雅思阅读真题
剑桥雅思真题6-阅读Test 3(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题6-阅读Test 3（附答案）Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.The FilmA The Lumiere Brothers opened their Cinematographe, at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, to 100 paying customers over 100 years ago, on December 8, 1895.Before the eyes of the stunned, thrilled audience, photographs came to life and moved across a flat screen.B So ordinary and routine has this become to us that it takes a determined leap of the imagination to grasp the impact of those first moving images. But it is worth trying, for to understand the initial shock of those images is to understand the extraordinary power and magic of cinema, the unique, hypnotic quality that has made film the most dynamic, effective art form of the 20th century.C One of the Lumiere Brothers' earliest films was a 30-second piece which showed a section of a railway platform flooded with sunshine. A train appears and heads straight for the camera. And that is all that happens. Yet the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the greatest of all film artists, described the film as a 'work of genius'. 'As the train approached,' wrote Tarkovsky,'panic started in the theatre: people jumped and ran away. That was the moment when cinema was born. The frightened audience could not accept that they were watching a mere picture. Pictures were still, only reality moved; this must, therefore, be reality. In their confusion, they feared that a real train was about to crush them.'D Early cinema audiences often experienced the same confusion. In time, the idea of film became familiar, the magic was accepted -but it never stopped being magic. Film has never lost its unique power to embrace its audiences and transport them to a different world. For Tarkovsky, the key to that magic was the way in which cinema created a dynamic image of the real flow of events.A still picture could only imply the existence of time, while time in a novel passed at the whim of the reader. But in cinema, the real, objective flow of time was captured.E One effect of this realism was to educate the world about itself. For cinema makes the world smaller. Long before people traveled to America or anywhere else, they knew what other places looked like; they knew how other people worked and lived.Overwhelmingly, the lives recorded -at least in film fiction -have been American. From the earliest days of the industry, Hollywood has dominated the world film market. American imagery-the cars, the cities, the cowboys - became the primary imagery of film. Film carried American life and values around the globe.F And, thanks to film, future generations will know the 20th century more intimately than any other period. We can only imagine what life was like in the 14th century or in classical Greece. But the life of the modern world has been recorded on film in massive, encyclopaedic detail. We shall be known better than any preceding generations.G The 'star' was another natural consequence of cinema. The cinema star was effectively born in 1910. Film personalities have such an immediate presence that, inevitably, they become super-real. Because we watch them so closely and because everybody in the world seems to knowwho they are, they appear more real to us than we do ourselves. The star as magnified human self is one of cinema’s most strange and enduring legacies.H Cinema has also given a new lease of life to the idea of the story. When the Lumiere Brothers and other pioneers began showing off this new invention, it was by no means obvious how it would be used. All that mattered at first was the wonder of movement. Indeed, some said that, once this novelty had worn off, cinema would fade away. It was no more than a passing gimmick, a fairground attraction.I Cinema might, for example, have become primarily a documentary form. Or it might have developed like television -as a strange, noisy transfer of music, information and narrative. But what happened was that it became, overwhelmingly, a medium for telling stories. Originally these were conceived as short stories - early producers doubted the ability of audiences to concentrate for more than the length of a reel. Then, in 1912, an Italian 2-hour film was hugely successful, and Hollywood settled upon the novel-length narrative that remains the dominant cinematic convention of today.J And it has all happened so quickly. Almost unbelievably, it is a mere 100 years since that train arrived and the audience screamed and fled, convinced by the dangerous reality of what they saw, and, perhaps, suddenly aware that the world could never be the same again - that, maybe, it could be better, brighter, more astonishing, more real than reality.Question 1-5Reading Passage 1 has ten paragraphs, A-J.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.1. the location of the first cinema2. how cinema came to focus on stories3. the speed with which cinema has changed4. how cinema teaches us about other cultures5. the attraction of actors in filmsQuestion 6-9Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet, writeYES if the statement agrees with the informationNO if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage6. It is important to understand how the first audiences reacted to the cinema.7. The Lumiere Brothers, film about the train was one of the greatest films ever made.8. Cinema presents a biased view of other countries.9. Storylines were important in very early cinema.Question 10-13Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write the correct letter in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.10. The writer refers to the film of the train in order to demonstrateA. the simplicity of early films.B. the impact of early films.C. how short early films were.D. how imaginative early films were.11. In Tarkovsky's opinion, the attraction of the cinema is that itA. aims to impress its audience.B. tells stories better than books.C. illustrates the passing of time.D. describes familiar events.12. When cinema first began, people thought thatA. it would always tell stories.B. it should be used in fairgrounds.C. its audiences were unappreciative.D. its future was uncertain.13. What is the best title for this passage?A. The rise of the cinema starB. Cinema and novels comparedC. The domination of HollywoodD. The power of the big screenReading Passage 2You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 14-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.Motivating Employees under Adverse ConditionsTHE CHALLENGEIt is a great deal easier to motivate employees in a growing organisation than a declining one, when organisations are expanding and adding personnel, promotional opportunities, pay rises, and the excitement of being associated with a dynamic organisation create feelings of optimism. Management is able to use the growth to entice and encourage employees, when an organisation is shrinking, the best and most mobile workers are prone to leave voluntarily. Unfortunately, they are the ones the organisation can least afford to lose- those with the highest skills and experience. The minor employees remain because their job options are limited.Morale also suffers during decline. People fear they may be the next to be made redundant. Productivity often suffers, as employees spend their time sharing rumours and providing one another with moral support rather than focusing on their jobs. For those whose jobs are secure, pay increases are rarely possible. Pay cuts, unheard of during times of growth, may even be imposed. The challenge to management is how to motivate employees under such retrenchment conditions. The ways of meeting this challenge can be broadly divided into six Key Points, which are outlined below.KEY POINT ONEThere is an abundance of evidence to support the motivational benefits that result from carefully matching people to jobs. For example, if the job is running a small business or an autonomous unit within a larger business, high achievers should be sought. However, if the job to be filled is amanagerial post in a larger bureaucratic organisation, a candidate who has a high need for power and a low need for affiliation should be selected. Accordingly, high achievers should not be put into jobs that are inconsistent with their needs. High achievers will do best when the job provides moderately challenging goals and where there is independence and Feedback. However, it should be remembered that not everybody is motivated by jobs that are high in independence, variety and responsibility.KEY POINT TWOThe literature on goal-setting theory suggests that managers should ensure that all employees have specific goals and receive comments on how well they are doing in those goals. For those with high achievement needs, typically a minority in any organisation, the existence of external goals is less important because high achievers are already internally motivated. The next factor to be determined is whether the goals should be assigned by a manager or collectively set in conjunction with the employees. The answer to that depends on perceptions of goal acceptance and the organisatiors' culture. If resistance to goals is expected, the use of participation in goal-setting should increase acceptance. If participation is inconsistent with the culture, however, goals should be assigned. If participation and the culture are incongruous, employees are likely to perceive the participation process as manipulative and be negatively affected by it.KEY POINT THREERegardless of whether goals are achievable or well within management's perceptions of the employee's ability, if employees see them as unachievable they will reduce their effort. Managers must be sure, therefore, that employees feel confident that their efforts can lead to performance goals. For managers, this means that employees must have the capability of doing the job and must regard the appraisal process as valid.KEY POINT FOURSince employees have different needs, what acts as a reinforcement for one may not for another. Managers could use their knowledge of each employee to personalise the rewards over which the have control. Some of the more obvious rewards that managers allocate include pay, promotions, autonomy, job scope and depth, and the opportunity to participate in goal-setting and decision-making.KEY POINT FIVEManagers need to make rewards contingent on performance. To reward factors other than performance will only reinforce those other factors. Key rewards such as pay increases and promotions or advancements should be allocated for the attainment of the employee's specific goals. Consistent with maximizing the impact of rewards, managers should look for ways to increase their visibility. Eliminating the secrecy surrounding pay by openly communicating everyone's remuneration, publicising performance bonuses and allocating annual salary increases in a lump sum rather than spreading them out over an entire year are examples of actions that will make rewards more visible and potentially more motivating.KEY POINT SIXThe way rewards are distributed should be transparent so that employees perceive that rewards or outcomes are equitable and equal to the inputs given. On a simplistic level, experience, abilities, effort and other obvious inputs should explain differences in pay, responsibility and other obvious outcomes. The problem, however, is complicated by the existence of dozens of inputs andoutcomes and by the fact that employee groups place different degrees of importance on them. For instance, a study comparing clerical and production workers identified nearly twenty inputs and outcome , clerical workers considered factors such as quality of work performed and job knowledge near the top of their list, but these were at the bottom of the production workers' list. Similarly, production workers thought that the most important inputs were intelligence and personal involvement with task accomplishment, two factors that were quite low in the importance ratings of the clerks. There were also important, though less dramatic, differences on the outcome side. For example, production workers rated advancement very highly, whereas clerical workers rated advancement in the lower third of their list. Such findings suggest that one person's equity is another's inequity, so an ideal should probably weigh different inputs and outcomes according to employee group.Question 14-18Reading Passage 2 contains six Key Points.Choose the correct heading for Key Points TWO to SIX from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14 -18 on your answer sheet.15 Key Point Three16 Key Point Four17 Key Point Five18 Key Point SixQuestion 19-24Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?In boxes 19-24 on your answer sheet, writeYES if the statement agrees with the informationNO if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage19. A shrinking organisation tends to lose its less skilled employees rather than its more skilled employees.20. It is easier to manage a small business than a large business.21. High achievers are well suited to team work.22. Some employees can feel manipulated when asked to participate in goal-setting.23. The staff appraisal process should be designed by employees.24. Employees' earnings should be disclosed to everyone within the organisation.Question 25-27Look at the following groups of workers (Questions 25-27) and the list of descriptions below. Match each group with the correct description, A-E.Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 25-27 on your answer sheet.25 high achievers26 clerical workers27 production workersReading Passage 3You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.The Search for the Anti-aging PillIn government laboratories and elsewhere, scientists are seeking a drug able to prolong life and youthful vigor. Studies of caloric restriction are showing the wayAs researchers on aging noted recently, no treatment on the market today has been proved to slow human aging -the build-up of molecular and cellular damage that increases vulnerability to infirmity as we grow older. But one intervention, consumption of a low-calorie* yet nutritionally balanced diet, works incredibly well in a broad range of animals, increasing longevity and prolonging good health. Those findings suggest that caloric restriction could delay aging and increase longevity in humans, too.Unfortunately, for maximum benefit, people would probably have to reduce their caloric intake by roughly thirty per cent, equivalent to dropping from 2,500 calories a day to 1,750. Few mortals could stick to that harsh a regimen, especially for years on end. But what if someone could create a pill that mimicked the physiological effects of eating less without actually forcing people to eat less? Could such a ‘caloric-restriction mimetic', as we call it, enable people to stay healthy longer, postponing age-related disorders (such as diabetes, arteriosclerosis, heart disease and cancer) until very late in life? Scientists first posed this question in the mid-1990s, after researchers came upon a chemical agent that in rodents seemed to reproduce many of caloric restriction's benefits. No compound that would safely achieve the same feat in people has been found yet, but the search has been informative and has fanned hope that caloric-restriction (CR) mimetics can indeed be developed eventually.The benefits of caloric restrictionThe hunt for CR mimetics grew out of a desire to better understand caloric restriction's many effects on the body. Scientists first recognized the value of the practice more than 60 years ago, when they found that rats fed a low-calorie diet lived longer on average than free-feeding rats and also had a reduced incidence of conditions that become increasingly common in old age. What is more, some of the treated animals survived longer than the oldest-living animals in the control group, which means that the maximum lifespan (the oldest attainable age), not merely the normal lifespan, increased. V arious interventions, such as infection-fighting drugs, can increase a population's average survival time, but only approaches that slow the body's rate of aging will increase the maximum lifespan.The rat findings have been replicated many times and extended to creatures ranging from yeast to fruit flies, worms, fish, spiders, mice and hamsters. Until fairly recently, the studies were limited to short-lived creatures genetically distant from humans. But caloric-restriction projects underway in two species more closely related to humans -rhesus and squirrel monkeys -have made scientists optimistic that CR mimetics could help people.The monkey projects demonstrate that, compared with control animals that eat normally, caloric-restricted monkeys have lower body temperatures and levels of the pancreatic hormone insulin, and they retain more youthful levels of certain hormones that tend to fall with age.The caloric-restricted animals also look better on indicators of risk for age-related diseases. For example, they have lower blood pressure and triglyceride levels (signifying a decreased likelihood of heart disease), and they have more normal blood glucose levels (pointing to a reduced risk for diabetes, which is marked by unusually high blood glucose levels). Further, it has recently been shown that rhesus monkeys kept on caloric-restricted diets for an extended time (nearly 15 years) have less chronic disease. They and the other monkeys must be followed still longer, however, to know whether low-calorie intake can increase both average and maximum lifespans in monkeys. Unlike the multitude of elixirs being touted as the latest anti-aging cure, CR mimetics would alter fundamental processes that underlie aging. We aim to develop compounds that fool cells into activating maintenance and repair.How a prototype caloric-restriction mimetic worksThe best-studied candidate for a caloric-restriction mimetic, 2DG (2-deoxy-D-glucose), works by interfering with the way cells process glucose. It has proved toxic at some doses in animals and so cannot be used in humans. But it has demonstrated that chemicals can replicate the effects of caloric restriction; the trick is finding the right one.Cells use the glucose from food to generate A TP (adenosine triphosphate), the molecule that powers many activities in the body. By limiting food intake, caloric restriction minimizes the amount of glucose entering cells and decreases ATP generation. When 2DG is administered to animals that eat normally, glucose reaches cells in abundance but the drug prevents most of it from being processed and thus reduces A TP synthesis. Researchers have proposed several explanations for why interruption of glucose processing and ATP production might retard aging. One possibility relates to the ATP-making machinery's emission of free radicals, which are thought to contribute to aging and to such age-related diseases as cancer by damaging cells. Reduced operation of the machinery should limit their production and thereby constrain the damage. Another hypothesis suggests that decreased processing of glucose could indicate to cells that food is scarce (even if it isn't) and induce them to shift into an anti-aging mode that emphasizes preservation of the organism over such ‘luxuries' as growth and reproduction.