托福阅读长难句178 2.0版

托福阅读长难句178谨献给奋斗在出国路上的Toeflers1. But the myths t h at have grown up around the rites may continue aspart of the group’s oral tradition and may even come to be acted out under conditions divorced from these rites. (Words 33; Medium)2. Another, advanced in the twentieth century, suggests that humanshave a gift for fantasy, through which they seek to reshape reality into more satisfying forms than those encountered in daily life. (Words 31;Medium)3. For example, one sign of this condition is the appearance of thecomic vision, since comedy requires sufficient detachment to view some deviations from social norms as ridiculous rather than as serious threats to the welfare of the entire group. (Words 40; Hard)4. Immediately adjacent to the timberline, the tundra consists of a fairlycomplete cover of low-lying shrubs, herbs, and grasses, while higher up the number and diversity of species decrease until there is much bare ground with occasional mosses and lichens and some prostratecushion plants. (Words 45; Medium)5. Whatever the final answer to the water crisis may be, it is evidentthat within the High Plains, irrigation water will never again be the abundant, inexpensive resource it was during the agricultural boom years of the mid-twentieth century. (Words 39; Hard)6. Many ecologists now think that the relative long-term stability ofclimax communities comes not from diversity but from the “patchiness”of the environment, an environment that varies from place to place supports more kinds of organisms than an environment that is uniform. (Words 42; Easy)7. These plants are termed opportunists because they rely on their seeds’falling into setting where competing plants have been removed by natural processes, such as along an eroding riverbank, on landslips, or where a tree falls and creates a gap in the forest canopy. (Words 44;Easy)8. Perhaps, like many contemporary peoples, Upper Paleolithic menand women believed that the drawing of a human image could cause death or injury, and if that were indeed their belief, it might explainwhy human figures are rarely depicted in the cave art. (Words 43;Easy)9. Consistent with this idea, according to the investigators, is the factthat the art of the cultural period that followed the Upper Paleolithic also seems to reflect how people got their food. (Words 32; Easy)10. The explosion is also calculated to have produced vast quantities ofnitric acid and melted rock that sprayed out over much of Earth, starting widespread fires that must have consumed most terrestrial forests and grassland. (Words 35; Medium)11. Demonstrations of infants’and toddlers’long-term memory haveinvolved their repeating motor activities that they had seen or done earlier, such as reaching in the dark for objects, putting a bottle in a doll’s mouth, or pulling apart two pieces of a toy. (Words 43; Easy)12. General knowledge of categories of events such as a birthday partyor a visit to the doctor’s office helps older individuals encode their experiences, but again, infants and toddlers are unlikely to encode many experiences within such knowledge structures. (Words 39;Easy)13. Contrary to the arguments of some that much of the pacific wassettled by Polynesians accidentally marooned after being lost and adrift, it seems reasonable that this feat was accomplished by deliberate colonization expeditions that set our fully stocked with food and domesticated plants and animals. (Words 46; Medium)14. As Patrick Kirch, an American anthropologist, points out, ratherthan being brought by rafting South Americans, sweet potatoes might just have easily been brought back by returning Polynesian navigators who could have reached the west coast of South America.(Words 39; Medium)15. At one time, the animals present in these fossil beds were assignedto various modern animals groups, but most paleontologists now agree that all Tommotian fossils represent unique body forms that arose in the early Cambrian period and disappeared before the end of the period, leaving not descendants in modern animals group.(Words 52; Medium)16. But detractors maintain that the terraces could also have beencreated by geological activity, perhaps related to the geologic forcesthat depressed the Northern Hemisphere far below the level of the south, in which case they have nothing whatever to do with Martian water. (Words 44; Medium)17. Lichens helped to speed the decomposition of the hard rock surfaces,preparing a soft bed of soil that was abundantly supplied with minerals that had been carried in the molten rock from the bowels of Earth. (Words 36; Medium)18. Since the laws of physics, not some arbitrary decision, havedetermined the general form of applied-art objects, they follow basic patterns, so much so that functional forms can vary only within certain limits. (Words 33; Easy)19. That this device was a necessary structural compromise is clearfrom the fact that the cannonball quickly disappeared when sculptors learned how to strengthen the internal structure of a statue with iron braces (iron being much stronger than bronze). (Words 39; Easy)20. Even though the fine arts in the twentieth century often treatmaterials in new ways, the basic difference in attitude of artists in relation to their materials in the fine arts and the applied arts remainsrelatively constant. (Words 38; Easy)21. The cinema did not emerge as a form of mass consumption until itstechnology evolved from the initial “peepshow” format to the point where images were projected on a screen in a darkened theater.