2013年5月26日托福阅读机经.docx

2013年5月26日托福考试阅读机经整理by 南京环雅邹中杰综述：本次阅读考试总体难度高于上周考试，很显著的特点在于：素材+结构的双重柔和，即素材有交叉，并且结构上也更加复杂，在接下来的考试中这一趋势是否会有所延续我们将继续关注考试。第一篇主题：Distribution of Plants and Animals本文主要讲解地球上植物之间的相似性要远大于动物。其中包括以下几个原因：原因一是植物很早以前就开始大范围传播，在大陆板块分开之前就分布到各处，而动物出现得较晚；原因二是动物曾经历了多次大灭绝，且之后出现的新物种代替了旧物种与原来很不相同，而植物则很长寿；原因三是动物群不如植物群一样分散广，每一个地方都有特定的动物种类，只有当大陆相连接的时候，动物才能进行传播。植物群分散比较广，并且即便是由于大陆漂移，植物也可以越过海洋进行种子的传播。所以人们能看到各个地方相似的植物群出现。最后转折，在亚洲和非洲两地的动物相似性却很高，是因为当时一度亚非板块相连。解析：在托福阅读考试中其实很难简单如此篇文章这样柔和了动物和植物，并且使用分类结构进行阐述的文章，不过这一现象也折射出托福考试“变难”的趋势，这样的文章明显对考生提出了更高的要求，一方面考生需要具备相关背景知识，另外一方面也需要对文章结构有所了解。下面给出一篇同素材参考范文：A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its “Map of Life,” an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.The demonstration version allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and North American freshwater fish. The database, which continues to expand, already contains hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of the planets diverse flora and fauna.“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Guralnick of the ecology and evolutionary biology department, part of the Map of Life research team. “Such information could be used by any organization that needs to make informed decisions regarding land management, health, conservation and climate change.”The initial version of the map tool being released today is intended to introduce it to the broader public, according to the researchers. It allows users to see several levels of detail for a given species - at its broadest, the type of environment it lives in, and at its finest, specific locations where the species presence has been documented. One function allows users to click a point on the map and generate a list of vertebrate species in the surrounding area. More functions will be added over time, according to the team.“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and the project lead. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”A paper by Jetz, Guralnick and Jana McPherson of the Calgary Zoological Society describing the evolving Map of Life technology tool appeared in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.By highlighting the known abundance and distribution of species, the researchers hope to identify and fill knowledge gaps and also offer a tool for detecting change over time. They expect the map tool will prove useful for professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, conservation organizations and the general public.The team is using information gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involved scientists, conservation organizations and “citizen scientists.” The projects success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs, and subsequent versions of the mapping tool will offer mechanisms for users to supply new or missing information about the distribution and abundance of particular species.Jetz called the Map of Life “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.” The team continues to work on several other tasks and challenges, including who will be contributing data and how information supplied by the contributors will be verified and curated.“A small but powerful next step is to provide a means for anyone, anywhere on the globe to use their mobile devices to instantly pull up animal and plant distributions and even get a realistic assessment on the odds of encountering a particular species of wildlife,” said Guralnick, who also is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.Guralnick said the Map of Life project is following in the footsteps of other knowledge repositories like the GenBank project, a National Institutes of Health-funded effort with a public database of more than 135 million gene sequences from more than 300,000 organisms that allows users to explore genes and genomes using bioinformatics tools. In the biodiversity arena, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Copenhagen has developed an important resource that provides access to more than 300 million records of plant and animal occurrences, which is one of the distributional databases being used by the Map of Life team.The National Science Foundation has provided initial support for the Map of Life project. Other supporters are the Encyclopedia of Life; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, both in Germany.