今天小編給大家帶來的是GRE閱讀解釋之Medium passage，希望對大家有所幫助。
　　A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in mapmaking and cartographic scholarship. Since nineteenth century cartographers, for instance, understood themselves as technicians who did not care about visual effects, while others saw themselves as landscape painters. That dichotomy structured the discipline of the history of cartography. Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called “the Old is Beautiful Paradigm,” scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800, marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age. Early mapmaking was considered art while modern cartography was located within the realm of engineering utility. Alpers, however, has argued that this boundary would have puzzled mapmakers in the seventeenth century, because they considered themselves to be visual engineers.
　　全文包括兩個觀點：
　　一是美學和技術是有界限的；
　　二是Alpers認為對17世紀的mapmaker來說并沒有這樣的界限。
　　1. According to the passage, Alpers would say that the assumptions underlying the “paradigm” wereA. inconsistent with the way some mapmakers prior to 1800 understand their own workB. dependent on a seventeenth-century conception of mapmaking visual engineering
　　C. unconcerned with the difference between the aesthetic and technical questions of mapmakingD. insensitive to divisions among cartographers working in the period after 1800E. supported by the demonstrable technical superiority of mapmaking made after 1800
　　答案：A
　　解析：paradigm代表前一種觀點，Alpers代表第二種觀點，因此選A，Alpers認為paradigm包含的觀點和17世紀的mapmaker不一樣。

　　2. It can be inferred from the passage that, beginning in the 1980s, historians of cartography
　　A. placed greater emphasis on the beauty of maps made after 1800B. expanded their range of study to include more material created after 1800C. grew more sensitive to the way mapmakers prior to 1800 conceived of their work
　　D. came to see the visual details of maps as aesthetic objects rather than practical cartographic aidsE. reduced the attention they paid to the technical aspects of mapmaking
　　答案：B
　　審題重點：beginning in the 1980s
　　答案句：Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called “the Old is Beautiful Paradigm,” scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800, marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age.
　　解析：注意until表示up to，后面的句子講述的是1980s前的事，而題目問1980s后的事，要取反。
　　小結：文章的核心就是兩個不同的觀點，頭一題考查兩個觀點的碰撞（A如何看B0，第二題定位不難，著重考until的意思，也是一個常見的GRE閱讀考點。