(Words 34; Easy)22. Although early exhibitors regularly accompanied movies with liveacts, the substance of the movies themselves is mass-produced prerecorded material that can easily be reproduced by theaters with little or no active participation by the exhibitor. (Words 35; Medium)23. With the advent of projection, the viewer’s relationship with theimage was no longer private, as it had been with earlier peepshow devices such as the Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope, which was a similar machine that reproduced motion by means of successive images on individual photographic cards instead of on strips of celluloid. (Words 53; Medium)24. Those individuals who possess characteristics that provide themwith an advantage in the struggle for existence are more likely to survive and contribute their genes to the next generation. (Words 29;Easy)25. More than a decade of agitation did finally bring a workdayshortened to 10 hours to most industries by the 1850’s, and the courts also recognized worker’s right to strike, but these gains had little immediate impact. (Words 37; Medium)26. The Fore also displayed familiar facial expressions when asked howthey would respond if they were the characters in stories that called for basic emotional responses. (Words 26; Easy)27. Ekman and his colleagues more recently obtained similar results ina study of ten cultures in which participants were permitted to reportthat multiple emotions were shown by facial expressions. (Words 30;Easy)28. Fuller devised a type of dance that focused on the shifting play oflights and colors on the voluminous skirts or draperies she wore, which she kept in constant motion principally through movements of her arms, sometimes extended with wands concealed under her costumes. (Words 44; Medium)29. Although she discovered and introduced her art in the United States,she achieved her great glory in Paris, where she was engaged by the Folies Bergere in 1892 and soon became “la Loie”, the darling of Parisian audience. (Words 38; Easy)30. Her interest in color and light paralleled the research of severalartists of the period, notably the painter Seurat, famed for his Pointillist technique of creating a sense of shapes and lights on canvas by applying extremely small dots of color rather than by painting lines. (Words 46; Hard)31. For example, some early societies ceased to consider certain ritesessential to their well-being and abandoned them, nevertheless, they retained as parts of their oral tradition the myths that had grown up around the rites and admired them for their artistic qualities rather than for their religious usefulness. (Words 48; Medium)32. Only recently have investigators considered using these plants toclean up soil and waste sites that have been contaminated by toxic levels of heavy metals—an environmentally friendly approach known as phytoremediation. (Words 32; Medium)33. Estimates indicate that the aquifer contains enough water to fillLake Huron, but unfortunately, under the semiarid climatic conditions that presently exist in the region, rates of addition to the aquifer are minimal, amounting to about half a centimeter a year.(Words 41; Easy)34. This “atmospheric engine”, invented by Thomas Savery and vastlyimproved by this partner, Thomas Newcomen, embodied revolutionary principles, but it was so slow and wasteful of fuel that it could not be employed outside the coal mines for which it had been designed. (Words 43; Easy)35. As a result of crustal adjustments and faulting, the Strait of Gibraltar,where the Mediterranean now connects to the Atlantic, opened, and water cascaded spectacularly back into the Mediterranean. (Words 30; Medium)36. These people settled at first in scattered hunting and gatheringbands, although in some places near lakes and rivers, people who fished, with a more secure food supply, lived in larger population concentrations. (Words 33; Easy)37. A 2003 Mars Global Surveyor image shows that mission specialiststhink may be a delta—a fan-shaped network of channels and sediments where a river once flowed into a larger body of water, in this case a lake filling a crater in the southern highlands. (Words 45;Medium)38. It is significant that the earliest living things that built communitieson these islands are examples of symbiosis, a phenomenon that depends upon the close cooperation of two or more forms of life anda principle that is very important in island communities. (Words 43;Medium)39. Ekman has found that the so-called Duchenne smile, which ischaracterized by “crow’s feet” wrinkles around the eyes and a subtle drop in the eye cover fold so that the skin above the eye moves down slightly toward the eyeball, can lead to pleasant feelings. (Words 45;Hard)40. Whether people can remember an event depends on critically on thefit between the way in which they earlier encoded the information and the way in which they later attempt to retrieve it. (Words 33;Easy)41. Nor did the Whigs envision any conflict in society between farmersand workers on the one hand and businesspeople and bankers on the other. (Words 24; Easy)42. It would therefore not be too great an exaggeration to say thatpractitioners of the fine arts work to overcome the limitations of their materials, whereas those engaged in the applied arts work in concert with their materials. (Words 38; Easy)43. Enormous changes in materials and techniques of constructionwithin the last few generations have made it possible to enclose space with much greater ease and speed and with a minimum of material. (Words 32; Medium)44. But as more and more accumulations of strata were cataloged inmore and more places, it became clear that the sequences of rocks sometimes differed from region to region and that no rock type was ever going to become a reliable time marker throughout the world.