獻給我們偉大的冠軍——谷愛凌！

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今天瘋狂被谷愛凌這個姑娘刷屏，當然，在看了比賽了解她之后，你就會發(fā)現(xiàn)是真的值得，因為她確實優(yōu)秀。

看標題，谷愛凌究竟有多強？由于本人只是一名英語考試培訓(xùn)師，對于冰上的項目實在不懂，沒辦法對這方面做出評論（但我覺得冬奧金牌和世界紀錄肯定是說明了一切），我只能對谷愛凌在英語學(xué)習(xí)方面有多強給出一個比較客觀的評價。

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首先，哈佛大學(xué)的世界排名不必多說，哈佛的錄取率也是低得可怕，如果這個年代還有人覺得國外名校是你掏錢就能上的人，那么請退出這篇文章，真的不適合你。因為國外大學(xué)的錄取規(guī)則沒辦法一兩句話就說清楚，因此，我這里不談那些無法量化的規(guī)則，（比如優(yōu)秀品質(zhì)，課外活動等。）我只說比較標準化成績，也就是SAT。

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首先，科普一下SAT考試，SAT，也稱?“美國高考”?，是由美國大學(xué)理事會（College Board）主辦的一項標準化的、以筆試形式進行的高中畢業(yè)生學(xué)術(shù)能力水平考試。其成績是世界各國高中畢業(yè)生申請美國高等教育院校入學(xué)資格及獎學(xué)金的重要學(xué)術(shù)能力參考指標。?

SAT 考試總分為 1600 分，分為閱讀（400分）??、文法（400分）?和數(shù)學(xué)（800分）?三個部分，另有總分為 24 分（閱讀理解8分，文章分析8分，英語寫作8分）的作文（選考）部分。

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那么，這個考試難度怎么樣？

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我負責(zé)任講，SAT的絕對難度是遠高于托福，雅思等語言類考試，略低于GRE（美國研究生入學(xué)考試），但是，對于一個不滿18的高中生，SAT絕對地獄級別的考試。

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我隨便選一篇SAT的閱讀大家自行感受一下。（沒有耐心的可以只看一段或者往下翻）

THE coffee-berry borer is a pesky beetle. It is thought to destroy $500m-worth of unpicked coffee beans a year, thus diminishing the incomes of some 20m farmers. The borer spends most of its life as a larva, buried inside a coffee berry, feeding on the beans within. To do so, it has to defy the toxic effects of caffeine. This is a substance which, though pleasing to people, is fatal to insects—except, for reasons hitherto unknown, to the coffee-berry borer. But those reasons are unknown no longer. A team of researchers led by Eoin Brodie of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Fernando Vega of the United States Department of Agriculture had a suspicion the answer lay not with the beetle itself, but with the bacteria in its gut. As they outline in Nature Communications, that suspicion has proved correct.

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The team’s hypothesis was that the borer’s gut bacteria are shielding it by eating any caffeine it has ingested before the poison can be absorbed through the insect’s gut wall. Experiments on a laboratory-reared strain of the borer suggested this hypothesis was probably true. Initially, the larvae’s droppings were caffeine-free. When the lab-rear insects were dosed with antibiotics, this changed. Caffeine started appearing in their droppings, and the animals themselves began, as it were, dropping off the perch. Over the course of an experiment lasting 44 days after their gut shad been sterilized (a period that let the insects complete an entire lifecycle of egg, larva, pupa and adult), the population of the experimental colonies fell by 95%—and even those larvae that did not die had trouble updating. Clearly, immunity to caffeine was being conferred by bacteria. The question was, which ones?

To answer that, Dr Brodie and Dr Vega turned to wild beetles. They collected samples from seven coffee-growing countries and combed through the insects’ gut floras, looking for features in common. By constructing what was, in effect, a Venn diagram of microbes from these populations, and also those from their lab-bred strain, they were able to focus on the bacterial species found in all of them.

They tried growing each of these on a medium whose only source of carbon and nitrogen for metabolism was caffeine. Some of the bugs were able to survive on this diet, others were not. Of the survivors, the most abundant in beetle guts was Pseudomonas fulva. This species, a genetic analysis showed, is blessed with an enzyme called caffeine demethylase, which converts caffeine into something that can be dealt with by normal metabolic enzymes.

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Kill P. fulva, then, and you would probably kill the borer. But that is easier said than done. Even if spraying coffee plantations with antibiotics were feasible and would do the job (by no means certain, for the larvae would have to ingest sufficient antibiotics for the purpose), it would be undesirable. The profligate use of antibiotics encourages resistance, thus making them less effective for saving human lives.

There might, though, be another way of getting at P.fulva. This would be to craft a type of virus, known as a bacteriophage, specific to the bug—an approach already being investigated for the treatment of human illness caused by a different species of Pseudomonas.

In practice, more than one type of phage would probably be needed, for if P. fulva were knocked out, another anothercaffeine-consuming bacterium in the beetle’s gut might end up replacing it. But, regardless of the details, this study has introduced a novel way of thinking about pest control. Many plants use poisons to protect themselves from insects. Sometimes, such plants are crops. Being able to circumvent these natural insecticides is an important part of becoming abundant enough to constitute a pest. It is possible other agronomists who have been seeking to understand how critters do this have been looking in the wrong place—ie, at the critters themselves, rather than among the bacteria in their guts.

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而這種級別的文章，SAT每場都有6篇?。ㄓ幸黄p篇對比）上面的自然科學(xué)類還比小說容易。

谷愛凌的SAT考了多少分？

1580！

這是什么水平？

我再給大家一張圖

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這是SAT高分的分布圖?？梢钥吹?，超過1450分，就已經(jīng)領(lǐng)先了99%的考生！

由于美國大學(xué)協(xié)會（SAT命題機構(gòu)）沒有給出超過1480的具體數(shù)據(jù)，但是根據(jù)我大膽猜測，這個分數(shù)，應(yīng)該是世界前千分之二的水平！

我本人教授了很多年的SAT考試，我的學(xué)生有不少其實分數(shù)超過1450，也有若干超過1500，但是，像谷愛凌這樣的1580，我此生，還沒有教出來過！

說到這里，大家應(yīng)該已經(jīng)知道谷愛凌的學(xué)習(xí)優(yōu)秀程度了吧。

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所以，一名陽光美少女+一名學(xué)霸，一名世界冠軍，還是一名愛國者，真想問一句，谷愛凌，你還能再強點嗎？

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擁有那么好背景和天賦的谷愛凌尚且如此努力，你我普通人，是不是更應(yīng)該奮發(fā)呢？

開年了，你的雅思，托福，GRE，GMAT，考研，SAT是不是應(yīng)該準備起來了呢？

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自勉，共勉！