* calorie: a measure of the energy value of foodQuestion 28-32Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?In boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet, writeYES if the statement agrees with the informationNO if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage28. Studies show drugs available today can delay the process of growing old.29. There is scientific evidence that eating fewer calories may extend human life.30. Not many people are likely to find a caloric-restricted diet attractive.31. Diet-related diseases are common in older people.32. In experiments, rats who ate what they wanted led shorter lives than rats on a low-calorie diet. Question 33-37Classify the following descriptions as relating toA. caloric-restricted monkeysB. control monkeysC. neither caloric-restricted monkeys nor control monkeysWrite the correct letter, A, B or C, in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.33Monkeys were less likely to become diabetic.34Monkeys experienced more chronic disease.35Monkeys have been shown to experience a longer than average life span.36Monkeys enjoyed a reduced chance of heart disease.37Monkeys produced greater quantities of insulin.Question 38-40Complete the flow-chart below.Choose N O MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.参考答案1 A2 I3 J4 E5 G6 YES7 NOT GIVEN8 NOT GIVEN9 NO10 B11 C12 D13 D14 vii15 iii16 ii17 iv18 i19 NO20 NOT GIVEN21 NO22 YES23 NOT GIVEN24 YES25B26C27A28 NO29 YES30 YES31 NOT GIVEN32 YES33A34 B35 C36 A37 B38 glucose39 free radicals40 preservation。
剑桥雅思真题9-阅读Test 1(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题9-阅读Test 1（附答案）Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.William Henry PerkinThe man who invented synthetic dyesWilliam Henry Perkin was born on March 12, 1838, in London, England. As a boy, Perkin's curiosity prompted early interests in the arts, sciences, photography, and engineering. But it was a chance stumbling upon a run-down, yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfather's home that solidified the young man's enthusiasm for chemistry.As a student at the City of London School, Perkin became immersed in the study of chemistry. His talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his teacher, Thomas Hall, who encouraged him to attend a series of lectures given by the eminent scientist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution. Those speeches fired the young chemist's enthusiasm further, and he later went on to attend the Royal College of Chemistry, which he succeeded in entering in 1853, at the age of 15.At the time of Perkin's enrolment, the Royal College of Chemistry was headed by the noted German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. Perkin's scientific gifts soon caught Hofmann's attention and within two years, he became Hofmann's youngest assistant. Not long after that, Perkin made the scientific breakthrough that would bring him both fame and fortune.At the time, quinine was the only viable medical treatment for malaria. The drug is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America, and by 1856 demand for the drug was surpassing the available supply. Thus, when Hofmann made some passing comments about the desirability of a synthetic substitute for quinine, it was unsurprising that his star pupil was moved to take up the challenge.During his vacation in 1856, Perkin spent his time in the laboratory on the top floor of his family's house. He was attempting to manufacture quinine from aniline, an inexpensive and readily available coal tar waste product. Despite his best efforts, however, he did not end up with quinine. Instead, he produced a mysterious dark sludge. Luckily, Perkin's scientific training and nature prompted him to investigate the substance further. Incorporating potassium dichromate and alcohol into the aniline at various stages of the experimental process, he finally produced a deep purple solution. And, proving the truth of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur's words 'chance favours only theprepared mind’. Perkin saw the potential of his unexpected find.Historically, textile dyes were made from such natural sources as plants and animal excretions. Some of these, such as the glandular mucus of snails, were difficult to obtain and outrageously expensive. Indeed, the purple colour extracted from a snail was once so costly that in society at the time only the rich could afford it. Further, natural dyes tended to be muddy in hue and fade quickly. It was against this backdrop that Perkin's discovery was made.Perkin quickly grasped that his purple solution could be used to colour fabric, thus making it the world's first synthetic dye. Realising the importance of this breakthrough, he lost no time in patenting it. but perhaps the most fascinating of all Perkin's reactions to his find was his nearly instant recognition that the new dye had commercial possibilities.Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly known as mauve (from the French for the plant used to make the colour violet). He asked advice of Scottish dye works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him that manufacturing the dye would be well worth it if the colour remained fast (i.e. would not fade) and the cost was relatively low. So, over the fierce objections of his mentor Hofmann, he left college to give birth to the modern chemical industry. With the help of his father and brother, Perkin set up a factory not far from London. Utilising the cheap and plentiful coal tar that was an almost unlimited byproduct of London's gas street lighting, the dye works began producing the world's first synthetically dyed material in 1857. The company received a commercial boost from the Empress Eugenie of France, when she decided the new colour flattered her. Very soon, mauve was the necessary shade for all the fashionable ladies in that country. Not to be outdone, England's Queen Victoria also appeared in public wearing a mauve gown, thus making it all the rage in England as well. The dye was bold and fast, and the public clamoured for more. Perkin went back to the drawing board.Although Perkin's fame was achieved and fortune assured by his first discovery, the chemist continued his research. Among other dyes he developed and introduced were aniline red (1859) and aniline black (1863) and, in the late 1860s, Perkin's green. It is important to note that Perkin's synthetic dye discoveries had outcomes far beyond the merely decorative. The dyes also became vital to medical research in many ways. For instance, they were used to slain previously invisible microbes and bacteria, allowing researchers to identify such bacilli as tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. Artificial dyes continue to play a crucial role today. And, in what would have been particularly pleasing to Perkin, their current use is in the search for a vaccine against malaria. Question 1-7Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this1. Michael Faraday was the first person to recognise Perkin's ability as a student of chemistry.2. Michael Faraday suggested Perkin should enrol in the Royal College of Chemistry.3. Perkin employed August Wilhelm Hofmann as his assistant.4. Perkin was still young when he made the discovery that made him rich and famous.5. The trees from which quinine is derived grow only in South America.6. Perkin hoped to manufacture a drug from a coal tar waste product.7. Perkin was inspired by the discoveries of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur.Question 8-13Answer the questions below.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.8 Before Perkin's discovery, with what group in society was the colour purple associated?9 What potential did Perkin immediately understand that his new dye had?10 What was the name finally used to refer to the first colour Perkin invented?11 What was the name of the person Perkin consulted before setting up his own dye works?12 In what country did Perkin's newly invented colour first become fashionable?13 According to the passage, which disease is now being targeted by researchers using synthetic dyes?Reading Passage 2You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.Is there anybody out there?The search for extra-terrestrial intelligencesThe question of whether we are alone in the Universe has haunted humanity for centuries, but we may now stand poised on the brink of the answer to that question, as we search for radio signals from other intelligent; civilisations. This search, often known by the acronym SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence), is a difficult one. Although groups around the world have been searching intermittently for three decades, it is only now that we have reached the level of technology where we can make a determined attempt to search all nearby stars for any sign of life.A The primary reason for the search is basic curiosity -the same curiosity about the natural world that drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are alone in the Universe. We want to know whether life evolves naturally if given the right conditions, or whether there is something very special about the Earth to have fostered the variety of life forms that we see around us on the planet. The simple detection of a radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic of all questions. In this sense, SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure science which is continually pushing out the horizon of our knowledge. However, there are other reasons for being interested in whether life exists elsewhere. For example, we have had civilisation on Earth for perhaps only a few thousand years, and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over the last few decades have told us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last another two thousand years or will we wipe ourselves out? Since the lifetime of a planet like ours is several billion years, we can expect that, if other civilisations do survive in our galaxy, their ages will range from zero to several billion years. Thus any other civilisation that we hear from is likely to be far older, on average, than ourselves. The mere existence of such a civilisation will tell us that long-term survival is possible, and gives us some cause for optimism. It is even possible that the older civilisation may pass on the benefits of their experience in dealing with threats to survival such as nuclear war and global pollution, and other threats that we haven't yet discovered.B In discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground rules. First, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are generally ignored since most scientists don’t consider the evidence for them to be strong enough to bear serious consideration (although it is also important to keep an open mind in case any really convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we make a very conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us, since if it differs radically from us we may well not recognise it as a life form, quite apart from whether we are able to communicate with it. In other words, the life form we are looking for may well have two green heads and seven fingers, but it will nevertheless resemble us in that it should communicate with its fellows, be interested in the Universe, live on a planet orbiting a star like our Sun. And perhaps most restrictively, have a chemistry, like us, based on carbon and water.C Even when we make these assumptions, our understanding of other life forms is still severely limited. We do not even know, for example, how many stars have planets, and we certain^ do not know how likely it is that life will arise naturally, given the right conditions. However, when we look at the 100 billion stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way), and 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, it seems inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life form on it; in fact, the best educated guess we can make, using the little that we do know about the conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that perhaps one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That means that our nearest neighbours are perhaps 100 light years away, which is almost next door in astronomical terms.D An alien civilisation could choose many different ways of sending information across the galaxy, but many of these either require too much energy, or else are severely attenuated while traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It turns out that, for a given amount of transmitted power, radio waves in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance, and so all searches to date have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency range. So far there have been a number of searches by various groups around the world, including Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Until now there have not been any detections from the few hundred stars which have been searched. The scale of the searches has been increased dramatically since 1992, when the US Congress voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years to conduct a thorough search for extra-terrestrial life. Much of the money in this project is being spent on developing the special hardware needed to search many frequencies at once. The project has two parts. One part is a targeted search using the world's largest radio telescopes, the American-operated telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and the French telescope in Nancy in France. This part of the project is searching the nearest 1000 likely stars with high sensitivity for signals in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz. The other part of the project is an undirected search which is monitoring all of space with a lower sensitivity, using the smaller antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network.E There is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal from an alien civilisation. Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately. Quite apart from the impracticality of sending a reply over such large distances at short notice, it raises a host of ethical questions that would have to be addressed by the global community before any reply could be sent. Would the human race face the culture shock if faced with 8 superior and much older civilisation? Luckily, there is no urgency about this. The stars being searched are hundreds of light years away, so it takes hundreds of years for their signal to reach us, and a further few hundred years for our reply to reach them. It's not important, then, if there's a delay of a few years, or decades, while the human race debates the question of whether to reply, and perhaps carefully drafts a reply. Question 14-17Reading Passage 2 has five paragraphs, A-E.Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-E from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, i-vii, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.15 Paragraph C16 Paragraph D17 Paragraph EQuestion 18-20Answer the questions below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet.18What is the life expectancy of Earth?19What kind of signals from other intelligent civilisations are SETI scientists searching for?20How many stars are the world's most powerful radio telescopes searching?Question 21-26Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 2?In boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet, writeYES if the statement agrees with the views of the writerNO if the statement contradicts the views of the writerNOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this21. Alien civilisations may be able to help the human race to overcome serious problems.22. SETI scientists are trying to find a life form that resembles humans in many ways.23. The Americans and Australians have co-operated on joint research projects.24. So far SETI scientists have picked up radio signals from several stars.25. The NASA project attracted criticism from some members of Congress.26. If a signal from outer space is received, it will be important to respond promptly.Reading Passage 3You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.The history of the tortoiseIf you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in evolutionary history, enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out onto the land, sometimes even to the most parched deserts, taking their own private seawater with them in blood andcellular fluids. In addition to the reptiles, birds, mammals and insects which we see all around us, other groups that have succeeded out of water include scorpions, snails, crustaceans such as woodlice and land crabs, millipedes and centipedes, spiders and various worms. And we mustn’t forget the plants, without whose prior invasion of the land none of the other migrations could have happened.Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing and reproduction. Nevertheless, a good number of thorough going land animals later turned around, abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial re-tooling, and returned to the water again. Seals have only gone part way back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the way to extreme cases such as whales and dugongs. Whales (including the small whales we call dolphins) and dugongs, with their close cousins the manatees, ceased to be land creatures altogether and reverted to the full marine habits of their remote ancestors. They don't even come ashore to breed. They do, however, still breathe air, having never developed anything equivalent to the gills of their earlier marine incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long time ago and, like all vertebrate returnees to the water, they breathe air. However, they are, in one respect, less fully given back to the water than whales or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs on beaches. There is evidence that all modern turtles are descended from a terrestrial ancestor which lived before most of the dinosaurs. There are two key fossils called Proganochelys quenstedti and Paiaeockersis talampayensis dating from early dinosaur times, which appear to be close to the ancestry of all modern turtles and tortoises. You might wonder how we can tell whether fossil animals lived on land or in water, especially if only fragments are found. Sometimes it's obvious. Ichthyosaurs were reptilian contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with fins and streamlined bodies. The fossils look like dolphins and they surely lived like dolphins, in the water. With turtles it is a little obvious. One way to tell is by measuring the bones of their forelimbs.Walter Joyce and Jacques Gauthier, at Yale University, obtained three measurements in these particular bones of 71 species of living turtles and tortoises. They used a kind of triangular graph paper to plot the three measurements against one another. All the land tortoise species formed a tight cluster of points in the upper part of the triangle; all the water turtles cluster in the lower part of the triangular graph. There was no overlap, except when they added some species that spend time both in water and on land. Sure enough, these amphibious species show up on the triangular graph approximately half way between the 'wet cluster’ of sea turtle and the 'dry cluster* of land tortoises. The next step was to determine where the fossils fell. The bones of P. quenstedti and P.talampayensis leave us in no doubt their points on the graph are right in the thick of the dry cluster. Both these fossils were dry-land tortoises. They come from the era before our turtles returned to the water.You might think, therefore, that modem land tortoises have probably stayed on land ever since those early terrestrial times, as most mammals did after a few of them went back to the sea. But apparently not. If you draw out the family tree of all modem turtles and tortoises, nearly all the branches are aquatic. Today's land tortoises constitute a single branch, deeply nested among branches consisting of aquatic turtles. This suggests that modem land tortoises have not stayed on land continuously since the time of P. quenstedti and P. talampayensis. Rather, their ancestors were among those who went back to the water, and they then re-emerged back onto the land in (relatively) more recent times.Tortoises therefore represent a remarkable double return. In common with all mammals, reptilesand birds, their remote ancestors were marine fish and before that various more or less worm-like creatures stretching back, still in the sea, to the primeval bacteria. Later ancestors lived on land and stayed there for a very large number of generations. Later ancestors still evolved back into the water and became sea turtles. And finally they returned yet again to the land as tortoises, some of which now live in the driest of deserts.Question 27-30Answer the questions below.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.27What had to transfer from sea to land before any animals could migrate?28Which TWO processes are mentioned as those in which animals had to make big changes as they moved onto land?29Which physical feature, possessed by their ancestors, do whales lack?30Which animals might ichthyosaurs have resembled?Question 31-33Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?In boxes 31-33 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this31. Turtles were among the first group of animals to migrate back to the sea.32. It is always difficult to determine where an animal lived when its fossilised remains are incomplete.33. The habitat of ichthyosaurs can be determined by the appearance of their fossilised remains. Question 34-39Complete the flow-chart below.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 34-39 on your answer sheet.Method of determining where the ancestors of turtles and tortoises come fromQuestion 40Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.40. According to the writer, the most significant thing about tortoises is thatA. they are able to adapt to life in extremely dry environments.B. their original life form was a kind of primeval bacteria.C. they have so much in common with sea turtles.D. they have made the transition from sea to land more than once.参考答案1 FALSE2 NOT GIVEN3 FALSE4 TRUE5 NOT GIVEN6 TRUE7 NOT GIVEN8 (the / only) rich9 commercial (possibilities)10 mauve (was/is)11 (Robert) Pullar12 (in) France13 malaria (is)14 iv15 vii16 i17 ii18 several billion years19 radio (waves/signals)20 1000(stars)21 YES22 YES23 NOT GIVEN24 NO25 NOT GIVEN26 NO27 plants28 (IN EITHER ORDER; BOTH REQUIRED FOR ONE MARK) breathing; reproduction29 gills30 dolphins31 NOT GIVEN32 FALSE33 TRUE34 3 measurements35 (triangular) graph36 cluster37 amphibious38 half way39 dry-land tortoises40 D。
雅思(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编5(题后含答案及解析)
雅思（阅读）历年真题试卷汇编5(题后含答案及解析) 题型有：1.You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.WONDER PLANTThe wonder plant with an uncertain future: more than a billion people rely on bamboo for either their shelter or income, while many endangered species depend on it for their survival. Despite its apparent abundance, a new report says that many species of bamboo may be under serious threat.Section AEvery year, during the rainy season, the mountain gorillas of Central Africa migrate to the foothills and lower slopes of the Virunga Mountains to graze on bamboo. For the 650 or so that remain in the wild, it’s a vital food source. Although they eat almost 150 types of plant, as well as various insects and other invertebrates, at this time of year bamboo accounts for up to 90 per cent of their diet. Without it, says Ian Redmond, chairman of the Ape Alliance, their chances of survival would be reduced significantly.Gorillas aren’t the only locals keen on bamboo. For the people who live close to the Virungas, it’s a valuable and versatile raw material used for building houses and making household items such as mats and baskets. But in the past 100 years or so, resources have come under increasing pressure as populations have exploded and large areas of bamboo forest have been cleared to make way for farms and commercial plantations.Section BSadly, this isn’t an isolated story. All over the world, the ranges of many bamboo species appear to be shrinking, endangering the people and animals that depend upon them. But despite bamboo’s importance, we know surprisingly little about it. A recent report published by the UN Environment Programme(UNEP)and the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan(INBAR)has revealed just how profound is our ignorance of global bamboo resources, particularly in relation to conservation.There are almost 1,600 recognised species of bamboo, but the report concentrated on the 1,200 or so woody varieties distinguished by the strong stems, or culms, that most people associate with this versatile plant. Of these, only 38 ‘priority species’identified for their commercial value have been the subject of any real scientific research, and this has focussed mostly on matters relating to their viability as a commodity.This problem isn’t confined to bamboo. Compared to the work carried out on animals, the science of assessing the conservation status of plants is still in its infancy. “People have only started looking hard at this during the past 10-15 years, and only now are they getting a handle on how to go about it systematically,”says Dr. Valerie Kapos, one of the report’s authors and a senior adviser in forest ecology and conservation to the UNEP.Section CBamboo is a type of grass. It comes in a wide variety of forms, ranging in height from 30 centimetres to more than 40 metres. It is also the world’s fastest-growing woody plant; some species can grow more than a metre in a day. Bamboo’s ecological role extends beyond providing food and habitat for animals. Bamboo tends to grow in stands made up of groups of individual plants that growfrom root systems known as rhizomes. Its extensive rhizome systems, which lie in the top layers of the soil, are crucial in preventing soil erosion. And there is growing evidence that bamboo plays an important part in determining forest structure and dynamics. “Bamboo’s pattern of mass flowering and mass death leaves behind large areas of dry biomass that attract wildfire,” says Kapos. “When these burn, they create patches of open ground within the forest far bigger than would be left by a fallen tree.”Patchiness helps to preserve diversity because certain plant species do better during the early stages of regeneration when there are gaps in the canopy.Section DHowever, bamboo’s most immediate significance lies in its economic value. Modern processing techniques mean that it can be used in a variety of ways, for example, as flooring and laminates. One of the fastest growing bamboo products is paper -25 per cent of paper produced in India is made from bamboo fibre, and in Brazil, 100,000 hectares of bamboo are grown for its production.Of course, bamboo’s main function has always been in domestic applications, and as a locally traded commodity it’s worth about US$4.5billion annually. Because of its versatility, flexibility and strength(its tensile strength compares to that of some steel), it has traditionally been used in construction. Today, more than one billion people worldwide live in bamboo houses. Bamboo is often the only readily available raw material for people in many developing countries, says Chris Staple-ton, a research associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens. “Bamboo can be harvested from forest areas or grown quickly elsewhere, and then converted simply without expensive machinery or facilities,”he says. “In this way, it contributes substantially to poverty alleviation and wealth creation.”Section EGiven bamboo’s value in economic and ecological terms, the picture painted by the UNEP report is all the more worrying. But keen horticulturists will spot an apparent contradiction here. Those who’ve followed the recent vogue for cultivating exotic species in their gardens will point out that if it isn’t kept in check, bamboo can cause real problems. “In a lot of places, the people who live with bamboo don’t perceive it as being endangered in any way,”says Kapos. “In fact, a lot of bamboo species are actually very invasive if they’ve been introduced.” So why are so many species endangered?There are two separate issues here, says Ray Townsend, vice president of the British Bamboo Society and arboretum manager at the Royal Botanic Gardens. “Some plants are threatened because they can’t survive in the habitat - they aren’t strong enough or there aren’t enough of them, perhaps. But bamboo can take care of itself - it is strong enough to survive if left alone. What is under threat is its habitat.” It is the physical disturbance that is the threat to bamboo, says Kapos. “When forest goes, it is converted into something else: there isn’t anywhere for forest plants such as bamboo to grow if you create a cattle pasture.”Section FAround the world, bamboo species are routinely protected as part of forest ecosystems in national parks and reserves, but there is next to nothing that protects bamboo in the wild for its own sake. However, some small steps are being taken to address this situation. The UNEP-INBAR report will help conservationists to establish effective measures aimed at protecting valuable wild bamboo species.Townsend, too, sees the UNEP report as an important step forward in promoting the cause of bamboo conservation. “Until now, bamboo has been perceivedas a second-class plant. When you talk about places such as the Amazon, everyone always thinks about the hardwoods. Of course these are significant, but there is a tendency to overlook the plants they are associated with, which are often bamboo species. In many ways, it is the most important plant known to man. I can’t think of another plant that is used so much and is so commercially important in so many countries.” He believes that the most important first step is to get scientists into the field. “We need to go out there, look at these plants and see how they survive and then use that information to conserve them for the future.”Questions 1-7Reading Passage 1 has six sections A-F.Which section contains the following information?Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any letter more than once.1．Comparison of bamboo with other plant species正确答案：E解析：该题目较难定位，原文对应信息出现于Section E第二个分段落第三行“Someplants are threatened because they can’t survive in the habitat…But bamboo can take careof itself．．．”，这里作者对“bamboo”和“other plant species”进行了生存能力的比较，所以答案为E。
剑桥雅思真题4-阅读test1(附答案)
剑桥雅思阅读真题集1Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage 1 belowAdults and children are frequently confronted with statements about the alarming rate of loss of tropical rainforests. For example, one graphic illustration to which children might readily relate is the estimate that rainforests are being destroyed at a rate equivalent to one thousand football fields every forty minutes — about the duration of a normal classroom period. In the face of the frequent and often vivid media coverage, it is likely that children will have formed ideas about rainforests — what and where they are, why they are important, what endangers them — independent of any formal tuition. It is also possible that some of these ideas will be mistaken.Many studies have shown that children harbour misconceptions about ‘pure’, curriculum science. These misconceptions do not remain isolated but become incorporated into a multifaceted, but organised, conceptual framework, making it and the component ideas, some of which are erroneous, more robust but also accessible to modification. These ideas may be developed by children absorbing ideas through the popular media. Sometimes this information may be erroneous. It seems schools may not be providing an opportunity for children to re-express their ideas and so have them tested and refined by teachers and their peers.Despite the extensive coverage in the popular media of the destruction of rainforests, little formal information is available about children’s ideas in this area. The aim of the present study is to start to provide such information, to help teachers design their educational strategies to build upon correct ideas and to displace misconceptions and to plan programmes in environmental studies in their schools.The study surveys children’s scientific knowledge and attitudes to rainforests. Secondary school children were asked to complete a questionnaire containing five open-form questions. The most frequent responses to the first question were descriptions which are self-evident from the term ‘rainforest’. Some children described them as damp, wet or hot. The second question concerned the geographical location of rainforests. The commonest responses were continents or countries: Africa (given by 43% of children), South America (30%), Brazil (25%). Some children also gave more general locations, such as being near the Equator.Responses to question three concerned the importance of rainforests. The dominant idea, raised by 64% of the pupils, was that rainforests provide animals with habitats. Fewer students responded that rainforests provide plant habitats, and even fewer mentioned the indigenous populations of rainforests. More girls (70%) than boys (60%) raised the idea of rainforest as animal habitats.Similarly, but at a lower level, more girls (13%) than boys (5%) said that rainforests provided human habitats. These observations are generally consistent with our previous studies of pupils’ views about the use and conservation of rainforests, in which girls were shown to be more sympathetic to animals and expressed views which seem to place an intrinsic value on non-human animal life.The fourth question concerned the causes of the destruction of