单选题
The truth may well be self-evident that all humans are created equal, but one thing our Maker did not endow us with equally is the speed at which we take in words on the printed page. This seems not so much a function of brains as of how efficiently the machinery works. A few of us are industrial vacuum cleaners, able to suck up "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" in a matter of hours. At the other extreme are the lint-pickers, those who must lip-read even Danielle Steel. The rest of us are left to carpet-sweep at the rate of three or four words at a glance, and dream of the hours that would be saved if only we were better endowed. Onto this uneven field charged Evelyn Wood back in the late 1950' s. She was convinced that with a little pushing, all of us, even the lint-pickets, could be transformed into vacuum cleaners. All we had to do was stop saying the words out loud in our heads—" subvocalizing" , she called it— and to stop pausing to reread words as our minds drifted away. The point was to start consuming print in bites instead of nibble. To do this, Wood wanted us to drag our fingers down the middle of the page to act as pacers, to be rabbits for the greyhounds of our eyes. She promised that the words wouldn' t blur; the faster we went, the more we would take in. Did her method really work? Multitudes believed it did and flocked to her Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institutes as they spread across the land. Presidents of the United States packed members of their staffs off to her schools, the better to keep from drowning in Presidential memos. Her students devoured George Orwell' s "Animal Farm" at the rate of 1,400 words a minute. Wood had guaranteed that her method worked on all manner of material. Not likely. So there had to be a drop of snake oil in the ointment. Still the essence of Wood' s notion was sound.
单选题
From Paragraph 1, we have learnt that______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】解析：第一段第一句指出人们生来平等，但是上帝并非平等地给予了每个人同样的speed atwhich we take in words on the printed page，这也就是说每个人的阅读速度都是不同的。
单选题
According to the passage, which of the following is NOT true?
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】解析：末段第一句讲到Wood保证her method worked on all manner of material，可是作者认为这不大可能(Not likely)。由此可知选项A的说法是错误的。选项D，从作者最后一段的行文可知，作者对于Wood的想法是给予肯定的，但也提出了些许质疑，可见，作者的态度是严谨的批判，即critically。