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| 考试日期 | 2012.06.09 |
| Passage 1 | |
| Title: | 罐头的发展 和 铁路的发展 |
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| 大致内容 | 有罐头技术的普及。刚开始的时候罐头刚发明，很多人不买账，因为价格太贵了而且不好打开，要用工具打开（有题），后来价格降低了，大家就接受了。后来说到railway, 交通运输的发展，当铁路通到某处（Chicago等）的时候，它们代替了原来的一些东西。 英文原文阅读： 【老托福 96-01】类似保鲜技术的发展 Aside from perpetuating itself, thesolepurpose of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is to "foster, assist and sustain an interest" in literature, music, and art. This it does by enthusiastically handing out money. Annual cash awards are given to deserving artists in various categories of creativity: architecture, musical composition, theater, novels, serious poetry, light verse, painting, sculpture. One awardsubsidizesa promising American writer's visit to Rome. There is even an award for a very good work of fiction that failed commercially—once won by the young John Updike forThe Poorhouse Fairand, more recently, by Alice Walker forIn Love and TroubleThe awards and prizes total about $750,000 a year, but most of them range in size from $5,000 to $12,500, a welcome sum to many young practitioners whose work may not bring in that much money in a year. One of the advantages of the awards is thatmanygo to the struggling artists, rather than to those who are already successful. Members of the Academy and Institute are not eligible for any cash prizes. Anotheradvantage is that, unlike the National Endowment for the Arts or similar institutions throughout the world, there is no government money involved. Awards are made by committee. Each of the three departments—Literature (120 members), Art (83), Music (47)—has a committee dealing with its own field. Committee membershiprotatesevery year, so that new voices and opinions are constantly heard. The most financially rewarding of all the Academy-Institute awards are the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings. Harold Strauss, a devoted editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publishing house, and Mildred Strauss, his wife, were wealthy and childless. They left the Academy-Institute a unique bequest: for five consecutive years, two distinguished (and financially needy) writers would receive enough money sotheycould devote themselves entirely to "prose literature" (no plays, no poetry, and no paying job that might distract). In 1983, the first Strauss Livings of $35,000 a year went to short-story writer Raymond Carver and novelist-essayist Cynthia Ozick. By 1988, the fund had grown enough so that two winners, novelists Diane Johnson and Robert Stone, each got $50,000 a year for five years. 【98-10】美国铁路发展类似文章 Railroads reshaped the North American environment and reoriented North American behavior. "In a quarter of a century", claimed the Omaha Daily Republican in 1883, "they have made the people of the United States homogeneous, breaking through the peculiarities and provincialisms which marked separate and unmingling sections." The railroad simultaneously stripped the landscape of the natural resources, made velocity of transport and economy of scale necessary parts of industrial production, and carried consumer goods to households;itdispatched immigrants to unsettled places,drewemigrants away from farms and villages to cities, and sent men and guns to battle. It standardized time and travel, seeking toannihilatedistance and space by allowing movement at any time and in any season or type of weather. In its grand and impressive terminals and stations, architects recreated historic Roman temples and public baths, French chateaus and Italian bell towers-edifices that people used as stages for many of everyday life's high emotions: meeting and parting, waiting and worrying, planning new starts or coming home. Passenger terminals, like the luxury express trains that hurled people over spots, spotlight the romance of railroading. (The twentieth-Century Limited sped between Chicago and New York in twenty hours by 1915). Equally important to everyday life were the slow freight trans chugging through industrial zones, the morning and evening commuter locals shuttling back ions and urban terminals, and the incessant comings and goings that occurred in the classifications, or switching, yards.Moreover, in addition to its being a transportation pathway equipped with a mammoth physical plant of tracks signals, crossings, bridges, and junctions, plus telegraph and telephone lines the railroad nurtured factory complexes, coat piles, warehouses, and generating stations, forming along its right-of-way what hasaptlybeen called "the metropolitan corridor" of the American landscape. |
| Passage 2 | |
| Title: | 非洲人的服饰 |
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| 大致内容 | 本篇讲非洲人的服饰，比较容易，从服饰起源，意义，对现在的影响几个方面讨论。 |
| Passage 3 | |
| Title: | 农业的起源 |
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| 大致内容 | 讲农业的起源应该是灌溉。第一段说四大文明都是发源于灌溉，第一段有一个题，跟几个文明有关但是记不真切了。第二段提到一个人写的一本书，目的是引出下文（有题），下边大半篇都在说这本书。书中说，古时代距离河较近的方便灌溉，就有更多的财富（有题），因此会有贫富差距；后来人们想办法建河道引水灌溉，后来还促进了army的产生，因为要保护河道不被破坏（有题）。后来说这本书虽然至今都有影响，但是有一些逻辑上的错误（有题，是最后一段还是倒数第二段的开头，改写），然后阐述它的错误。最后说但是现在因为缺乏具体的事实证据，也不能说它真的就是错误的。 英文原文阅读： 【老托福2003-10】Both in what is now the eastern and the southwestern United States, the peoples of the Archaic era (8,000-1,000 B.C) were, in a way, already adapted to beginnings of cultivation through their intensive gathering and processing of wild plant foods. In both areas, there was a well-established ground stone tool technology, a method of pounding and grinding nuts and other plant foods, that could be adapted to newly cultivated foods. By the end of the Archaic era, people in eastern North America had domesticated certain native plants, including sunflowers; weeds called goosefoot, sumpweed, or marsh elder; and squash or gourds of some kind. These provided seeds that were important sources of carbohydrates and fat in the diet. The earliest cultivation seems to have taken place along the river valleys of the Midwest and the Southeast, with experimentation beginning as early as 7,000 years ago and domestication beginning 4,000 to 2,000 years ago. Although the term “Neolithic” is not used in North American prehistory,thesewere the first steps