rainforests. Perhaps encouragingly,more than half of the pupils (59%) identified that it is human activities which are destroying rainforests, some personalising the responsibility by the use of terms such as ‘we are’. About 18% of the pupils referred specifically to logging activity.One misconception, expressed by some 10% of the pupils, was that acid rain is responsible for rainforest destruction; a similar proportion said that pollution is destroying rainforests. Here, children are confusing rainforest destruction with damage to the forests of Western Europe by these factors. While two fifths of the students provided the information that the rainforests provide oxygen, in some cases this response also embraced the misconception that rainforest destruction would reduce atmospheric oxygen, making the atmosphere incompatible with human life on Earth.In answer to the final question about the importance of rainforest conservation, the majority of children simply said that we need rainforests to survive. Only a few of the pupils (6%) mentioned that rainforest destruction may contribute to global warming. This is surprising considering the high level of media coverage on this issue. Some children expressed the idea that the conservation of rainforests is not important.The results of this study suggest that certain ideas predominate in the thinking of children about rainforests. Pupils’ responses indicate some misconceptions in basic scientific knowledge of rainforests’ ecosystems such as their ideas about rainforests as habitats for animals, plants and humans and the relationship between climatic change and destruction of rainforests.Pupils did not volunteer ideas that suggested that they appreciated the complexity of causes of rainforest destruction. In other words, they gave no indication of an appreciation of either the range of ways in which rainforests are important or the complex social, economic and political factors which drive the activities which are destroying the rainforests. One encouragement is that the results of similar studies about other environmental issues suggest that older children seem to acquire the ability to appreciate, value and evaluate conflicting views. Environmental education offers an arena in which these skills can be developed, which is essential for these children as future decision-makers.Questions 1-8Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this1 The plight of the rainforests has largely been ignored by the media.2 Children only accept opinions on rainforests that they encounter in their classrooms.3 It has been suggested that children hold mistaken views about the ‘pure’ science that they study at school.4 The fact that children’s ideas about science form part of a larger framework of ideas means thatit is easier to change them.5 The study involved asking children a number of yes/no questions such as ‘Are there any rainforests in Africa?’6 Girls are more likely than boys to hold mistaken views about the rainforests’ destruction.7 The study reported here follows on from a series of studies that have looked at children’s understanding of rainforests.8 A second study has been planned to investigate primary school children’s ideas about rainforests.Questions 9-13The box below gives a list of responses A-P to the questionnaire discussed in Reading Passage 1.Answer the following questions by choosing the correct responses A-P.Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.9 What was the children’s most frequent response when asked where the rainforests were?10 What was the most common response to the question about the importance of the rainforests?11 What did most children give as the reason for the loss of the rainforests?12 Why did most children think it important for the rainforests to be protected?13 Which of the responses is cited as unexpectedly uncommon, given the amount of time spent on the issue by the newspapers and television?Question 14Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, D or E.Write your answer in box 14 on your answer sheet.Which of the following is the most suitable title for Reading Passage 1?A The development of a programme in environmental studies within a science curriculumB Children’s ideas about the rainforests and the implications for course designC The extent to which children have been misled by the media concerning the rainforestsD How to collect, collate and describe the ideas of secondary school children.E The importance of the rainforests and the reasons for their destructionREADING PASSAGE 2You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.What Do Whales Feel?An examination of the functioning of the senses in cetaceans, the group of mammals comprising whales, dolphins and porpoisesSome of the senses that we and other terrestrial mammals take for granted are either reduced or absent in cetaceans or fail to function well in water. For example, it appears from their brain structure that toothed species are unable to smell. Baleen species, on the other hand, appear to have some related brain structures but it is not known whether these are functional. It has been speculated that, as the blowholes evolved and migrated to the top of the head, the neural pathways serving sense of smell may have been nearly all sacrificed. Similarly, although at least some cetaceans have taste buds, the nerves serving these have degenerated or are rudimentary.The sense of touch has sometimes been described as weak too, but this view is probably mistaken. Trainers of captive dolphins and small whales often remark on their animals’ responsiveness to being touched or rubbed, and both captive and free-ranging cetacean individuals of all species (particularly adults and calves, or members of the same subgroup) appear to make frequent contact. This contact may help to maintain order within a group, and stroking or touching are part of the courtship ritual in most species. The area around the blowhole is also particularly sensitive and captive animals often object strongly to being touched there.The sense of vision is developed to different degree in different species. Baleen species studied at close quarters underwater — specifically a grey whale calf in captivity for a year, and free-ranging right whale and humpback whales studied and filmed off Argentina and Hawaii — have obviously tracked objects with vision underwater, and they can apparently see moderately well both in water and in air. However, the position of the eyes so restricts the field of vision in baleen whales that they probably do not have stereoscopic vision.On the other hand, the position of the eyes in most dolphins and porpoises suggests that they have stereoscopic vision forward and downward. Eye position in freshwater dolphins, which often swim on their side or upside down while feeding, suggests that what vision they have is stereoscopic forward and upward. By comparison, the bottlenose dolphin has extremely keenvision in water. Judging from the way it watches and tracks airborne flying fish, it can apparently see fairly well through the air-water interface as well. And although preliminary experimental evidence suggests that their in-air vision is poor, the accuracy with which dolphins leap high to take small fish out of a trainer’s hand provides anecdotal evidence to the contrary.Such variation can no doubt be explained with reference to the habitats in which individual species have developed. For example, vision is obviously more useful to species inhabiting clear open waters than to those living in turbid rivers and flooded plains. The South American boutu and Chinese Beiji, for instance, appear to have very limited vision, and the Indian susus are blind, their eyes reduced to slits that probably allow them to sense only the direction and intensity of light.Although the senses of taste and smell appear to have deteriorated, and vision in water appears to be uncertain, such weaknesses are more than compensated for by cetaceans’ well-developed acoustic sense. Most species are highly vocal, although they vary in the range of sounds they produce, and many forage for food using echolocation1. Large baleen whales primarily use the lower frequencies and are often limited in their repertoire. Notable exceptions are the nearly song-like choruses of bowhead whales in summer and the complex, haunting utterances of the humpback whales. Toothed species in general employ more of the frequency spectrum, and produce a wider variety of sounds, than baleen species (though the sperm whale apparently produces a monotonous series of high-energy clicks and little else). Some of the more complicated sounds are clearly communicative, although what role they may play in the social life and ‘culture’ of cetaceans has been more the subject of wild speculation than of solid science.1. echolocation: the perception of objects by means of sound wave echoes.Questions 15-21Complete the table below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 2 for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 15-21 on your answer sheet.Questions 22-26Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.22 Which of the senses is described here as being involved in mating?23 What species swims upside down while eating?24 What can bottlenose dolphins follow from under the water?25 Which type of habitat is related to good visual ability?26 Which of the senses is best developed in cetaceans?READING PASSAGE 3You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.Visual Symbols and the BlindFrom a number of recent studies, it has become clear that blind people can appreciate the use of outlines and perspectives to describe the arrangement of objects and other surfaces in space. But pictures are more than literal representations. This fact was drawn to my attention dramatically when a blind woman in one of my investigations decided on her own initiative to draw a wheel as it was spinning. To show this motion, she traced a curve inside the circle (Fig. 1). I was taken aback. Lines of motion, such as the one she used, are a very recent invention in the history of illustration. Indeed, as art scholar David Kunzle notes, Wilhelm Busch, a trend-setting nineteenth-century cartoonist, used virtually no motion lines in his popular figures until about 1877.When I asked several other blind study subjects to draw a spinning wheel, one particularly clever rendition appeared repeatedly: several subjects showed the wheel’s spokes as curved lines. When asked about these curves, they all described them as metaphorical ways of suggesting motion. Majority rule would argue that this device somehow indicated motion very well. But was it a better indicator than, say, broken or wavy lines — or any other kind of line, for that matter? The answer was not clear. So I decided to test whether various lines of motion were apt ways of showing movement or if they were merely idiosyncratic marks. Moreover, I wanted to discover whether there were differences in how the blind and the sighted interpreted lines of motion.To search out these answers, I created raised-line drawings of five different wheels, depicting spokes with lines that curved, bent, waved, dashed and extended beyond the perimeter of the wheel. I then asked eighteen blind volunteers to feel the wheels and assign one of the following motions to each wheel: wobbling, spinning fast, spinning steadily, jerking or braking. My control group consisted of eighteen sighted undergraduates from the University of Toronto.All but one of the blind subjects assigned distinctive motions to each wheel. Most guessed that the curved spokes indicated that the wheel was spinning steadily; the wavy spokes, they thought, suggested that the wheel was wobbling; and the bent spokes were taken as a sign that the wheel was jerking. Subjects assumed that spokes extending beyond the wheel’s perimeter signified that the wheel had its brakes on and that dashed spokes indicated the wheel was spinning quickly.In addition, the favoured description for the sighted was the favoured description for the blind in every instance. What is more, the consensus among the sighted was barely higher than that among the blind. Because motion devices are unfamiliar to the blind, the task I gave them involved some problem solving. Evidently, however, the blind not only figured out meanings for each line of motion, but as a group they generally came up with the same meaning at least as frequently as did sighted subjects.We have found that the blind understand other kinds of visual metaphors as well. One blind woman drew a picture of a child inside a heart – choosing that symbol, she said, to show that love surrounded the child. With Chang Hong Liu, a doctoral student from China, I have begun exploring how well blind people understand the symbolism behind shapes such as hearts that do not directly represent their meaning.We gave a list of twenty pairs of words to sighted subjects and asked them to pick from each pair the term that best related to a circle and the term that best related to a square. For example, we asked: What goes with soft? A circle or a square? Which shape goes with hard?All our subjects deemed the circle soft and the square hard. A full 94% ascribed happy to the circle, instead of sad. But other pairs revealed less agreement: 79%matched fast to slow and weak to strong, respectively. And only 51% linked deep to circle and shallow to square. (See Fig. 2) When we tested four totally blind volunteers using the same list, we found that their choices closely resembled those made by the sighted subjects. One man, who had been blind since birth, scored extremely well. He made only one match differing from the consensus, assigning ‘far’ to square and ‘near’ to circle. In fact, only a small majority of sighted subjects – 53% – had paired far and near to the opposite partners. Thus, we concluded that the blind interpret abstract shapes as sighted people do.Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write your answers in boxes 27-29 on your answer sheet.27 In the first paragraph the writer makes the point that blind people.A may be interested in studying art.B can draw outlines of different objects and surfaces.C can recognise conventions such as perspective.D can draw accurately.28 The writer was surprised because the blind womanA drew a circle on her own initiative.B did not understand what a wheel looked like.C included a symbol representing movement.D was the first person to use lines of motion.29 From the experiment described in Part 1, the writer found that the blind subjectsA had good understanding of symbols representing movement.B could control the movement of wheels very accurately.C worked together well as a group in solving problems.D got better results than the sighted undergraduates.Questions 30-32Look at the following diagrams (Questions 30-32), and the list of types of movement below. Match each diagram to the type of movement A-E generally assigned to it the experiment. Choose the correct letter A-E and write them in boxes 30-32 on your answer sheet.Complete the summary below using words from the box.Write your answers in boxes 33-39 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any word more than once.In the experiment described in Part 2, a set of word 33…… was used to investigate whether blind and sighted people perceived the symbolism in abstract 34…… in the same way. Subjects were asked which word fitted best with a circle and which with a square. From the 35… volunteers, everyone thought a circle fitted ‘soft’ while a square fitted ‘hard’.However, only 51% of the 36…… volunteers assigned a circle to 37…… . When the test was later repeated with 38…… volunteers, it was found that they made 39…… choices.Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.Write your answer in box 40 on your answer sheet.Which of the following statements best summarises the writer’s general conclusion?A The blind represent some aspects of reality differently from sighted people.B The blind comprehend visual metaphors in similar ways to sighted people.C The blind may create unusual and effective symbols to represent reality.D The blind may be successful artists if given the right training.参考答案1. FALSE2. FALSE3. TRUE4. TRUE5. FALSE6. NOT GIVEN7. TRUE8. NOT GIVEN9. M10. E11. G12. P13. J14. B15. taste buds16. baleen/the baleen whales17. forward downward (IN EITHER ORDER, BOTH REQUIRED FOR ONE MARK)18. freshwater dolphin(s)/ the freshwater dolphin(s)19. water/the water20. lower frequencies/the lower frequencies21. bowhead humpback (IN EITHER ORDER, BOTH REQUIRED FOR ONE MARK)22. touch/sense of touch23. freshwater dolphin(s)/ the freshwater dolphin(s)24. airborne flying fish25. clear water(s)/clear open water(s)26. acoustic sense/the acoustic sense27. C28. C29. A30. E31. C32. A33. pairs34. shapes35. sighted36. sighted37. deep38. blind39. similar40. B。
