想要在托福阅读考试中获得高分，平时就要多阅读一些英语类的文章，不断提高理解能力，增加背景知识。今天小编为大家带来的是一篇关于“博客”的托福阅读文章，并对文章进行了详细的分析，大家一起来学习一下吧。
内容提要：
1. 背景介绍(关于“博客”和“Six Apart”公司)
2. 重点词汇
3. 文章分析(重要词汇+语法点)
4. 语法学习(现在完成时+过去完成时)
5. 习题讲解(词汇题+句子插入题)
1. 背景介绍
John Barger在1997年首先提出“Blog(博客)”这个名词，随后博客得以兴起和发展。
Mena Trott和Ben在2001年创办“Six Apart”公司，成为美国博客先驱。
“Six Apart”旗舰产品——Movable Type & TypePad，成为世界上最受欢迎的博客出版平台。
2010年9月22日，“Six Apart”被美国富媒体广告网络Video Egg收购，更名为“Say Media”。
2. 重点词汇
Banjo 班卓琴
under-employed 待业的
whim 奇想，怪念头，一时兴致
feminist 女权主义者
bully 恐吓，威胁
livid 暴怒的，苍白的
insight 洞察力
mass media 大众媒体
intimate 私人的，亲密的
unpretentious 不炫耀的，朴实的
whizzy 高科技的
wheeze 喘息，喘息声
3. 文章分析
The Universal Diarist
IT ALL began five years ago with a blog entry about a banjo. Mena Trott had recently graduated as an English major from college and, at 23, was living as an under-employed designer with her husband Ben in San Francisco, passing her time by keeping a personal online diary. Called Dollarshort, it was a blog about her childhood, her pets and that sort of thing. One day, on a girly whim[1], she wrote that she wanted to buy a banjo but that her husband, ever the “tyrant”, wouldn't let her. Mena's friends and family, knowing that “Ben is the sweetest guy in the world”, recognised the humour, says Ms Trott. But all sorts of strangers suddenly blogged back with angry feminist advice, advising her to get a separate bank account, to tell off her bullying husband, and even to leave him. Ms Trott was livid. “Why can't people take a joke, and who are these people anyway?” she wondered.
故事要从五年前一篇关于班卓琴的博客文章说起。当时Mena Trott刚从大学英语专业毕业，与她的丈夫Ben一起住在旧金山。她的职业是一名设计师，但没多少活可干，就靠在网上写日记打发时光。那个名叫Dollarshort的博客记载了她的童年，她的宠物，等等不一而足。有一天，她突然萌生了一个孩子气的念头，就在日记中说她想买一把班卓琴，可她那位素来“专制”的丈夫不让她买。Trott女士说，她的亲朋好友都知道“Ben是世界上最可爱的小伙子”，所以一眼就看出来她这是在开玩笑。但是形形色色的陌生人却纷纷在她的博客中留言，愤怒地表示男女应该平等，有的建议她单独设立一个银行账户，有的让她教训一下她那横行霸道的丈夫，还有的甚至劝她离婚。Trott女士气不打一处来。她心想：“为什么人们看不出来这是玩笑呢?这都是些什么人呢?”
It was the seed of a profound insight: that the era of mass media was ending and a new era of “intimate media” had begun. Mr Trott had written some software to make it easier for his wife to update her blog, and they realised that other people might find it useful too. It was an instant success upon its release onto the internet in 2001, and the Trotts have since built their company, called Six Apart (because their birthdays are six days apart), into the largest independent provider of blogging tools and hosting services. Ms Trott is Six Apart's president and public face, while Mr Trott, who is shy and retiring, runs the technical side of things and seasoned executives handle the management. Six Apart's flagship products, Movable Type and TypePad, are popular among “power bloggers” with large audiences, and its third product, LiveJournal, is big among teenage girls who blog for their friends. Collectively, Six Apart's products are used by over 30m bloggers around the world.
