Over the past century, all kinds of unfairness and discrimination have been condemned or made illegal. But one insidious form continues to thrive: alphabetism. This, for those as yet unaware of such a disadvantage, refers to discrimination against those whose surnames begin with a letter in the lower half of the alphabet.
It has long been known that a taxi firm called AAAA cars has a big advantage over Zodiac cars when customers thumb through their phone directories. Less well known is the advantage that Adam Abbott has in life over Zoë Zysman. English names are fairly evenly spread between the halves of the alphabet. Yet a suspiciously large number of top people have surnames beginning with letters between A and K.
Thus the American president and vice-president have surnames starting with B and C respectively; and 26 of George Bush's predecessors (including his father) had surnames in the first half of the alphabet against just 16 in the second half. Even more striking, six of the seven heads of government of the G7 rich countries are alphabetically advantaged (Berlusconi, Blair, Bush, Chirac, Chrétien and Koizumi). The world's three top central bankers (Greenspan, Duisenberg and Hayami) are all close to the top of the alphabet, even if one of them really uses Japanese characters. As are the world's five richest men (Gates, Buffett, Allen, Ellison and Albrecht).
这三个段落中，第一段是结论，而二三段是论据。
A、B、C选项且不去讨论其表述正确与否，只需从In both East and West，Zoë Zysman，companies' names这样的字词中即可判定出其源自论据的出生，他们一开始就注定了不能成为正确答案的宿命，无需步步惊心。
段落性的推理题在按照常规的解题思路完成后，和主题相关选项大于和细节相关的选项，和结论相关的选项大于和论据相关的选项。这就是又一考研的特色。因此在解题的过程中一定要关注观点和结论，和观点表达相关的动词在必杀技一中已经列出。
2006年26题
From the first two paragraphs, we learn that_________.
[A]the townsfolk deny the RSC‘s contribution to the town’s revenue
[B] the actors of the RSC imitate Shakespeare on and off stage
[C] the two branches of the RSC are not on good terms
[D] the townsfolk earn little from tourism
答案为A选项，解题思路就是第一段是事实的论述，而第二段第一句就出现了观点，对应A选项。
2008年37题
We may infer from the second paragraph that____________.
[A] DNA technology has been widely applied to history research
[B] in its early days the U.S. was confronted with delicate situations
[C] historians deliberately made up some stories of Jefferson’s life
[D] political compromises are easily found throughout the U.S. history
答案为B选项，正是对应于历史学家们著作中的结论，而其他几个选项都是从论据入手的，且是错误的表述。
