谷爱凌究竟有多强

献给我们伟大的冠军——谷爱凌！

 

今天疯狂被谷爱凌这个姑娘刷屏，当然，在看了比赛了解她之后，你就会发现是真的值得，因为她确实优秀。

看标题，谷爱凌究竟有多强？由于本人只是一名英语考试培训师，对于冰上的项目实在不懂，没办法对这方面做出评论（但我觉得冬奥金牌和世界纪录肯定是说明了一切），我只能对谷爱凌在英语学习方面有多强给出一个比较客观的评价。

 

首先，哈佛大学的世界排名不必多说，哈佛的录取率也是低得可怕，如果这个年代还有人觉得国外名校是你掏钱就能上的人，那么请退出这篇文章，真的不适合你。因为国外大学的录取规则没办法一两句话就说清楚，因此，我这里不谈那些无法量化的规则，（比如优秀品质，课外活动等。）我只说比较标准化成绩，也就是SAT。

 

首先，科普一下SAT考试，SAT，也称 “美国高考” ，是由美国大学理事会（College Board）主办的一项标准化的、以笔试形式进行的高中毕业生学术能力水平考试。其成绩是世界各国高中毕业生申请美国高等教育院校入学资格及奖学金的重要学术能力参考指标。 

SAT 考试总分为 1600 分，分为阅读（400分）  、文法（400分） 和数学（800分） 三个部分，另有总分为 24 分（阅读理解8分，文章分析8分，英语写作8分）的作文（选考）部分。

 

那么，这个考试难度怎么样？

 

我负责任讲，SAT的绝对难度是远高于托福，雅思等语言类考试，略低于GRE（美国研究生入学考试），但是，对于一个不满18的高中生，SAT绝对地狱级别的考试。

 

我随便选一篇SAT的阅读大家自行感受一下。（没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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

而这种级别的文章，SAT每场都有6篇！（有一篇双篇对比）上面的自然科学类还比小说容易。

谷爱凌的SAT考了多少分？

1580！

这是什么水平？

我再给大家一张图

 

这是SAT高分的分布图。可以看到，超过1450分，就已经领先了99%的考生！

由于美国大学协会（SAT命题机构）没有给出超过1480的具体数据，但是根据我大胆猜测，这个分数，应该是世界前千分之二的水平！

我本人教授了很多年的SAT考试，我的学生有不少其实分数超过1450，也有若干超过1500，但是，像谷爱凌这样的1580，我此生，还没有教出来过！

说到这里，大家应该已经知道谷爱凌的学习优秀程度了吧。

 

所以，一名阳光美少女+一名学霸，一名世界冠军，还是一名爱国者，真想问一句，谷爱凌，你还能再强点吗？

 

拥有那么好背景和天赋的谷爱凌尚且如此努力，你我普通人，是不是更应该奋发呢？

开年了，你的雅思，托福，GRE，GMAT，考研，SAT是不是应该准备起来了呢？

 

自勉，共勉！