剑桥雅思真题7-阅读Test 3(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题7-阅读Test 3（附答案）Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.Ant IntelligenceWhen we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising images and jingle s, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids* as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child lab our, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.'However, in ants there is no cultural transmission -everything must be encoded in the genes -whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.Or have they? The farming methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can't digest the cellulose in leaves - but some fungi can. They therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might ac t as 'weeds', and spread waste to fertilize the crop.It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 8 62 different types of fungi taken from ants' nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles - the forcing house of intelligence -the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplishedby humans. Yet Hoelldobler and Wilson's magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants, describes a supercolony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This 'megalopolis' was reported to be compose d of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4, 500 interconnected nests a cross a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric ma n looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind? Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn too.And in a twelve-year programmed of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in a maze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odor clues. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a 'left-right' sequence of turns or as a 'compass bearing and distance ' message.During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals - even without the paint spots used to mark them. It's no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, 'In the company of ants', advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: 'Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives.' Question 1-6Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage1. Ants use the same channels of communication as humans do.2. City life is one factor that encourages the development of intelligence.3. Ants can build large cities more quickly than humans do.4. Some ants can find their way by making calculations based on distance and position.5. In one experiment, foraging teams were able to use their sense of smell to find food.6. The essay, ‘In the company of ants’, explores ant communication.Question 7-13Complete the summary using the list of words, A-O, below.Write the correct letter, A-O, in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.Ants have sophisticated methods of farming, including herding livestock and growing crops, which are in many ways similar to those used in human agriculture. The ants cultivate a largenumber of different species of edible fungi which convert 7 …………into a form which they can digest. They use their own natural8………… as weed-killers and also use unwanted materials as 9………… Genetic analysis shows they constantly upgrade these fungi by developing new species and by 10 …………species with neighbouring ant colonies. In fact, the forming methods of ants could be said to be more advanced than human agribusiness, since they use 11 …………methods, they do not affect the 12………… and do not waste 13 ………… .You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.Population movements and geneticsA Study of the origins and distribution of human populations used to be based on archaeological and fossil evidence. A number of techniques developed since the 1950s, however, have placed the study of these subjects on a sounder and more objective footing. The best information on early population movements is now being obtained from the 'archaeology of the living body', the clues to be found in genetic material.B Recent work on the problem of when people first entered the Americas is an example of the value of these new techniques. North-east Asia and Siberia have long been accepted as the launching ground for the first human colonizers of the New World. But was there one major wave of migration across the Bering Strait into the Americas, or several? And when did this event, or events, take place？In recent years, new clues have come from research into genetics, including the distribution of genetic markers in modern Native Americans.C An important project, led by the biological anthropologist Robert Williams, focused on the variants (called Gm allotypes) of one particular protein -immunoglobin G-found in the fluid portion of human blood. All proteins 'drift', or produce variants, over the generations, and members of an interbreeding human population will share a set of such variants. Thus, by comparing the Gm allotypes of two different populations (e.g. two Indian tribes), one can establish their genetic 'distance', which itself can be calibrated to give an indication of the length of time since these populations last interbred.D Williams and his colleagues sampled the blood of over 5,000 American Indians in western North America during a twenty- year period. They found that their Gm allotypes could be divided into two groups, one of which also corresponded to the genetic typing of Central and South American Indians. Other tests showed that the Inuit (or Eskimo) and Aleut formed a third group. From this evidence it was deduced that there had been three major waves of migration across the Bering Strait. The first, Paleo-lndian, wave more than 15,000 years ago was ancestral to all Central and South American Indians. The second wave, about 14,000-12,000 years ago, brought Na-Dene hunters, ancestors of the Navajo and Apache (who only migrated south from Canada about 600 or 700 years ago). The third wave, perhaps 10,000 or 9,000 years ago, saw the migration from North-east Asia of groups ancestral to the modern Eskimo and Aleut.E How far does other research support these conclusions ？Geneticist Douglas Wallace has studied mitochondrial DNA in blood samples from three widely separated Native American groups: Pima- Papago Indians in Arizona, Maya Indians on the Y ucatan peninsula, Mexico, and Ticuna Indians in the Upper Amazon region of Brazil. As would have been predicted by Robert Williams's work, all three groups appear to be descended from the same ancestral (Paleo-lndian) population.F There are two other kinds of research that have thrown some light on the origins of the Native American population; they involve the study of teeth and of languages. The biological anthropologist Christy Turner is an expert in the analysis of changing physical characteristics in human teeth. He argues that tooth crowns and roots have a high genetic component, minimally affected by environmental and other factors. Studies carried out by Turner of many thousands of New and Old World specimens, both ancient and modern, suggest that the majority of prehistoric Americans are linked to Northern Asian populations by crown and root traits such as incisor shoveling (a scooping out on one or both surfaces of the tooth), single-rooted upper first premolars and triple-rooted lower first molars.According to Turner, this ties in with the idea of a single Paleo-lndian migration out of North Asia, which he sets at before 14,000 years ago by calibrating rates of dental micro-evolution. Tooth analyses also suggest that there were two later migrations of Na-Denes and Eskimo- Aleut.G The linguist Joseph Greenberg has, since the 1950s, argued that all Native American languages belong to a single 'Amerind' family, except for Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut - a view that gives credence to the idea of three main migrations. Greenberg is in a minority among fellow linguists, most of whom favour the notion of a great many waves of migration to account for the more than 1,000 languages spoken at one time by American Indians. But there is no doubt that the new genetic and dental evidence provides strong backing for Greenberg's view. Dates given for the migrations should nevertheless be treated with caution, except where supported by hard archaeological evidence.Question 14-19Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-GChoose the correct heading for paragraphs A-F from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, i-x, into boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.14Section A15Section A16Section A17Section A18Section A19Section AThe discussion of Williams's research indicates the periods at which early people are thought to have migrated along certain routes. There are six routes, A-F, marked on the map below. Complete the table below.Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 20 and 21 on your answer sheet.Early Population Movement to the AmericasQuestion 22-25Reading Passage 2 refers to the three-wave theory of early migration to the Americas. It also suggests in which of these three waves the ancestors of various groups of modem native Americans first reached the continent.Classify the groups named in the table below as originating fromA the first waveB the second waveC the third waveWrite the correct letter, A, B or C, in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.Choose the correct letter, A. B, C or D.Write the correct letter in box 26 on your answer sheet.26. Christy Turner's research involved the examination ofA. teeth from both prehistoric and modem Americans and Asians.B. thousands of people who live in either the New or the Old World.C. dental specimens from the majority of prehistoric Americans.D. the eating habits of American and Asian populations.Reading Passage 3You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.Forests are one of the main elements of our natural heritage. The decline of Europe's forests over the last decade and a half has led to an increasing awareness and understanding of the serious imbalances which threaten them.European countries are becoming increasingly concerned by major threats to European forests, threats which know no frontiers other than those of geography or climate: air pollution, soil deterioration, the increasing number of forest fires and sometimes even the mismanagement of our woodland and forest heritage. There has been a growing awareness of the need for countries to get together to co-ordinate their policies. In December 1990, Strasbourg hosted the first Ministerial Conference on the protection of Europe's forests. The conference brought together 31 countries from both Western and Eastern Europe. The topics discussed included the co-ordinated study of the destruction of forests, as well as how to combat forest fires and the extension of European research programs on the forest ecosystem. The preparatory work for the conference had been undertaken at two meetings of experts. Their initial task was to decide which of the many forest problems of concern to Europe involved the largest number of countries and might be the subject of joint action. Those confined to particular geographical areas, such as countries bordering the Mediterranean or the Nordic countriestherefore had to be discarded. However, this does not mean that in future they will be ignored.As a whole, European countries see forests as performing a triple function: biological, economic and recreational. The first is to act as a 'green lung' for our planet; by means of photosynthesis, forests produce oxygen through the transformation of solar energy, thus fulfilling what for humans is the essential role of an immense, non-polluting power plant. At the same time, forests provide raw materials for human activities through their constantly renewed production of wood. Finally, they offer those condemned to spend five days a week in an urban environment an unrivalled area of freedom to unwind and take part in a range of leisure activities, such as hunting, riding and hiking. The economic importance of forests has been understood since the dawn of man - wood was the first fuel. The other aspects have been recognised only for a few centuries but they are becoming more and more important. Hence, there is a real concern throughout Europe about the damage to the forest environment which threatens these three basic roles.The myth of the 'natural' forest has survived, yet there are effectively no remaining 'primary' forests in Europe. All European forests are artificial, having been adapted and exploited by man for thousands of years. This means that a forest policy is vital, that it must transcend national frontiers and generations of people, and that it must allow for the inevitable changes that take place in the forests, in needs, and hence in policy. The Strasbourg conference was one of the first events on such a scale to reach this conclusion. A general declaration was made that 'a central place in any ecologically coherent forest policy must be given to continuity over time and to the possible effects of unforeseen events, to ensure that the full potential of these forests is maintained'.That general declaration was accompanied by six detailed resolutions to assist national policy-making. The first proposes the extension and systematisation of surveillance sites to monitor forest decline. Forest decline is still poorly understood but leads to the loss of a high proportion of a tree's needles or leaves. The entire continent and the majority of species are now affected: between 30%and 50% of the tree population. The condition appears to result from the cumulative effect of a number of factors, with atmospheric pollutants the principal culprits. Compounds of nitrogen and sulphur dioxide should be particularly closely watched. However, their effects are probably accentuated by climatic factors, such as drought and hard winters, or soil imbalances such as soil acidification, which damages the roots. The second resolution concentrates on the need to preserve the genetic diversity of European forests. The aim is to reverse the decline in the number of tree species or at least to preserve the 'genetic material' of all of them. Although forest fires do not affect all of Europe to the same extent, the amount of damage caused the experts to propose as the third resolution that the Strasbourg conference consider the establishment of a European databank on the subject. All information used in the development of national preventative policies would become generally available. The subject of the fourth resolution discussed by the ministers was mountain forests. In Europe, it is undoubtedly the mountain ecosystem which has changed most rapidly and is most at risk. A thinly scattered permanent population and development of leisure activities, particularly skiing, have resulted in significant long-term changes to the local ecosystems. Proposed developments include a preferential research program on mountain forests. The fifth resolution relaunched the European research network on the physiology of trees, called Eurosilva. Eurosilva should support joint European research on tree diseases and their physiological and biochemical aspects. Each country concerned could increase the number of scholarships and other financial support for doctoraltheses and research projects in this area. Finally, the conference established the framework for a European research network on forest ecosystems. This would also involve harmonising activities in individual countries as well as identifying a number of priority research topics relating to the protection of forests. The Strasbourg conference's main concern was to provide for the future. This was the initial motivation, one now shared by all 31 participants representing 31 European countries. Their final text commits them to on-going discussion between government representatives with responsibility for forests.Question 27-33Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?In boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage27. Forest problems of Mediterranean countries are to be discussed at the next meeting of experts.28. Problems in Nordic countries were excluded because they are outside the European Economic Community.29. Forests are a renewable source of raw material.30. The biological functions of forests were recognised only in the twentieth century.31. Natural forests still exist in parts of Europe.32. Forest policy should be limited by national boundaries.33. The Strasbourg conference decided that a forest policy must allow for the possibility of change.Question 34-39Look at the following statements issued by the conference.Which six of the following statements, A-J, refer to the resolutions that were issued?Match the statements with the appropriate resolutions (Questions 34-39).Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes 34-39 on your answer sheet.35Resolution 236Resolution 337Resolution 438Resolution 539Resolution 6Question 40Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.40. What is the best title for Reading Passage 3?A. The biological, economic and recreational role of forestsB. Plans to protect the forests of EuropeC. The priority of European research into ecosystemsD. Proposals for a world-wide policy on forest management参考答案1 FALSE2 TRUE3 NOT GIVEN4 TRUE5 FALSE6 NOT GIVEN7 C8 M9 F10 D11 N12 O13 E14 iv15 vii16 x17 i18 vi19 ii20 E21 D22 C23 B24 A25 A26 A27 NOT GIVEN28 FALSE29 TRUE30 FALSE31 FALSE32 FALSE33 TRUE34 J35 A36 E37 B38 G39 D40 B。