从此她便开始考虑一个更深层次的问题——大众传媒时代正渐渐远去，新的“私人传媒”时代来临了。为便于妻子更新博客，Trott先生编写了一款软件。他们意识到其他人也会觉得这款软件有用。2001年，这款软件在网上发布并风靡一时。如今，Trott夫妇已经将他们的Six Apart(因为他俩的生日正好相差6天)建设成为博客工具和网络空间租用服务最大的独立供应商。Trott女士Six Apart公司的总裁，负责公司的对外事务，而Trott先生比较腼腆，不善交际，因此负责公司技术层面的工作。公司的运营则由经验丰富的管理人员负责。Six Apart的主打产品Movable Type和TypePad在拥有大量读者的“有影响力的博客作家”中颇受欢迎，而其第三种产品LiveJournal则十分受那些专为朋友写博客的少女们的青睐。全球总共有3000多万博客使用Six Apart的产品。
These days, however, the Trotts are most excited about their newest product, Vox, which was launched last month. For if a blogging service can have a personality, then Vox has Ms Trott's. Like Ms Trott, Vox is unpretentious and accessible. By contrast with rival services, users need not worry about having to understand technical matters, such as the HTML formatting language in which web pages are encoded, in order to incorporate whizzy features into their blogs. They can upload pictures, video clips and songs with just a few clicks on a simple, colour-coded page. Also like Ms Trott, Vox celebrates the frivolous and mundane. Much of Ms Trott's personal blog, VoxTrott, is devoted to images of her beloved dog Maddy, while Mr Trott, a dilettante cook, likes to post “disgusting pictures of good food” on his blog. Many ordinary people are scared of blogging because they feel that they have nothing to say, says Ms Trott. So her message is that “mundane is interesting; it's OK to talk about your sandwich”. To a handful of people in the world it may mean a lot.
然而，这几天让Trott夫妇感到兴奋之至的是他们上个月发布的最新产品——Vox。假如说博客服务可以个性化的话，那么Vox恰好就体现了Trott女士的个性。跟她一样，Vox朴实无华，简单易懂。相比行业对手的服务系统，Vox的用户根本不用掌握复杂的技术(如网页编码用的HTML格式语言)就可以把博客装点得精美且富有特色。他们只需要在一个简洁的用色彩编码的网页上点击几下，就能够上传图片、视频片段和歌曲。还有跟Trott女士一样的是，Vox不放过平凡生活中的一点一滴。Trott女士个人博客VoxTrott中有许多其爱犬Maddy的照片，而对厨艺半懂不懂的Trott先生则喜欢在他的博客中贴一些“令人作呕的美食图片”。Trott女士说，一般人很多都由于觉得无话可说而害怕写博客。因此，她主张“平凡的就是有趣的，就算是谈谈三明治也无妨”。对世界上少数人而言，这也许意味深长。
The other thing that keeps many people from blogging is fear for their privacy, she thinks. Hence the third and most important characteristic of Vox. It is intimate. For every item on Vox—a text paragraph, a photo, a link—bloggers can determine if it is to be public or private and, if it is private, exactly who can see it. Ms Trott, for instance, keeps one part of VoxTrott for communicating only with her mother, who has an insatiable appetite for information about certain minutiae of Ms Trott's life. She also has a daily “Yay Me Update” just for herself, in which she uploads self-portraits from her mobile phone in order to preserve a chronicle of her life for her descendants—uninterrupted except for that time when she gained a bit more weight than she cared to commit to memory and conveniently forgot to post for a few days.
在她看来，许多人远离博客的另一个原因是他们对隐私问题的担心。由是就要说到Vox的第三个特点，同时也是最重要的一个特点，那就是它绝对私密。针对Vox上的每一个条目——一个段落，一张照片，一个链接，博客作家都可以决定是公开还是保密;如若公开，还可以确切到允许哪些人浏览。例如，Trott女士的博客中有一部分内容是仅供她与母亲进行交流的，母亲对她生活的关怀无微不至。她还建立了一个完全属于她私人空间的“Yay Me Update”栏目，把手机中的自拍照上传到那里，目的就是为了给后人留存一段自己生活的记忆。更新几乎没有间断过，只有在她长胖了一点时，她不愿意把那个样子存入记忆，因此就借口忘记而连续几天都不更新了。
But despite its homely origins Six Apart is ultimately a business, so somewhere in this vision there must be money. The daunting challenge it faces is to“monetise”the product without ruining the feeling of intimacy for its users. Like most online media, Vox is funded by advertising, but “the advertising is so subtle that a lot of users don't even know where it is,” says Andrew Anker, the product manager for Vox. A blogger might, for instance, write about her favourite novels and include a link to the books on Amazon, a big online retailer. Within a small social circle, such personal recommendations are a powerful form of marketing. If somebody clicks on these links, lands on Amazon's website and completes a purchase, Amazon will share 7% of the proceeds with Six Apart. Similar arrangements exist with an online video service, and Mr Anker hopes to add deals with online music stores and other partners in future.