toward the same major subsistence changes that took place during the Neolithic (8,000-2,000 B.C.) period elsewhere in the world. Archaeologists debate the reasons for beginning cultivation in the eastern part of the continent. Although population and sedentary living were increasing at the time, there is little evidence that people lackedadequatewild food resources; the newly domesticated foods supplemented a continuing mixed subsistence of hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants, Increasing predictability of food supplies may have been a motive. It has been suggested that some early cultivation was for medicinal and ceremonial plantsrather thanfor food. One archaeologist has pointed out that the early domesticated plants were all weedy species that do well in open, disturbed habitats, the kind that would form around human settlements where people cut down trees, trample the ground, deposit trash, and dig holes. It has been suggested that sunflower,sumpweed, and other plants almost domesticated themselves, that is, theythrivedin human –disturbed habitats, so humans intensively collected them and began to control their distribution. Women in the Archaic communities were probably the main experimenters with cultivation, because ethnoarchaeological evidence tells us that women were the main collectors of plant food and had detailed knowledge of plants. TPO21-2 The Origins of Agriculture How did it come about that farming developed independently in a number of world centers (the Southeast Asian mainland, Southwest Asia, Central America, lowland and highland South America, and equatorial Africa) at more or less the same time? Agriculture developed slowly among populations that had an extensive knowledge of plants and animals. Changing from hunting and gathering to agriculture had no immediate advantages. To start with it forced the population to abandon the nomad’s life and become sedentary, to develop methods of storage and, often, systems of irrigation. While hunter-gatherers always had the option of moving elsewhere when the resources were exhausted, this became more difficult with farming. Furthermore, as the archaeological record shows, the state of health of agriculturalists was worse than that of their contemporary hunter gatherers. Traditionally, it was believed that the transition to agriculture was the result of a worldwide population crisis. It was argued that once hunter gatherers had occupied the whole, the population started to grow everywhere and food became scarce, agriculture would have been a solution to this problem. We know, however, that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies control their population in a variety of ways. The idea of a world population on crisis is therefore unlikely, although population pressure might have arisen in some areas. Climatic changes at the end of the glacial period 13,000 years ago have been proposed to account for the emergence of farming. The temperature increased dramatically in a short period of time (years rather than centuries), allowing for a growth of hunting-gathering population due to the abundance of resources. There were, however, fluctuations in the climatic conditions, with the consequences that wet conditions were followed by dry ones, so that the availability of plants and animals oscillated brusquely. It would appear that the instability of the climatic conditions led populations that had originally been nomadic to settle down and develop a sedentary style of life which led in turn to population growth and to the need to increase the amount of food available. Farming originated in these conditions. Later on, it became very difficult to change because of the significant expansion of these populations. It could be argued, however, that these conditions are not sufficient to explain the origins of agriculture. Earth had experienced previous periods of climatic change, and yet agriculture had not been developed. It is archaeologist Steven Mithen’s thesis, brilliantly developed in his bookThe Prehistory of the Mind(1996),that approximately 40,000 years ago the human mind developed cognitive fluidity, that is the integration of the specializations of the mind: technical, natural history (geared to understanding the behavior and distribution of natural resources), social intelligence, and the linguistic capacity. Cognitive fluidity explains the appearance of art, religion, and sophisticated speech. Once humans possessed such a mind, they were able to find an imaginative solution to a situation of severe economic crisis such as the farming dilemma described earlier. Mithen proposes the existence of four mental elements to account for the emergence of farming. (1) the ability to develop tools that could be used intensively to harvest and process plant resources; (2) the tendency to use plants and animals as the medium to acquire social prestige and power; (3) the tendency to develop “social relationships” with animals structurally similar to those developed with people—specifically, the ability to think of animals as people (anthropomorphism) and of people as animals (totemism) ;and (4) the tendency to manipulate plants and animals. The fact that some societies domesticated animals and plants, discovered the use of metal tools, became literate, and developed a state should not make us forget that others developed pastoralism or horticulture(vegetable gardening)but remained illiterate and at low levels of productivity, a few entered the modern period as hunting and gathering societies. It is anthropologically important to inquire into the conditions that made some societies adopt agriculture while others remained hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. However, it should be kept in mind that many societies that knew of agriculture more or less consciously avoid it. Whether Mithen’s explanation is satisfactory is open to contention, and some authors have recently emphasized the importance of other factors. |
| 点评： 虽然这次阅读考题重复以前的老题（2010年10月29日北美考题），但是盲目记忆阅读机经是很愚蠢的行为，因为没人可以把文章背下来。与其投机取巧地花大量时间去找机经，看机经，不如把TPO的文章做一下，就算来不及做，那也要当小人书一样看一轮。对于时间充裕的考生，可以把老托福的阅读真题拿来看看，就看文章。我个人觉得，现在托福考的东西就是老托福的加长版本。现在考的背景基本上能在老托福的阅读文章中找到类似的文章。 | |
