对于想要提升英语阅读理解能力的人来说，练习是提高与巩固的不二法门，下面小编提供一篇公共英语五级阅读文章给大家，希望对大家有所帮助。
Statistics
There were two widely divergent influences on the early development of statistical methods. Statistics had a mother who was dedicated to keeping orderly records of governmental units (state and statistics come from the same Latin root status) and a gentlemanly gambling father who relied on mathematics to increase his skill at playing the odds in games of chance. The influence of the mother on the offspring, statistics, is represented by counting, measuring, describing, tabulating, ordering, and the taking of censuses —— all of which led to modern descriptive statistics. From the influence of the father came modern inferential statistics, which is based squarely on theories of probability.
Descriptive statistics involves tabulating, depicting and describing collections of data. These data may be quantitative such as measures of height, intelligence or grade level —— variables that are characterized by an underlying continuum —— or the data may represent qualitative variables, such as sex, college major or personality type. Large masses of data must generally undergo a process of summarization or reduction before they are comprehensible. Descriptive statistics is a tool for describing or summarizing or reducing to comprehensible form the properties of an otherwise unwieldy mass of data.
Inferential statistics is a formalized body of methods for solving another class of problems that present great difficulties for the unaided human mind. This general class of problems characteristically involve attempts to make predictions using a sample of observations. For example, a school superintendent wishes to determine the proportion of children in a large school system who come to school without breakfast, have been vaccinated for flu, or whatever. Having a little knowledge of statistics, the superintendent would know that it is unnecessary and inefficient to question each child: the proportion for the entire district could be estimated fairly accurately from a sample of as few as 100 children. Thus, the purpose of inferential statistics is to predict or estimate characteristics of a population from a knowledge of the characteristics of only a sample of the population.
(1)做词汇问题应注意以下3点：
①一个单词可有不同的意思，而选项常用与上下文语境不符的词义来迷惑考生。
②选项中有时会出现文章中的一个词或短语，由于这个词或短语与所考词汇相近，有可能被当做所考词汇的定义。
③还有一些选项由于拼写与所考词汇相似，易迷惑考生。
(2)回答主题类问题时可采用略读法，先读首段、末段及每个段落的第一个句子。对于这类问题应注意把握全文的内容，而不应以某个段落为依据做出选择。选好答案后应看看它是否与文章中的每一段落都有联系。若该选项与文中某一段落毫不相干，便表明选项不正确。
(3)回答有关文章细节的问题时可采取查读法。在查读的同时，要默默地重复所寻找的细节。这种重复可加强视觉感知效果，更快捷、有效地找到所寻求的信息。
(4)回答推断性问题时考生应依据文章所讲的内容，利用推理的.方法做出合理的选择。这类问题难就难在考生无法直接从文章中找出考题的答案，而必须在完全理解文章的基础上，悟出其中隐含的意思。
回答这类问题时，往往需要利用常识、经验及文章中的观点和内容进行逻辑推理。关联词、带有感情色彩的形容词或副词常常是一些有助于考生进行推理的语境线索。