虽然Six Apart公司源于家常生活，但它毕竟是一个企业，因而就必定涉及到钱的问题。它现在面对的严峻挑战就是，如何在不破坏其与用户之间亲密关系的前提下，实现产品的“货币化”。Vox与大多数网络传媒一样通过广告获取资金。但是Vox产品经理Andrew Anker说：“广告太不起眼了，好多用户连广告在哪儿都不知道。”比如说，某个博客作者在博客中介绍她喜欢的小说，并加入这些小说指向Amazon网站(一个大型的在线零售商)的链接。这种个人推荐在一个小型的社交圈内可以是一种有力的促销方式。如果有人点击这些链接，进入Amazon网站再买一样东西，Six Apart公司就可以按7%的比例从Amazon利润中提成。类似协议也见于在线视频服务。Anker希望今后与一些在线音乐商店及其它合伙人也开展类似合作。
4. 语法学习
(1)现在完成时
过去发生并且已经完成的动作对现在造成影响或产生后果，过去某一时间开始并一直持续到现在并有可能还会持续的动作或状态。
结构：主语+have done/have been doing
例1：It has been raining since this morning.
例2：I have never been in Beijing for more than six years.
(2)过去完成时
表示在过去某一时刻或动作以前完成了的动作，即发生在“过去的过去”。
结构：主语+had done
例1：I had been at the bus stop for 20 minutes when a bus finally came.
例2：By nine o'clock last night, we had got 200 pictures from the spaceship.
例3：The era of mass media was ending and a new era of "intimate media" had begun.
5. 习题讲解
(1)词汇题
例1：While Mr. Trott, who is shy and retiring, runs the technical side and seasoned executives handle the management.
The word seasoned in the passage is closest in meaning to
A. Periodic
B. Well-known
C. Experienced
D. Impatient
解析：文中的“seasoned”为分词形式，进而我们判断，它是一个形容词，在这里修饰“executives”。根据文章内容，从感情色彩上来讲，这个词应该是一个褒义词。选项D(Impatient没耐心的)不正确，公司是不会雇佣一个没耐心的高管的;选项B(well-known著名的)也没有必要;选项A(periodic周期的)在搭配上也不合适;因此正确答案就是C选项experienced(经验丰富的)。
例2：To incorporate whizzy features into their blogs, they can upload pictures, video clips and songs with just a few clicks on a simple, color-coded page.
The word incorporate in the passage is closest in meaning to
A. Include
B. Obtain
C. Increase
D. Remove
解析：我们可以通过后面的“they can upload pictures, video clips and songs”我们可以知道，这应该是它的一种特色，也就是前面所说的“whizzy features”。这时我们可以把“incorporate…into…”理解成“include(把这些特点包含进去)”。
(2)句子插入题
★Six Apart’s flagship products, Movable Type and TypePad, are popular among "power bloggers" with large audiences. ★Its third product, Live Journal, is big among teenage girls who blog for their friends. These days, however, the Trotts are most exi about their newest product, Vox, which was launched last month. ★For if a blogging service can have a personality, and then Vox has Ms Trott’s.
Collectively, Six Apart's products are used by 30m bloggers around the world.
解析：解答句子插入题，首先我们要观察一下被插入的句子中有没有代词。如果有代词，能够找到它相应的指代内容，那么这道题就变容易了。如果没有代词，我们就看一下句子中是否包含一些逻辑关系词。
这道题中的被插入句中虽然没有代词，但却有一个副词“Collectively(集体地，共同地)，”结合句子内容，这句话应该是总结性的一句话放在句尾去说的。据此分析，在这句话之前应该提到过“Six Apart”的一些产品。回到原文，首先第一个星号的位置不能填，排除。然后通过阅读发现后面都是在讲公司的产品，但是第三个星号后面的句子中出现了转折词“however”，说明后面和前面是在介绍不同的产品，因此把插入句放在第三个星号的位置比较合适。
以上就是小编为大家带来的英语阅读文章分析，希望能给考生的学习带来帮助。最后，小编祝愿各位考生在托福考试中取得好成绩!
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