(Words 46; Easy)45. Like the stone of Roman wall, which were held together both by theregularity of the design and by that peculiarly powerful Roman cement, so the various parts of the Roman realm were bonded into a massive, monolithic entity by physical, organizational, and psychological controls. (Words 45; Medium)46. Unlike in the Americas, where metallurgy was a very late andlimited development, Africans had iron from a relatively early date, developing ingenious furnaces to produce the high heat needed for production and to control the amount of air that reached the carbon and iron ore necessary for making iron. (Words 50; Easy)47. Many plants and animals disappear abruptly from the fossil recordas one moves from layers of rock documenting the end of the Cretaceous up into rocks representing the beginning of the Cenozoic (the era after the Mesozoic). (Words 37; Medium)48. This was justified by the view that reflective practice could helpteachers to feel more intellectually involved in their role and work in teaching and enable them to cope with the paucity of scientific fact and the uncertainty of knowledge in the discipline of teaching.(Words 45; Medium)49. For example, people who believe that aggression is necessary andjustified-as during wartime-are likely to act aggressively, whereas people who believe that a particular war or act of aggression is unjust, or who think that aggression is never justified, are less likely to behave aggressively. (Words 45; Easy)50. This “paper money aristocracy”of bankers and investorsmanipulated the banking system for their own profit, Democrats claimed, and sapped the nation’s virtue by encouraging speculation and the desire of sudden, unearned wealth. (Words 33; Easy)51. Kramer then set up experiments with caged starlings and found thattheir orientation was, in fact, in the proper migratory direction except when the sky was overcast, at which times there was no clear direction to their restless movements. (Words 39; Medium)52. In fact, when tapes of begging tree swallows were played at anartificial swallow nest containing an egg, the egg in that “noisy”nest was taken or destroyed by predators before the egg in a nearby quiet nest in 29 of 37 trials. (Words 45; Medium)53. This prediction was supported by data collected in one survey of 24species from an Arizona forest, more evidence that predator pressure favors the evolution of begging calls that are hard to detect and pinpoint. (Words 35; Easy)54. One possibility is that a noisy baby bird provides accurate signals ofits real hunger and good health, making it worthwhile for the listening parent to give it food in a nest where several other offspring are usually available to be fed. (Words 42; Medium)55. When experimentally deprived baby robins are placed in a nest withnormally fed siblings, the hungry nestlings beg more loudly than usual—but so do their better-fed siblings, though not as loudly as the hungrier birds. (Words 36; Medium)56. The answer lies apparently not in the increased energy costs ofexaggerated begging—such energy costs are small relative to the potential gain in calories—but rather in the damage that any successful cheater would do to its siblings, which share genes with one another. (Words 45; Medium)57. Most engravings, for example, are best lit from the left, as befits thework of right-handed artists, who generally prefer to have the lightsource on the left so that the shadow of their hand does not fall on the tip of the engraving tool or brush. (Words 47; Medium)58. Despite all the highly visible technological developments intheatrical and home delivery of the moving image that have occurred over the decades since then, no single innovation has come close to being regarded as a similar kind of watershed. (Words 39; Medium)59. In many instances, spectators in the era before recorded soundexperienced elaborate aural presentations alongside movies' visual images, from the Japanese benshi (narrators) crafting multivoiced dialogue narratives to original musical compositions performed by symphony-size orchestras in Europe and the United States. (Words 41; Easy)60. Though it may be difficult to imagine from a later perspective, astrain of critical opinion in the 1920s predicted that sound film would be a technical novelty that would soon fade from sight, just as had many previous attempts, dating well back before the First World War, to link images with recorded sound. (Words 54; Hard)61. To be sure, their evaluation of the technical flaws in 1920s soundexperiments was not so far off the mark, yet they neglected to take into account important new forces in the motion picture field that, ina sense, would not take no for an answer. (Words 46; Hard)62. With financial assets