今天小编给大家带来的是GRE阅读解释之Medium passage，希望对大家有所帮助。
A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in mapmaking and cartographic scholarship. Since nineteenth century cartographers, for instance, understood themselves as technicians who did not care about visual effects, while others saw themselves as landscape painters. That dichotomy structured the discipline of the history of cartography. Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called “the Old is Beautiful Paradigm,” scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800, marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age. Early mapmaking was considered art while modern cartography was located within the realm of engineering utility. Alpers, however, has argued that this boundary would have puzzled mapmakers in the seventeenth century, because they considered themselves to be visual engineers.
全文包括两个观点：
一是美学和技术是有界限的；
二是Alpers认为对17世纪的mapmaker来说并没有这样的界限。
1. According to the passage, Alpers would say that the assumptions underlying the “paradigm” wereA. inconsistent with the way some mapmakers prior to 1800 understand their own workB. dependent on a seventeenth-century conception of mapmaking visual engineering
C. unconcerned with the difference between the aesthetic and technical questions of mapmakingD. insensitive to divisions among cartographers working in the period after 1800E. supported by the demonstrable technical superiority of mapmaking made after 1800
答案：A
解析：paradigm代表前一种观点，Alpers代表第二种观点，因此选A，Alpers认为paradigm包含的观点和17世纪的mapmaker不一样。

2. It can be inferred from the passage that, beginning in the 1980s, historians of cartography
A. placed greater emphasis on the beauty of maps made after 1800B. expanded their range of study to include more material created after 1800C. grew more sensitive to the way mapmakers prior to 1800 conceived of their work
D. came to see the visual details of maps as aesthetic objects rather than practical cartographic aidsE. reduced the attention they paid to the technical aspects of mapmaking
答案：B
审题重点：beginning in the 1980s
答案句：Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called “the Old is Beautiful Paradigm,” scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800, marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age.
解析：注意until表示up to，后面的句子讲述的是1980s前的事，而题目问1980s后的事，要取反。
小结：文章的核心就是两个不同的观点，头一题考查两个观点的碰撞（A如何看B0，第二题定位不难，着重考until的意思，也是一个常见的GRE阅读考点。