第二篇主题：determining the age of planets and universe 宇宙里面组成的物质都是一样的，形成的时间也比较相仿。科学家发现不同的的星球上留下的遗迹通过科学测量，月球和岩石形成的时间都是一样的，得出结论，所有星球形成时间相仿。地球上有很多水，有腐蚀，不能作为参数进行比较。但是月球和小行星进行比较，目前人类史上没出现小行星撞击地球，但宇宙爆炸产生的小行星碎片已陨石的状态掉落到地球上。解析：对比结构所阐述的天文学素材文章，在这一文章中ETS将宇宙与地球、小行星与大行星进行了很好的对比，对比型结构文章对考生的要求相对较高，一方面需要找到对比的两方面甚至更多方面，另一方面也要注意到素材之间细微的差别，解题过程中分清文章层次和素材分割点是关键。下面给出一篇同素材参考文章：Making a statement about the age of the Universe implies the fundamental assumption that the Universe had a beginning.Although we can easily determine that most constituents of our visible Universe, such as the islands of Hawaii, our Sun, the Earth, the Moon and the stars that we see at night, had a beginning, it is much more difficult to determine if the ensemble of all those things had a starting point in the past. One could imagine that the Universe itself has always been there, but that all of its componentsthe atoms, the planets and the starsgo through a continuous cycle of birth, life and death.Until recently, this view of an eternal universe has dominated the history of philosophy. Today, we talk much about the Big Bang theory, which is a very solid and consistent physical theory of the origin and the evolution of the universe as we now observe it. We forget that for most of human history, an eternal universe was accepted as the most economical way of explaining the Cosmos.Even today there is an independent physical theory of the Universe called the Steady State Universe. This theory, supported by a small minority of astronomers, defends a model of an eternal universe where the well-known expansion of the Universe is countered by the continuous creation of one hydrogen atom per 10,000 cubic meters per year (this is a very small amount of matter) to maintain its average density constant. Hence the Universe should appear the same in all directions (this is isotropy) and at all distances and epochs (this is homogeneity).The idea that the Universe had a beginning is relatively new and quite revolutionary.第三篇主题：agricultural and settlement around the NIle主要讲撒哈拉沙漠和尼罗河对居民的影响。大家都认为尼罗河对于居民的定居是积极意义的，沙漠有着消极的影响。但实际上两个方面是相互影响。在很多年前，当时撒哈拉沙漠还是一片比较富裕的土地，土壤比较适宜，但是随着气候逐渐变干，撒哈拉沙漠已经不适宜人们居住，人们被迫迁移到尼罗河周围，尼罗河那里比较适宜人类的居住，但是大洪水在尼罗河的泛滥导致在溪流边上的人民到达介于河流和沙漠的一片土地上躲避洪水，退却后，人们恢复正常的生活。随着气候的变化，越来越多额游牧主义社群开始定居下来sedentary lifestyle，以庄稼的种植和农业的发展来不断的提供稳定的食物来源，其中谈到非洲农作物源于东亚。解析：这是一篇文章结构和素材都与TPO阅读中“17世纪欧洲经济发展”非常相似的一篇文章，大家可以参考TPO文章对这篇文章做出解析。下面给出一篇同素材参考文章：On the following evening Haschim， the merchant， came to the governors house with a small part of his caravan. A stranger might have taken the mansion for the home of a wealthy country-gentleman rather than the official residence of a high official； for at this hour， after sunset， large herds of beasts and sheep were being driven into the vast court-yard behind the house， surrounded on three sides by out-buildings； half a hundred horses of choice breed came， tied in couples， from the watering-place； and in a well-sanded paddock enclosed by hurdles， slaves， brown and black， were bringing fodder to a large troop of camels.The house itself was well-fitted by its unusually palatial size and antique splendor to be the residence of the emperors viceroy， and the Mukaukas， to whom it all belonged， had in fact held the office for a long time. After the conquest of the country by the Arabs they had left him in possession， and at the present date he managed the affairs of his Egyptian fellow-countrymen， no more in the name of the emperor at Byzantium， but under the authority of the Khaliff at Medina and his great general， Amru. The Moslem conquerors had found him a ready and judicious mediator； while his fellow-Christians and country-men obeyed him as being the noblest and wealthiest of their race and the descendant of ancestors who had enjoyed high distinction even under the Pharaohs.Only the governors residence was Greekor rather Alexandrian-in style； the court-yards and out-buildings on the contrary， looked as though they belonged to some Oriental magnate-to some Erpaha （or prince of a province） as the Mukaukas forefathers had been called， a rank which commanded respect both at court and among