考研英语

Design courses,then,should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking,a central mechanism in engineering design,involves perceptions,the stock-in-trade of the artist,not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail hard thinking， nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering,the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students,but rather students attending architectural schools.

5.The author calls the predicament faced by the Historic American Engineering Record paradoxical (line 6,paragraph 3) most probably because

[A] the publication needed drawings that its own staff could not make.

[B] architectural schools offered but did not require engineering design courses for their students.

[C] college students were qualified to make the drawings while practicing engineers were not.

[D] engineering students were not trained to make the type of drawings needed to record the development of their own discipline.

「答案」D

「考点解析」本题是一道细节推导题。题干已经将本题的答案信息确定在第三段的尾句，该句强调的是“engineering students”在教育方面的缺陷，因此本题的正确选项应该是D.如果考生在理解此句时有困难，可借助于本段的主题句(第三段句)来破解本题。第三段句强调的是“engineering curricula”缺乏“design courses”。这句话同样是表明“engineering students”在教育方面的缺失。考生在破解此类题型时一定要善于总结和归纳原文的信息。。