considerably greater than those in the motionpicture industry, and perhaps a wider vision of the relationships among entertainment and communications media, they revitalized research into recording sound for motion pictures. (Words 34; Easy)63. The relations between animal activity and these periods, particularlyfor the daily rhythms, have been of such interest and importance thata huge amount of work has been done on them and the specialresearch field of chronobiology has emerged. (Words 40; Medium)64. Normally, the constantly changing levels of an animal's activity—sleeping, feeding, moving, reproducing, metabolizing, andproducing enzymes and hormones, for example—are wellcoordinated with environmental rhythms, but the key question iswhether the animal's schedule is driven by external cues, such assunrise or sunset, or is instead dependent somehow on internaltimers that themselves generate the observed biological rhythms.(Words 61; Easy)65. The disorienting effects of this mismatch between external timecues and internal schedules may persist, like our jet lag, for several days or weeks until certain cues such as the daylight/darkness cycle reset the organism's clock to synchronize with the daily rhythm ofthe new environment. (Words 46; Hard)66. Therefore, when observational assessment is used as a technique forstudying infant perceptual abilities, care must be taken not toovergeneralize from the data or to rely on one or two studies asconclusive evidence of a particular perceptual ability of the infant.(Words 43; Medium)67. The first is the habituation-dishabituation technique, in which asingle stimulus is presented repeatedly to the infant until there is ameasurable decline (habituation) in whatever attending behavior is being observed. (Words 31; Medium)68. The second technique relies on evoked potentials, which areelectrical brain responses that may be related to a particular stimulus because of where they originate. (Words 25; Hard)69. The author George Comstock suggested that less than a quarter ofchildren between the ages of six and eight years old understoodstandard disclaimers used in many toy advertisements and thatdisclaimers are more readily comprehended when presented in both audio and visual formats. (Words 44; Medium)70. To understand the ancient Mayan people who lived in the area thatis today southern Mexico and Central America and the ecologicaldifficulties they faced, one must first consider their environment,which we think of as “jungle" or 'tropical rainforest”. (Words 41;Easy)71. While that made things hard for ancient Maya living in the south, ithas also made things hard for modem archaeologists who havedifficulty understanding why ancient droughts caused biggerproblems in the wet south than in the dry north. (Words 40; Easy)72. The likely explanation is that an area of underground freshwaterunderlies the Yucatan Peninsula, but surface elevation increases from north to south, so that as one moves south the land surface liesincreasingly higher above the water table. (Words 38; Medium)73. The explanation is that the Maya excavated depressions, ormodified natural depressions, and then plugged up leaks in the karst by plastering the bottoms of the depressions in order to createreservoirs, which collected rain from large plastered catchmentbasins and stored it for use in the dry season. (Words 49; Medium)74. It is the use of horses for transportation and warfare that explainswhy Inner Eurasian pastoralism proved the most mobile and themost militaristic of all major forms of pastoralism. (Words 30; Easy)75. The remarkable mobility and range of pastoral societies explain, inpart, why so many linguists have argued that the Indo-Europeanlanguages began their astonishing expansionist career not amongfarmers in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), but among earlypastoralists from Inner Eurasia. (Words 40; Easy)76. Such theories imply that the Indo-European languages evolved notin Neolithic (10,000 to 3,000 B.C.) Anatolia, but among the foraging communities of the cultures in the region of the Don and Dnieperrivers, which took up stock breeding and began to exploit theneighboring steppes. (Words 45; Easy)77. Inequalities of wealth and rank certainly exist, and have probablyexisted in most pastoralist societies, but except in periods of military conquest, they are normally too slight to generate the stable,hereditary hierarchies that are usually implied by the use of the term class. (Words 44; Medium)78. Inequalities of gender have also existed in pastoralist societies, butthey seem to have been softened by the absence of steep hierarchies of wealth in most communities, and also by the requirement thatwomen acquire most of the skills of men, including, often, theirmilitary skills. (Words 46; Medium)79. In a countercurrent exchange system, the blood vessels carryingcooled blood from the flippers run close enough to the blood vessels carrying warm blood from the body to pick up some heat from thewarmer blood vessels. (Words 37; Medium)80. American paleontologists David Raup and John Sepkoski, who havestudied extinction rates in a number of fossil groups, suggest thatepisodes of increased extinction have recurred periodically,approximately every 26 million years since the mid-Cretaceousperiod. (Words 36; Easy)81. The possibility that mass extinctions may recur periodically