GRE考试当中无论是填空还是阅读部分都要求我们能够准确利用逻辑信号判断信息关系。
今天我们来谈一个重要的逻辑标志词：
even
adv. 甚至，即使
我们在本文中只讨论even作为逻辑连接词的作用，不考虑它作为实词（动词、形容词）的用法，比如我们不考虑它的除了“甚至、即使”以外的语义“平的，均匀的，相等的，偶数的”等作为实词的意思。
一个基本的问题就是，这个逻辑词连接的是两个独立语句的关系，还是连接的是一个独立语句内部各成分之间的关系。
I don’t want to raise children. I don’t even want to be around them.（我不想养小孩。甚至我小孩在我旁边我都不爽。）
I like clothes with bright colors. For example, I like wearing red, orange, yellow, light blue, and sometimes even pink.（我喜欢穿亮色的衣服。比如，我喜欢穿红色的、橙色的、黄色的、浅蓝色的，甚至粉色的衣服。）
例1：
Even if I work harder, I will still fail this exam.（就算我再努力一些，我还是会考不过。）
例2：
Even though I worked very hard, I still failed this exam.（尽管我很努力，但这次考试我还是没过。）
Tips：even if 和 even though的区别
例3：
Her husband is often home late. And even when he comes home early, he barely talks to her. Of course, she wants a divorce.（他老公总很晚回家。而就算他回家早的时候，他也不怎么和她说话。她当然想要离婚了。）
句内：
如果我们单看“And even when he comes home early, he barely talks to her.”这一个句子，even自然和when共同引导了让步状语。
句间：
但如果我们看前一句“Her husband is often home late”和这一整句话共同构建的关系，你会发现这其实仍然是个递进，是在“老公不回家”和“回家了也不说话”两件事情之间构建的递进关系。
“I know I am not working very hard, and I will probably fail this exam. But even if I work harder, I will still fail this exam.”
Even the smartest person in the world cannot solve this problem. (即使是世界上最聪明的人也解决不了这个问题。)
例1
Many scholars have argued that government investment in manufacturing in the southern United States during the Second World War spurred a regional economic boom that lasted into the postwar period. But much of this investment went to specialized plants, many of them unsuitable for postwar production. Large-scale, wartime government funding led to a massive increase in the number and scale of munitions facilities. By the war’s end, 216 munitions establishment costing more than $3.5 billion had been built, many of them located in the south. Indeed, according to one estimate, more than 70 percent of federally financed manufacturing construction capital in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee went into munitions plants.
Even in the northern regions with strong prewar manufacturing economics, these plants were difficult to deal with once the imperative of war had been removed. In the south few industrialists had the capacity or desire to transform these factories to a peacetime function. Accordingly, at war’s end almost all of the southern munitions facilities were shut down, placed on standby, operated at a very low capacity, or converted to nonmanufacturing functions, usually storage. Although some reopened a few years later for use during the Korean War, the impact of the special plants on the South’s postwar economy was marginal at best.
第二段段首的even连接了句内逗号前后两部分，构成了让步，“就算是在北方有着比较好的战前经济，这些工厂在战后都很难处理”，但同时我们应该读出隐含的信息，“那在南方，战前经济比较差，这些工厂肯定难处理”。
例2
Unlike herbivores and omnivores, predators have traditionally been thought not to balance nutrient intake because of the assumption that animal tissue as a food source varies little and is nutritionally balanced. But chemical analysis of invertebrate prey reveals remarkable variation in nutrient composition among species; even within species, nutrient composition may vary considerably. Greenstone suggested that predators may select food items according to their nutrient contents. Jensen et al (2011) have shown experimentally that even sit-and-wait invertebrate predators with limited mobility can work to address nutrient deficiencies. The wolf spider, for instance, has been shown to regulate nutrient intake by extracting more dry mass from a prey item if it contains a higher proportion of a nutrient that was deficient in the previous prey.
这个例子没有任何隐藏信息，所以我们更容易看出来为什么even可以同时构建递进与让步。
这个even作为让步引导词，连接了within species和主句之间的让步关系，“即使是在物种内部，营养组成也会有很大区别。”
但同时，它也构建了分号前后两句平行内容的递进关系，“研究显示，在物种之间有这巨大的营养组成差别；而即使是在物种内部，营养组成也会有很大区别。”
例3
思路
例4
思路
总结