對於想要提升英語閱讀理解能力的人來說，練習是提高與鞏固的不二法門，下面小編提供一篇公共英語五級閱讀文章給大家，希望對大家有所幫助。
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.
附：公共英語五級閱讀理解有什麼解題技巧?
(1)做詞彙問題應注意以下3點：
①一個單詞可有不同的意思，而選項常用與上下文語境不符的詞義來迷惑考生。
②選項中有時會出現文章中的一個詞或短語，由於這個詞或短語與所考詞彙相近，有可能被當做所考詞彙的定義。
③還有一些選項由於拼寫與所考詞彙相似，易迷惑考生。
(2)回答主題類問題時可採用略讀法，先讀首段、末段及每個段落的第一個句子。對於這類問題應注意把握全文的內容，而不應以某個段落為依據做出選擇。選好答案後應看看它是否與文章中的每一段落都有聯絡。若該選項與文中某一段落毫不相干，便表明選項不正確。
(3)回答有關文章細節的問題時可採取查讀法。在查讀的同時，要默默地重複所尋找的細節。這種重複可加強視覺感知效果，更快捷、有效地找到所尋求的資訊。
(4)回答推斷性問題時考生應依據文章所講的內容，利用推理的.方法做出合理的選擇。這類問題難就難在考生無法直接從文章中找出考題的答案，而必須在完全理解文章的基礎上，悟出其中隱含的意思。
回答這類問題時，往往需要利用常識、經驗及文章中的觀點和內容進行邏輯推理。關聯詞、帶有感情色彩的形容詞或副詞常常是一些有助於考生進行推理的語境線索。