剑桥雅思真题14-阅读Test 1(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题14-阅读Test 1（附答案）READING PASSAGE 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.THE IMPORTANCE OF CHILDREN'S PLAYBrick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale turrets and fire-breathing dragons, wicked witches and gallant heroes, she's creating an enchanting world. Although she isn't aware of it, this fantasy is helping her take her first steps towards her capacity for creativity and so it will have important repercussions in her adult life.Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of playing schools with her younger brother. When she bosses him around as his 'teacher', she's practising how to regulate her emotions through pretence. Later on, when they tire of this and settle down with a board game, she's learning about the need to follow rules and take turns with a partner.'Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species,' says Dr David Whitebread from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. 'It underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem-solving adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable species.'Recognising the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for adult life, and ideas about play-based learning have been developing since the 19th century.But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline in play, pointing out that over half the people in the world now live in cities. 'The opportunities for free play, which I experienced almost every day of my childhood, are becoming increasingly scarce,' he says. Outdoor play is curtailed by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, as well as parents' increased wish to protect their children from being the victims of crime, and by the emphasis on 'earlier is better' which is leading to greater competition in academic learning and schools.International bodies like the United Nations and the European Union have begun to develop policies concerned with children's right to play, and to consider implications for leisure facilities and educational programmes. But what they often lack is the evidence to base policies on.'The type of play we are interested in is child-initiated, spontaneous and unpredictable - but, as soon as you ask a five-year-old "to play", then you as the researcher have intervened,' explains Dr Sara Baker. 'And we want to know what the long-term impact of play is. It's a real challenge.' Dr Jenny Gibson agrees, pointing out that although some of the steps in the puzzle of how and why play is important have been looked at, there is very little data on the impact it has on the child's later life.Now, thanks to the university's new Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL), Whitebread, Baker, Gibson and a team of researchers hope to provide evidence on the role played by play in how a child develops.'A strong possibility is that play supports the early development of children's self-control,' explains Baker. 'This is our ability to develop awareness of our own thinking processes -it influences how effectively we go about undertaking challenging activities.'In a study carried out by Baker with toddlers and young pre-schoolers, she found that children with greater self-control solved problems more quickly when exploring an unfamiliarset-up requiring scientific reasoning. 'This sort of evidence makes us think that giving children the chance to play will make them more successful problem-solvers in the long run.' If playful experiences do facilitate this aspect of development, say the researchers, it could be extremely significant for educational practices, because the ability to self-regulate has been shown to be a key predictor of academic performance.Gibson adds: 'Playful behaviour is also an important indicator of healthy social and emotional development. In my previous research, I investigated how observing children at play can give us important clues about their well-being and can even be useful in the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.'Whitebread's recent research has involved developing a play-based approach to supporting children's writing. 'Many primary school children find writing difficult, but we showed in a previous study that a playful stimulus was far more effective than an instructional one.' Children wrote longer and better structured stories when they first played with dolls representing characters in the story. In the latest study, children first created their story with Lego*, with similar results. 'Many teachers commented that they had always previously had children saying they didn't know what to write about. With the Lego building, however, not a single child said this through the whole year of the project.'Whitebread, who directs PEDAL, trained as a primary school teacher in the early 1970s, when, as he describes, 'the teaching of young children was largely a quiet backwater, untroubled by any serious intellectual debate or controversy.' Now, the landscape is very different, with hotly debated topics such as school starting age.'Somehow the importance of play has been lost in recent decades. It's regarded as something trivial, or even as something negative that contrasts with "work". Let's not lose sight of its benefits, and the fundamental contributions it makes to human achievements in the arts, sciences and technology. Let's make sure children have a rich diet of play experiences.'* Lego: coloured plastic building blocks and other pieces that can be joined together Questions 1-8Complete the notes below.Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the information,NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this9 Children with good self-control are known to be likely to do well at school later on.10 The way a child plays may provide information about possible medical problems.11 Playing with dolls was found to benefit girls' writing more than boys' writing.12 Children had problems thinking up ideas when they first created the story with Lego.13 People nowadays regard children's play as less significant than they did in the past.READING PASSAGE 2You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.The growth of bike-sharing schemes around the worldHow Dutch engineer Luud Schimmelpennink helped to devise urban bike-sharing schemesA The original idea for an urban bike-sharing scheme dates back to a summer's day in Amsterdam in 1965. Provo, the organisation that came up with the idea, was a group of Dutch activists who wanted to change society. They believed the scheme, which was known as the Witte Fietsenplan, was an answer to the perceived threats of air pollution and consumerism. In the centre of Amsterdam, they painted a small number of used bikes white. They also distributed leaflets describing the dangers of cars and inviting people to use the white bikes. The bikes were then left unlocked at various locations around the city, to be used by anyone in need of transport.B Luud Schimmelpennink, a Dutch industrial engineer who still lives and cycles in Amsterdam, was heavily involved in the original scheme. He recalls how the scheme succeeded in attracting a great deal of attention - particularly when it came to publicising Provo's aims - but struggled to get off the ground. The police were opposed to Provo's initiatives and almost as soon as the white bikes were distributed around the city, they removed them. However, for Schimmelpennink and for bike-sharing schemes in general, this was just the beginning. 'The first Witte Fietsenplan was just a symbolic thing,' he says. 'We painted a few bikes white, that was all. Things got more serious when I became a member of the Amsterdam city council two years later.'C Schimmelpennink seized this opportunity to present a more elaborate Witte Fietsenplan to the city council. 'My idea was that the municipality of Amsterdam would distribute 10,000 white bikes over the city, for everyone to use,' he explains.' I made serious calculations. It turned out that a white bicycle -per person, per kilometre -would cost the municipality only 10% of what it contributed to public transport per person per kilometre.' Nevertheless, the council unanimously rejected the plan. 'They said that the bicycle belongs to the past. They saw a glorious future for the car,' says Schimmelpennink. But he was not in the least discouraged.D Schimmelpennink never stopped believing in bike-sharing, and in the mid-90s, two Danes asked for his help to set up a system in Copenhagen. The result was the world's first large-scale bike-share programme. It worked on a deposit: 'You dropped a coin in the bike and when you returned it, you got your money back.' After setting up the Danish system, Schimmelpennink decided to try his luck again in the Netherlands -and this time he succeeded in arousing the interest of the Dutch Ministry of Transport. 'Times had changed,' he recalls. 'People had become more environmentally conscious, and the Danish experiment had proved that bike-sharing was areal possibility.' A new Witte Fietsenplan was launched in 1999 in Amsterdam. However, riding a white bike was no longer free; it cost one guilder per trip and payment was made with a chip card developed by the Dutch bank Postbank. Schimmelpennink designed conspicuous, sturdy white bikes locked in special racks which could be opened with the chip card - the plan started with 250 bikes, distributed over five stations.E Theo Molenaar, who was a system designer for the project, worked alongside Schimmelpennink. 'I remember when we were testing the bike racks, he announced that he had already designed better ones. But of course, we had to go through with the ones we had.' The system, however, was prone to vandalism and theft. 'After every weekend there would always be a couple of bikes missing,' Molenaar says. 'I really have no idea what people did with them, because they could instantly be recognised as white bikes.' But the biggest blow came when Postbank decided to abolish the chip card, because it wasn't profitable. 'That chip card was pivotal to the system,' Molenaar says. 'To continue the project we would have needed to set up another system, but the business partner had lost interest.'F Schimmelpennink was disappointed, but - characteristically - not for long. In 2002 he got a call from the French advertising corporation JC Decaux, who wanted to set up his bike-sharing scheme in Vienna. 'That went really well. After Vienna, they set up a system in Lyon. Then in 2007, Paris followed. That was a decisive moment in the history of bike-sharing.' The huge and unexpected success of the Parisian bike-sharing programme, which now boasts more than 20,000 bicycles, inspired cities all over the world to set up their own schemes, all modelled on Schimmelpennink's. 'It's wonderful that this happened,' he says. 'But financially I didn't really benefit from it, because I never filed for a patent.'G In Amsterdam today 38% of all trips are made by bike and, along with Copenhagen, it is regarded as one of the two most cycle-friendly capitals in the world -but the city never got another Witte Fietsenplan. Molenaar believes this may be because everybody in Amsterdam already has a bike. Schimmelpennink, however, cannot see that this changes Amsterdam's need for a bike-sharing scheme. 'People who travel on the underground don't carry their bikes around. But often they need additional transport to reach their final destination.' Although he thinks it is strange that a city like Amsterdam does not have a successful bike-sharing scheme, he is optimistic about the future. 'In the '60s we didn't stand a chance because people were prepared to give their lives to keep cars in the city. But that mentality has totally changed. Today everybody longs for cities that are not dominated by cars.'Questions 14-18Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any letter more than once.14 a description of how people misused a bike-sharing scheme15 an explanation of why a proposed bike-sharing scheme was turned down16 a reference to a person being unable to profit from their work17 an explanation of the potential savings a bike-sharing scheme would bring18 a reference to the problems a bike-sharing scheme was intended to solveQuestions 19 and 20Choose TWO letters, A-E.Write the correct letters in boxes 19 and 20 on your answer sheet.Which TWO of the following statements are made in the text about the Amsterdam bike-sharing scheme of 1999?A It was initially opposed by a government department.B It failed when a partner in the scheme withdrew support.C It aimed to be more successful than the Copenhagen scheme.D It was made possible by a change in people's attitudes.E It attracted interest from a range of bike designers.Questions 21 and 22Choose TWO letters, A-E.Write the correct letters in boxes 21 and 22 on your answer sheet.Which TWO of the following statements are made in the text about Amsterdam today?A The majority of residents would like to prevent all cars from entering the city.B There is little likelihood of the city having another bike-sharing scheme.C More trips in the city are made by bike than by any other form of transport.D A bike-sharing scheme would benefit residents who use public transport.E The city has a reputation as a place that welcomes cyclists.Questions 23-26Complete the summary below.Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.The first urban bike-sharing schemeThe first bike-sharing scheme was the idea of the Dutch group Provo. The people who belonged to this group were 23 ________ . They were concerned about damage to the environment and about 24 ________, and believed that the bike-sharing scheme would draw attention to these issues. As well as painting some bikes white, they handed out 25 ________ that condemned the use of cars.However, the scheme was not a great success: almost as quickly as Provo left the bikes around the city, the 26 ________ took them away. According to Schimmelpennink, the scheme was intended to be symbolic. The idea was to get people thinking about the issues.READING PASSAGE 3You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.Motivational factors and the hospitality industryA critical ingredient in the success of hotels is developing and maintaining superior performance from their employees. How is that accomplished? What Human Resource Management (HRM) practices should organizations invest in to acquire and retain great employees?Some hotels aim to provide superior working conditions for their employees. The idea originated from workplaces -usually in the non-service sector -that emphasized fun and enjoyment as part of work-life balance. By contrast, the service sector, and more specifically hotels, has traditionally not extended these practices to address basic employee needs, such as good working conditions.Pfeffer (1994) emphasizes that in order to succeed in a global business environment,organizations must make investment in Human Resource Management (HRM) to allow them to acquire employees who possess better skills and capabilities than their competitors. This investment will be to their competitive advantage. Despite this recognition of the importance of employee development, the hospitality industry has historically been dominated by underdeveloped HR practices (Lucas, 2002).Lucas also points out that 'the substance of HRM practices does not appear to be designed to foster constructive relations with employees or to represent a managerial approach that enables developing and drawing out the full potential of people, even though employees may be broadly satisfied with many aspects of their work' (Lucas, 2002). In addition, or maybe as a result, high employee turnover has been a recurring problem throughout the hospitality industry. Among the many cited reasons are low compensation, inadequate benefits, poor working conditions and compromised employee morale and attitudes (Maroudas et al., 2008).Ng and Sorensen (2008) demonstrated that when managers provide recognition to employees, motivate employees to work together, and remove obstacles preventing effective performance, employees feel more obligated to stay with the company. This was succinctly summarized by Michel et al. (2013): '[P]roviding support to employees gives them the confidence to perform their jobs better and the motivation to stay with the organization.' Hospitality organizations can therefore enhance employee motivation and retention through the development and improvement of their working conditions. These conditions are inherently linked to the working environment.While it seems likely that employees' reactions to their job characteristics could be affected by a predisposition to view their work environment negatively, no evidence exists to support this hypothesis (Spector et al., 2000). However, given the opportunity, many people will find something to complain about in relation to their workplace (Poulston, 2009). There is a strong link between the perceptions of employees and particular factors of their work environment that are separate from the work itself, including company policies, salary and vacations.Such conditions are particularly troubling for the luxury hotel market, where high-quality service, requiring a sophisticated approach to HRM, is recognized as a critical source of competitive advantage (Maroudas et al., 2008). In a real sense, the services of hotel employees represent their industry (Schneider and Bowen, 1993). This representation has commonly been limited to guest experiences. This suggests that there has been a dichotomy between the guest environment provided in luxury hotels and the working conditions of their employees.It is therefore essential for hotel management to develop HRM practices that enable them to inspire and retain competent employees. This requires an understanding of what motivates employees at different levels of management and different stages of their careers (Enz and Siguaw, 2000). This implies that it is beneficial for hotel managers to understand what practices are most favorable to increase employee satisfaction and retention.Herzberg (1966) proposes that people have two major types of needs, the first being extrinsic motivation factors relating to the context in which work is performed, rather than the work itself. These include working conditions and job security. When these factors are unfavorable, job dissatisfaction may result. Significantly, though, just fulfilling these needs does not result in satisfaction, but only in the reduction of dissatisfaction (Maroudas et al., 2008).Employees also have intrinsic motivation needs or motivators, which include such factors as achievement and recognition. Unlike extrinsic factors, motivator factors may ideally result in job satisfaction (Maroudas et al., 2008). Herzberg's (1966) theory discusses the need for a 'balance' ofthese two types of needs.The impact of fun as a motivating factor at work has also been explored. For example, Tews, Michel and Stafford (2013) conducted a study focusing on staff from a chain of themed restaurants in the United States. It was found that fun activities had a favorable impact on performance and manager support for fun had a favorable impact in reducing turnover. Their findings support the view that fun may indeed have a beneficial effect, but the framing of that fun must be carefully aligned with both organizational goals and employee characteristics. 