation is widely taught to college students, but if it is true, Magritte went to an awful lot of trouble- carefully selecting a dress-finish pipe of particularly elegant design, making dozens of sketches of it, taking it apart to familiarize himself with its anatomy, then painting its portrait with great care and skill- just to tell us something we already knew. In another canvas, The Two Mysteries, Magritte is even more insistent: the original pipe painting, complete with caption, is depicted as sitting on an easel that rests on a plank floor, but above that painting, to the left, hovers a second pipe, larger (or closer) than the painted canvas and its frame. What we have here is a painting of a paradox. Obviously the smaller pipe is a painting and not a pipe. But what is the second pipe, the one that looms outside the represented canvas? And if that too is but a painting, then where does the painting end?

It seems to me that the roots of the paradox reside in the concept of the frame. When we look at a realistic painting- a portrait of a historical figure- we accept by convention that the portrait represents a real person and actual objects. When that convention is denied, as in Magritte’s pipe paintings, the point is not to remind us that paintings are not real. That much is true but trivial. The point is to challenge the belief that everything outside the frame is real.

The enemy of artists like Magritte is naïve realism- the dogged assumption that the human sensory apparatus accurately records the one and only real world, of which the human brain can make but one accurate model. The truth, of course, is that nobody can grasp reality whole, that each person’s universe is to some extent unique, and that this circumstance makes it impossible for us to prove that there is but one true reality.

If modern artists have labored to call attention to the fact that our understanding of reality is limited and variegated, so too have modern scientists. Many people are surprised to hear this. They think of science as a collection of hard facts mined from bedrock reality, through a process as uncreative as coin collecting. The scientists, however, have come to know better. Astronomers understand that each act of observation- photographing a galaxy, taking an ultraviolet spectrum of an exploding star- extracts but a small piece of the whole, and that a montage of many such images is still only a representation, a painting if you will. The quantum physicists go further: they appreciate that the answers they obtain through experiment depend significantly on the questions they ask, so that an electron, asked if it is a particle or a wave, will answer “Yes” to both questions. Neuroscientists have learned that the brain is no monolith, either. Each of us harbors many intelligences, and insofar as my various minds take varying views of reality-in terms, say, of spatial relationships versus language, or of sentimental versus rational education- I can no more legitimately impose a single model on myself than I can expect to impose it on others.

This is not to say that every opinion about the universe deserves equal attention, as if schoolteachers should be enjoined to give equal weight to the flat-Earth theory, ESP, or the existence of extraterrestrials. That no one theory of the universe can deservedly gain permanent predominance does not mean that all theories are equally valid. In fact, to understand the limitations of science (and art and philosophy) can be a source of strength, emboldening us to renew our search for the objectively real even though we understand that the search will never end. I often reflect on a remark made to me one evening over dinner by a famous scientist: “The world is a fantasy, so let’s find out about it.” To me, that heroic statement encapsulates the spirit of science: to seek to learn something while accepting that one will never know everything.

在本篇SAT阅读材料中，作者先是从一幅Rene Magritte于1920年代画的一幅名为The Treachery of Images的画(请见图一)说起。这幅画里画的是一支很逼真的烟斗，下面用法语写着”这不是一支烟斗”。紧接着作者又描述了Magritte画的另外一幅名为The Two Mysteries的画(请见图二)。这幅画中俨然安放着刚才提到的第一幅画，而且在那幅画外又出现了另外一支烟斗，仿佛更大也离我们更近了。说到这里，笔者就指出，如果第一幅画正如Magritte说指出的它并不是一支烟斗的话，那么第二幅画中出现在画外的那支烟斗是什么?作者进一步指出，显然画家的用意不是花这么大的功夫告诉我们画画得再逼真也终究是画，而不是实物。他还指出要真正理解画家的用意关键在于那个画框，理解它的概念为何。他说画家的用意在于挑战出现在画框之外的任何事物都是真实存在这一信念(The point is to challenge the belief that everything outside the frame is real).

考察考生批判性思考能力的题目在SAT考试中非常常见，通过此篇SAT考试批判性阅读材料，SAT考生可以了解到批判性思考中的一个重要方法，就是不将任何东西视为理所当然。作为思考上的思考(the thinking of thinking)的一门艺术，它要求作为人的我们要不断审视我们有可能存在的认识上的误区，自觉或不自觉陷入的偏见、成见、扭曲、不加批判接受的社会规则和禁忌，进而为自我利益或既得利益中存在错误的牺牲品。

新东方VIP老师在SAT考试授课中，会通过大量的SAT真题训练SAT考生的批判性思维能力，帮助SAT考生从容应对SAT考试。

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