GRE真题讲解“Hughes的blue poetry究竟属于哪一类别？”
“Blues is for singing,” writes folk musicologist Paul Oliver, and “is not a form of folk song that stands up particularly well when written down.” A poet who wants to write blues can attempt to avoid this problem by poeticizing the form—but literary blues tend to read like bad poetry rather than like refined folk song. For Oliver, the true spirit of the blues inevitably eludes the self-conscious imitator. However, Langston Hughes, the first writer to grapple with these difficulties of blue poetry, in fact succeeded in producing poems that capture the quality of genuine, performed blues while remaining effective as poems.In inventing blues poetry, Hughes solved two problems: first, how to write blues lyrics in such a way that they work on the printed page, and second, how to exploit the blues form poetically without losing all sense of authenticity. <长阅读的第一段使用我们课上所说的结构性阅读法阅读（红线内容为必读内容）。根据划线内容，我们掌握的信息是：blue poetry的书写存在一定难度，而Hughes是第一位作家解决了这些困难。他创造出了一种诗歌风格，不仅可以演绎出blue poetry,而且还可以保持诗歌本身的特质。同时，下文紧接着阐述他的诗歌解决的两个问题。一般来说长阅读的第一段都会体现出全文话题，所以在这里我们知道，下文肯定是围绕Langton Hughes的blue poetry的具体内容进行展开。
There are many styles of blues, but the distinction of importance to Hughes is between the genres referred to as “folk blues” and “classic blues.” Folk blues and classic blues are distinguished from one another by differences in performers (local talents versus touring professionals), patronage (local community versus mass audience), creation (improvised versus composed), and transmission (oral versus written). It has been a commonplace among critics that Hughes adopted the classic blues as the primary model for his blues poetry, and that he writes his best blues poetry when he tries least to imitate the folk blues. In this view, Hughes’ attempts to imitate the folk blues are too self-conscious, too determined to romanticize the African American experience, too intent on reproducing what he takes to be the quaint humor and na?ve simplicity of the folk blues to be successful. <我们在阅读中间段落时要注意把握其与第一段的关系，这一段有两个重点信息：1. 区分“folk blues”和“classic blues”，从表演者、观看者、创造方式和呈现方式四个角度去呈现二者的不同点；2. 评论家普遍认为Hughes主要是采取classic blues作为诗歌的书写方法（注：最后一句话明显是对上一句的进一步解释说明，所以在考试时可以忽略不读，考生们在考试时一定要时刻注意把握句句关系）。>
But a more realistic view is that by conveying his perceptions as a folk artist ought to—through an accumulation of details over the span of his blues oeuvre, rather than by overloading each poem with quaintness and naivety–Hughes made his most important contributions to the genre. His blues poems are in fact closer stylistically to the folk blues on which he modeled them than to the cultivated classic blues. Arnold Rampersad has observed that virtually all of the poems in the 1927 collection in which Hughes essentially originated blues poetry fall deliberatively within the “range of utterance” of common folk. This surely applies to “Young Gal’s Blues,” in which Hughes avoids the conventionally “ poetic” language and images that the subjects of death and love sometimes elicit in his ordinary lyric poetry. To see what Hughes’ blues poetry might have been like if he had truly adopted the classic blues as his model, one need only look to “Golden Brown Blues,” a song lyric Hughes wrote for composer W.C. Handy. Its images, allusions, and diction are conspicuously remote from the common “range of utterance.”<最后一段的的转折词“But”很明显的体现出对第二段内容的反驳，即从现实的观点来看，Hughes的诗歌风格更接近于“folk blues”，以及原因。紧接着后文通过对比Hughes的两部作品——“Young Gal’s Blues” 和 “Golden Brown Blues”，来呈现“folk”和“classic”两种诗歌类型的差异性 。>
1. The primary purpose of the passage is to
这篇文章主要谈论话题是Hughes的blue poetry，下文基于他的诗歌风格进行讨论，传统上认为他的诗歌风格主要是“classic blue”，但是现实的观点确认为他的诗歌风格更偏于“folk blue”。根据这些信息我们来看一些其主旨题，AB两个选项的内容并没有涉及到Hughes，主体话题信息不一致，直接排除。CD中的colloquial和derivative这两个内容我们在结构性阅读时并没有读到，排除。选项E中的内容符合我们刚刚总结的内容，故选E。
A. describe the influence of folk and classic blues on blues poetry
B. analyze the effect of African American culture on blues poetry
C. demonstrate that the language used in Hughes’ blues poetry is colloquial
D. defend Hughes’ blues poetry against criticism that it is derivative
E. refute an accepted view of Hughes’ blues poetry style
2. The author of the passage uses the highlighted quotation primarily to
该题是一道作者细节目的题，考察的是句子本身的功能性。该黑体字引出了一个关于写blues的“difficulty”，紧接着后文围绕这种“difficulty”展开，进而引出Hughes的诗歌（Hughes解决关于书写blue poetry的困难点）。因此，该题正确答案为B。
A. indicate how blues poetry should be performed
B. highlight the difficulties faced by writers of blues poetry
C. support the idea that blues poetry is a genre doomed to fail
D. illustrate the obstacles that blues poetry is unable to overcome
E. suggest that written forms of blues are less authentic than sung blues
3. It can be inferred from the passage that, as compared with the language of “Golden Brown Blues,” the language of “Young Gal’s Blues” is
该题是一道比较推理考点题，遇到这类考点时，大家要注意比较对象的特点，而这题考察的是 “Young Gal’s Blues”和“Golden Brown Blues,” 的差异性。根据最后一段内容可知，“Young Gal’s Blues”是一种“range of utterance” of common folk，即是一名民间艺术的形式；而“Golden Brown Blues,” 更接近classic blues，因此该题的正确答案是A，“colloquial”意为“通俗的”、“口语的”，符合folk blues的特点。
A. more colloquial
B. more melodious
C. marked by more allusions
D. characterized by more conventional imagery
E. more typical of classic blues song lyrics
4. According to the passage, Hughes’ blues poetry and classic blues are similar in which of the following ways?
这题难度较大，很多学生一开始会出现定位不准确的情况。这题题干要求我们去找出Hughes’ blues poetry和classic blues的共性。很多同学会一开始就定位到文中第二段的信息，但是第二段的内容主要是关于folk blues和classic blues的差异性，但是这道题中涉及的对象是Hughes’ blues poetry和classic blues的共性。结合第二段的内容我们可知，classic blues的特点有“touring professionals”、“mass audience”、“composed”和“oral”；而Hughes诗歌的特点在第一段最后有体现，“write blues lyrics in such a way …… losing all sense of authenticity.”，即在纸上书写和诗歌化地书写blues，且保留真实性。因此，这二者的共性在于，都可以在纸上书写，故选择B选项。
A. Both are improvised
B. Both are written down
C. Both are intended for the same audience
D. Neither uses colloquial language
E. Neither is professionally performed
虽然长阅读在真正考试中占比不算大，也是很多同学会选择“放弃”的一项内容，但是对于目标分在325以上的同学来说，攻克长阅读还是非常重要的。对于大部分GRE考生来看，GRE长阅读的难点在于内容多、定位难、时间不够用。因此，对于长阅读我们要不断练习课上所说的“结构性阅读变形法”，以及学会快速理清题干中的定位信息和解题要求，确保定位的准确性，以节省不必要的阅读时间，保证可以在规定的时间内完成该类题型的解题。