hasgiven rise to such hypotheses as that of a companion star with along-period orbit deflecting other bodies from their normal orbits, making some of them fall to Earth as meteors and causingwidespread devastation upon impact. (Words 46; Hard)82. A search of sedimentary deposits that span the boundary betweenthe Cretaceous and Tertiary periods shows that there is a dramatic increase in the abundance of iridium briefly and precisely at thisboundary. (Words 33; Easy)83. When the ice is thick enough, usually over 30 meters, the weight ofthe snow and firn will cause the ice crystals toward the bottom tobecome plastic and to flow outward or downward from the area of snow accumulation. (Words 40; Easy)84. For a glacier to grow or maintain its mass there must be sufficientsnowfall to match or exceed the annual loss through melting,evaporation, and calving, which occurs when the glacier loses solid chunks as icebergs to the sea or to large lakes. (Words 43; Medium)85. Glaciers move slowly across the land with tremendous energy,carving into even the hardest rock formations and thereby reshaping the landscape as they engulf, push, drag, and finally deposit rockdebris in places far from its original location. (Words 38; Easy)86. This has been so since ancient times, partly due to the geology ofthe area, which is mostly limestone and sandstone, with few deposits of metallic ore and other useful materials. (Words 31; Easy)87. In these shops differences of rank were blurred as artisans andmasters labored side by side in the same modest establishment, were usually members of the same guild and religious sect, lived in thesame neighborhoods, and often had assumed (or real) kinshiprelationships. (Words 44; Medium)88. In the multiplicity of small-scale local egalitarian orquasi-egalitarian organizations for fellowship, worship, andproduction that flourished in this laissez-faire environment,individuals could interact with one another within a community ofharmony and ideological equality, following their own popularlyelected leaders and governing themselves by shared consensus while minimizing distinctions of wealth and power. (Words 54; Hard)89. As among tribespeople, personal relationships and a carefulweighing of character have always been crucial in a mercantileeconomy with little regulation, where one's word is one's bond and where informal ties of trust cement together an international tradenetwork. (Words 40; Medium)90. Nor have merchants and artisans ever had much tolerance foraristocratic professions of moral superiority, favoring instead anegalitarian ethic of the open market, where steady hard work, theloyalty of one's fellows, and entrepreneurial skill make all thedifference. (Words 40; Hard)91. The central state, though often very rich and very populous, wasintrinsically fragile, since the development of new international trade routes could undermine the monetary base and erode state power, as occurred when European seafarers circumvented Middle Easternmerchants after Vasco da Gama's voyage around Africa in the latefifteenth-century opened up a southern route. (Words 55; Medium)92. When the elements known at the time were ordered by increasingatomic mass, it was found that successive elements belonged todifferent chemical groups and that the order of the groups in thissequence was fixed and repeated itself at regular intervals. (Words 42; Hard)93. Ramsay then studied a gas that was present in natural gas depositsand discovered that it was helium, an element whose presence in the Sun had been noted earlier in the spectrum of sunlight but that had not previously been known on Earth. (Words 43; Medium)94. It is hypothesized that the primordial cloud of dust and gas fromwhich all the planets are thought to have condensed had acomposition somewhat similar to that of Jupiter. (Words 30; Easy)95. The explanation may be that the terrestrial planets were once muchlarger and richer in these materials but eventually lost them because of these bodies' relative closeness to the Sun, which meant that their temperatures were relatively high. (Words 38; Easy)96. This development, coming as it did when the bottom had fallen outof the European economy, provided an impetus to a long-held desire to secure direct relations with the East by establishing a sea trade.(Words 35; Medium)97. But even high-priced commodities like spices had to be transportedin large bulk in order to justify the expense and trouble of sailingaround the African continent all the way to India and China. (Words 34; Medium)98. In the largest caravels, two main masts held large square sails thatprovided the bulk of the thrust driving the ship forward, while asmaller forward mast held a triangular-shaped sail, called a lateensail, which could be moved into a variety of positions to maneuver the ship. (Words 48; Medium)99. In the green-to-yellow lighting conditions of the lowest levels of theforest, yellow and green would be the brightest colors, but when an animal is signaling, these colors would not be very visible if theanimal was sitting in an area with a yellowish or greenishbackground. (Words 47; Easy)100. This species, which lives in the rain forests and scrublands of the east coast of Australia, has a brown-to-black plumage with bare,bright-red skin on the head and neck and a neck collar oforange-yellow loosely hanging skin. (Words 38; Easy)。