'Managers must learn how to achieve the delicate balance of allowing employees the freedom to enjoy themselves at work while simultaneously maintaining high levels of performance' (Tews et al., 2013).Deery (2008) has recommended several actions that can be adopted at the organizational level to retain good staff as well as assist in balancing work and family life. Those particularly appropriate to the hospitality industry include allowing adequate breaks during the working day, staff functions that involve families, and providing health and well-being opportunities. Questions 27-31Look at the following statements (Questions 27-31) and the fist of researchers below.Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-F.Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any letter more than once.27 Hotel managers need to know what would encourage good staff to remain.28 The actions of managers may make staff feel they shouldn't move to a different employer.29 Little is done in the hospitality industry to help workers improve their skills.30 Staff are less likely to change jobs if co-operation is encouraged.Questions 32-35Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?In boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet, writeYES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writerNO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writerNOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this32 One reason for high staff turnover in the hospitality industry is poor morale.33 Research has shown that staff have a tendency to dislike their workplace.34 An improvement in working conditions and job security makes staff satisfied with theirjobs.35 Staff should be allowed to choose when they take breaks during the working day. Questions 36-40Complete the summary below.Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.Fun at workTews, Michel and Stafford carried out research on staff in an American chain of 36 ________.They discovered that activities designed for staff to have fun improved their 37 ________, and that management involvement led to lower staff 38 ________. They also found that the activities needed to fit with both the company's 39 ________ and the 40 ________ of the staff. A balance was required between a degree of freedom and maintaining work standards.参考答案1 creativity2 rules3 cities4&5 IN EITHER ORDERtrafficcrime6 competition7 evidence8 life9 TRUE10 TRUE11 NOT GIVEN12 FALSE13 TRUE14 E15 C16 F17 C18 A19&20 IN EITHER ORDERBD21&22 IN EITHER ORDERDE23 activists24 consumerism25 leaflets26 police27 E28 D29 B30 D31 C32 YES33 NO34 NO35 NOT GIVEN36 restaurants37 performance38 turnover39 goals40 characteristics。
剑桥雅思真题5-阅读Test1(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题5-阅读Test1（附答案）Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.Johnson’s DictionaryFor the century before Johnson’s Dictionary was published in 1775, there had been concern about the state of the English language. There was no standard way of speaking or writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the chaos of English spelling. Dr Johnson provided the solution.There had, of course, been dictionaries in the past, the first of these being a little book of some 120 pages, compiled by a certain Robert Cawdray, published in 1604 under the title A Table Alphabeticall ‘of hard usuall English wordes’. Like the various dictionaries that came after it during the seventeenth century, Cawdray’s tended to concentrate on ‘scholarly’ words; one function of the dictionary was to enable its student to convey an impression of fine learning.Beyond the practical need to make order out of chaos, the rise of dictionaries is associated with the rise of the English middle class, who were anxious to define and circumscribe the various worlds to conquer —lexical as well as social and commercial. it is highly appropriate that Dr Samuel Johnson, the very model of an eighteenth-century literary man, as famous in his own time as in ours, should have published his Dictionary at the very beginning of the heyday of the middle class.Johnson was a poet and critic who raised common sense to the heights of genius. His approach to the problems that had worried writers throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was intensely practical. Up until his time, the task of producing a dictionary on such a large scale had seemed impossible without the establishment of an academy to make decisions about right and wrong usage. Johnson decided he did not need an academy to settle arguments about language; he would write a dictionary himself and he would do it single-handed. Johnson signed the contract for the Dictionary with the bookseller Robert Dosley at a breakfast held at the Golden Anchor Inn near Holbom Bar on 18 June 1764.He was to be paid ￡1.575 in instalments, and from this he took money to rent Gough Square, in which he set up his ‘dictionary workshop’.James Boswell, his biographer, described the garret where Johnson worked as ‘fitted up like a counting house’ with a long desk running down the middle at which the copying clerks would work standing up. Johnson himself was stationed on a rickety chair at an ‘old crazy deal table’ surrounded by a chaos of borrowed books. He was also helped by six assistants, two of whom died whilst the Dictionary was still in preparation.The work was immense; filling about eighty large notebooks (and without a library to hand), Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words, and illustrated their many meanings with some 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing on every subject, from the Elizabethans to his own time. He did not expect to achieve complete originality. Working to a deadline, he had to draw on the best of all previous dictionaries, and to make his work one of heroic synthesis. In fact, it was very much more. Unlike his predecessors, Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning. He adopted his definitions on theprinciple of English common law — according to precedent. After its publication, his Dictionary was not seriously rivalled for over a century.After many vicissitudes the Dictionary was finally published on 15 April 1775. It was instantly recognised as a landmark throughout Europe. ‘This very noble work,’ wrote the leading Italian lexicographer, ‘will be a perpetual monument of Fame to the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general Benefit to the republic of Letters throughout Europe.’ The fact that Johnson had taken on the Academies of Europe and matched them (everyone knew that forty French academics had taken forty years to produce the first French national dictionary) was cause for much English celebration.Johnson had worked for nine years, ‘with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. For all its faults and eccentricities his two-volume work is a masterpiece and a landmark, in his own words, ‘setting the orthography, displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the significations of English words’. It is the cornerstone of Standard English an achievement which, in James Boswell’s words ‘conferred stability on the language of his country.’The Dictionary, together with his other writing, made Johnson famous and so well esteemed that his friends were able to prevail upon King George Ⅲto offer him a pension. From then on, he was to become the Johnson of folklore.Questions 1-3Choose THREE letters A-H.Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.NB Your answers may be given in any order.Which THREE of the following statements are true of Johnson’s Dictionary?A It avoided all scholarly words.B It was the only English dictionary in general use for 200 years.C It was famous because of the large number of people involved.D It focused mainly on language from contemporary texts.E There was a time limit for its completion.F It ignored work done by previous dictionary writers.G It took into account subtleties of meaning.H Its definitions were famous for their originality.Questions 4-7Complete the summary.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 4-7 on your answer sheet.In 1764 Dr Johnson accepted the contract to produce a dictionary. Having rented a garret, he took on a number of 4…………, who stood at a long central desk. Johnson did not have a 5………… available to him, but eventually produced definitions of in excess of 40,000 words written down in 80 large notebooks. On publications, the Dictionary was immediately hailed in many European countries as a landmark. According to his biographer, James Boswell, Johnson’s principal achievement was to bring 6………… to the English language. As a reward for his hard work, he was granted a 7………by the king.Questions 8-13Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this8 The growing importance of the middle classes led to an increased demand for dictionaries.9 Johnson has become more well known since his death.10 Johnson had been planning to write a dictionary for several years.11 Johnson set up an academy to help with the writing of his Dictionary.12 Johnson only received payment for his Dictionary on its completion.13 Not all of the assistants survived to see the publication of the Dictionary.Reading Passage 2You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2below.Nature or NurtureA A few years ago, in one of the most fascinating and disturbing experiments in behavioural psychology. Stanley Milgram of Yale University tested 40 subjects from all walks of life for their willingness to obey instructions given by a 'leader in a situation in which the subjects might feel a personal distaste for the actions they were called upon to perform. Specifically, Milgram told each volunteer 'teacher-subject' that the experiment was in the noble cause of education, and was designed to test whether or not punishing pupils for their mistakes would have a positive effect on the pupils’ ability to learn.B Milgram's experimental set-up involved placing the teacher-subject before a panel of thirty switches with labels ranging from ‘15 volts of electricity (slight shock)' to ‘450 volts (danger -severe shock)' in steps of 15 volts each. The teacher-subject was told that whenever the pupil gave the wrong answer to a question, a shock was to be administered, beginning at the lowest level and increasing in severity with each successive wrong answer. The supposed 'pupil’ was in reality an actor hired by Milgram to simulate receiving the shocks by emitting a spectrum of groans, screams and writhings together with an assortment of statements and expletives denouncing both the experiment and the experimenter. Milgram told the teacher-subject to ignore the reactions of the pupil, and to administer whatever level of shock was called for, as per the rule governing the experimental situation of the moment.C As the experiment unfolded, the pupil would deliberately give the wrong answers to questions posed by the teacher, thereby bringing on various electrical punishments, even up to the danger level of 300 volts and beyond. Many of the teacher-subjects balked at administering the higher levels of punishment, and turned to Milgram with questioning looks and/or complaints about continuing the experiment. In these situations, Milgram calmly explained that the teacher-subject was to ignore the pupil's cries for mercy and carry on with the experiment. If the subject was still reluctant to proceed, Milgram said that it was important for the sake of the experiment that the procedure be followed through to the end. His final argument was, 'You have no other choice. You must go on'. What Milgram was trying to discover was the number of teacher-subjects who would be willing to administer the highest levels of shock, even in the face of strong personal and moral revulsion against the rules and conditions of the experiment.D Prior to carrying out the experiment, Milgram explained his idea to a group of 39 psychiatrists and asked them to predict the average percentage of people in an ordinary population who would be willing to administer the highest shock level of 450 volts. The overwhelming consensus was that virtually all the teacher-subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. The psychiatrists felt that 'most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts' and they further anticipated that only four per cent would go up to 300 volts. Furthermore, they thought that only a lunatic fringe of about one in 1000 would give the highest shock of 450 volts.E What were the actual results? Well, over 60 per cent of the teacher-subjects continued to obey Milgram up to the 450-volt limit! In repetitions of the experiment in other countries, the percentage of obedient teacher-subjects was even higher, reaching 85 per cent in one country. How can we possibly account for this vast discrepancy between what calm, rational, knowledgeable people predict in the comfort of their study and what pressured, flustered, but cooperative 'teachers' actually do in the laboratory of real life?F One's first inclination might be to argue that there must be some sort of built-in animal aggression instinct that was activated by the experiment, and that Milgram's teacher-subjects were just following a genetic need to discharge this pent-up primal urge onto the pupil by administering the electrical shock. A modern hard-core sociobiologist might even go so far as to claim that this aggressive instinct evolved as an advantageous trait, having been of survival value to our ancestors in their struggle against the hardships of life on the plains and in the caves, ultimately finding its way into our genetic make-up as a remnant of our ancient animal ways.G An alternative to this notion of genetic programming is to see the teacher-subjects' actions as a result of the social environment under which the experiment was carried out. As Milgram himself pointed out, 'Most subjects in the experiment see their behaviour in a larger context that is benevolent and useful to society - the pursuit of scientific truth. The psychological laboratory has a strong claim to legitimacy and evokes trust and confidence in those who perform there. An action such as shocking a victim, which in isolation appears evil, acquires a completely different meaning when placed in this setting.'H Thus, in this explanation the subject merges his unique personality and personal and moral code with that of larger institutional structures, surrendering individual properties like loyalty, self-sacrifice and discipline to the service of malevolent systems of authority.I Here we have two radically different explanations for why so many teacher-subjects were willing to forgo their sense of personal responsibility for the sake of an institutional authority figure. The problem for biologists, psychologists and anthropologists is to sort out which of these two polar explanations is more plausible. This, in essence, is the problem of modern sociobiology -to discover the degree to which hard-wired genetic programming dictates, or at least strongly biases, the interaction of animals and humans with their environment, that is, their behaviour. Put another way, sociobiology is concerned with elucidating the biological basis of all behaviour. Question 14-19Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter A-I in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.14. a biological explanation of the teacher-subjects’ behaviour15. the explanation Milgram gave the teacher-subjects for the experiment16. the identity of the pupils17. the expected statistical outcome18. the general aim of sociobiological study19. the way Milgram persuaded the teacher-subjects to continueQuestion 20-22Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write your answers in boxes 20-22 on your answer sheet.20. The teacher-subjects were told that they were testing whetherA. a 450-volt shock was dangerous.B. punishment helps learning.C. the pupils were honest.D. they were suited to teaching.21. The teacher-subjects were instructed toA. stop when a pupil asked them to.B. denounce pupils who made mistakes.C. reduce the shock level after a correct answer.D. give punishment according to a rule.22. Before the experiment took place the psychiatristsA. believed that a shock of 150 volts was too dangerous.B. failed to agree on how the teacher-subjects would respond to instructions.C. underestimated the teacher-subjects’ willingness to comply with experimental procedure.D. thought that many of the teacher-subjects would administer a shock of 450 volts.Question 23-26Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?In boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this23. Several of the subjects were psychology students at Yale University.24. Some people may believe that the teacher-subjects’ behaviour could be explained positive survival mechanism.25. In a sociological explanation, personal values are more powerful than authority.26. Milgram’s experiment solves an important question in sociobiology.Reading Passage 3You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 2below.The truth about the EnvironmentFor many environmentalists, the world seems to be getting worse. They have developed a hit-list of our main fears: that natural resources are running out; that the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat; that species are becoming extinct in vast numbers, and that the planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.But a quick look at the facts shows a different picture. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so, since the book The Limits to Growth was published in1972 by a group of scientists. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world’s population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming extinct only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient -associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution - the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming - does appear to be a phenomenon that is going to extend well into our future, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.Yet opinion polls suggest that many people nurture the belief that environmental standards are declining and four factors seem to cause this disjunction between perception and reality.One is the lopsidedness built into scientific research. Scientific funding goes mainly to areas with many problems. That may be wise policy, but it will also create an impression that many more potential problems exist than is the case.Secondly, environmental groups need to be noticed by the mass media. They also need to keep the money rolling in. Understandably, perhaps, they sometimes overstate their arguments. In 1997, for example, the World Wide Fund for Nature issued a press release entitled:'Two thirds of the world’s forests lost forever'. The truth turns out to be nearer 20%.Though these groups are run overwhelmingly by selfless folk, they nevertheless share many of the characteristics of other lobby groups. That would matter less if people applied the same degree of scepticism to environmental lobbying as they do to lobby groups in other fields. A trade organisation arguing for, say, weaker pollution controls is instantly seen as self-interested. Yet a green organisation opposing such a weakening is seen as altruistic, even if an impartial view of the controls in question might suggest they are doing more harm than good.A third source of confusion is the attitude of the media. People are clearly more curious about bad news than good. Newspapers and broadcasters are there to provide what the public wants. That, however, can lead to significant distortions of perception. An example was America^ encounter with El Nino in 1997 and 1998. This climatic phenomenon was accused of wrecking tourism, causing allergies, melting the ski-slopes and causing 22 deaths. However, according to an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the damage it did was estimated at US$4 billion but the benefits amounted to some US$19 billion. These came from higher winter temperatures (which saved an estimated 850 lives, reduced heating costs and diminished spring floods caused by meltwaters).The fourth factor is poor individual perception. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of stuff everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America's trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st century will still take up only one-12,000th of the area of the entire United States.So what of global warming? As we know, carbon dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. The best estimates are that the temperatures will rise by 2-3°C in this century, causing considerable problems, at a total cost of US$5,000 billion.Despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem, economic analyses clearly show it will be far more expensive to cut carbon dioxide emissionsradically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures. A model by one of the main authors of the United Nations Climate Change Panel shows how an expected temperature increase of 2.1 degrees in 2100 would only be diminished to an increase of 1.9 degrees. Or to put it another way, the temperature increase that the planet would have experienced in 2094 would be postponed to 2100.So this does not prevent global warming, but merely buys the world six years. Yet the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, for the United States alone, will be higher than the cost of solving the worlds single, most pressing health problem: providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Such measures would avoid 2 million deaths every year, and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill.It is crucial that we look at the facts if we want to make the best possible decisions for the future. It may be costly to be overly optimistic - but more costly still to be too pessimistic.Question 27-32Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?In boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the writer's claimsFALSE if the statement contradicts the writer's claimsNOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this27. Environmentalists take a pessimistic view of the world for a number of reasons.28. Data on the Earth's natural resources has only been collected since 1972.29. The number of starving people in the world has increased in recent years.30. Extinct species are being replaced by new species.31. Some pollution problems have been correctly linked to industrialisation.32. It would be best to attempt to slow down economic growth.Question 33-37Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write your answers in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.33. What aspect of scientific research does the writer express concern about in paragraph 4?A. the need to produce resultsB. the lack of financial supportC. the selection of areas to researchD. the desire to solve every research problem34. The writer quotes from the Worldwide Fund for Nature to illustrate howA. influential the mass media can be.B. effective environmental groups can be.C. the mass media can help groups raise funds.D. environmental groups can exaggerate their claims.35. What is the writer’s main point about lobby groups in paragraph 6?A. Some are more active than others.B. Some are better organised than others.C. Some receive more criticism than others.D. Some support more important issues than others.36. The writer suggests that newspapers print items that are intended toA. educate readers.B. meet their readers' expectations.C. encourage feedback from readers.D. mislead readers.37. What does the writer say about America’s waste problem?A. It will increase in line with population growth.B. It is not as important as we have been led to believe.C. It has been reduced through public awareness of the issues.D. It is only significant in certain areas of the country.Question 38-40Complete the summary with the list of words A-I below.Drag the correct letter A-I into boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.The writer admits that global warming is a 38………… challenge, but says that it will not have a catastrophic impact on our future, if we deal with it in the 39………… way. If we try to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases, he believes that it would only have a minimal impact on rising temperatures. He feels it would be better to spend money on the more 40………… health problem of providing the world’s population with clean drinking water.参考答案1-3 (IN ANY ORDER) D E G4 clerks / copying clerks5 library6 stability7 pension8 TRUE9 FALSE10 NOT GIVEN11 FALSE12 FALSE13 TRUE14 F15 A16 B17 D18 I19 C20 B21 D22 C23 NOT GIVEN24 TRUE25 FALSE26 FALSE27 YES28 NOT GIVEN29 NO30 NOT GIVEN31 YES32 NO33 C34 D35 C36 B37 B38 E39 D40 I。
剑桥雅思真题13-阅读Test 1(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题13-阅读Test 1（附答案）Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.Case Study: Tourism New Zealand websiteNew Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world. Tourism currently makes up 9% of the country's gross domestic product, and is the country's largest export sector. Unlike other export sectors, which make products and then sell them overseas, tourism brings its customers to New Zealand. The product is the country itself - the people, the places and the experiences. In 1999, Tourism New Zealand launched a campaign to communicate a new brand position to the world. The campaign focused on New Zealand's scenic beauty, exhilarating outdoor activities and authentic Maori culture, and it made New Zealand one of the strongest national brands in the world.A key feature of the campaign was the website , which provided potential visitors to New Zealand with a single gateway to everything the destination had to offer. The heart of the website was a database of tourism services operators, both those based in New Zealand and those based abroad which offered tourism services to the country. Any tourism-related business could be listed by filling in a simple form. This meant that even the smallest bed and breakfast address or specialist activity provider could gain a web presence with access to an audience of long-haul visitors. In addition, because participating businesses were able to update the details they gave on a regular basis, the information provided remained accurate. And to maintain and improve standards, Tourism New Zealand organised a scheme whereby organisations appearing on the website underwent an independent evaluation against a set of agreed national standards of quality. As part of this, the effect of each business on the environment was considered.To communicate the New Zealand experience, the site also carried features relating to famous people and places. One of the most popular was an interview with former New Zealand All Blacks rugby captain Tana Umaga. Another feature that attracted a lot of attention was an interactive journey through a number of the locations chosen for blockbuster films which had made use of New Zealand's stunning scenery as a backdrop. As the site developed, additional features were added to help independent travellers devise their own customised itineraries. To make it easier to plan motoring holidays, the site catalogued the most popular driving routes in the country, highlighting different routes according to the season and indicating distances and times.Later, a Travel Planner feature was added, which allowed visitors to click and 'bookmark' places or attractions they were interested in, and then view the results on a map. The Travel Planner offered suggested routes and public transport options between the chosen locations. There were also links to accommodation in the area. By registering with the website, users could save their Travel Plan and return to it later, or print it out to take on the visit. The website also had a 'Your Words' section where anyone could submit a blog of their New Zealand travels for possible inclusion on the website.The Tourism New Zealand website won two Webby awards for online achievement and innovation. More importantly perhaps, the growth of tourism to New Zealand was impressive. Overall tourismexpenditure increased by an average of 6.9% per year between 1999 and 2004. From Britain, visits to New Zealand grew at an average annual rate of 13% between 2002 and 2006, compared to a rate of 4% overall for British visits abroad.The website was set up to allow both individuals and travel organisations to create itineraries and travel packages to suit their own needs and interests. On the website, visitors can search for activities not solely by geographical location, but also by the particular nature of the activity. This is important as research shows that activities are the key driver of visitor satisfaction, contributing 74% to visitor satisfaction, while transport and accommodation account for the remaining 26%. The more activities that visitors undertake, the more satisfied they will be. It has also been found that visitors undertake, the more satisfied they will be. It has also been found that visitors enjoy cultural activities most when they are interactive, such as visiting a marae (meeting ground) to learn about traditional Maori life. Many long-haul travellers enjoy such learning experiences, which provide them with stories to take home to their friends and family. In addition, it appears that visitors to New Zealand don't want to be 'one of the crowd' and find activities that involve only a few people more special and meaningful.It could be argued that New Zealand is not a typical destination. New Zealand is a small country with a visitor economy composed mainly of small businesses. It is generally perceived as a safe English-speaking country with a reliable transport infrastructure. Because of the long-haul flight, most visitors stay for longer (average 20 days) and want to see as much of the country as possible on what is often seen as a once-in-a-lifetime visit. However, the underlying lessons apply anywhere -the effectiveness of a strong brand, a strategy based on unique experiences and a comprehensive and user-friendly website.Questions 1-7Complete the table below.Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.Questions 8-13Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this8. The website aimed to provide ready-made itineraries and packages for travel companies and individual tourists.9. It was found that most visitors started searching on the website by geographical location.10. According to research, 26% of visitor satisfaction is related to their accommodation.11. Visitors to New Zealand like to become involved in the local culture.12. Visitors like staying in small hotels in New Zealand rather than in larger ones.13. Many visitors feel it is unlikely that they will return to New Zealand after their visit.Reading Passage 2You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.Why being bored is stimulating - and useful, tooThis most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thoughtA We all know how it feels - it's impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. There isn't even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust - an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. 'If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from ''infectious'' social situations,' he suggests.B By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes - one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is 'reactant' boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls 'indifferent' boredom: someone isn't engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.C Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. 'All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,' she says. Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. 'We're all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,' she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up withmore creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander in fact, she goes so far as to (suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.D Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn't convinced. 'If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,' he says. 'In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.' That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't adaptive, he adds. 'Pain is adaptive - if we didn't have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.' For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our 'attention system' into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What's more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. 'People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there's that frustration and irritability,' he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we don't know what to do any more, and no longer care.E Eastwood's team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It's early days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill - it's the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz's group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who 'approach' a boring situation - in other words, see that it's boring and get stuck in anyway - report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.F Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. 'In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,' she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.Questions 14-19Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, A-H, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.14Paragraph A15Paragraph B16 Paragraph C17 Paragraph D18Paragraph E19Paragraph FQuestions 20-23Look at the following people (Questions 20-23) and the list of ideas below.Match each person with the correct idea, A-E.Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet.20Peter Toohey21 Thomas Goetz22John Eastwood23Francoise WemelsfelderQuestions 24-26Complete the summary below.Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.Responses to boredomFor John Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is that people cannot 24 …………, due to a failure in what he calls the 'attention system', and as a result they become frustrated and irritable. His team suggests that those for whom 25 ………… is an important aim in life may have problems in coping with boredom, whereas those who have the characteristic of 26 ………… can generally cope with it.Reading Passage 3You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.Artificial artistsCan computers really create works of art?The Painting Fool is one of a growing number of computer programs which, so their makers claim, possess creative talents. Classical music by an artificial composer has had audiences enraptured, and even tricked them into believing a human was behind the score. Artworks painted by a robothave sold for thousands of dollars and been hung in prestigious galleries. And software has been built which creates art that could not have been imagined by the programmer.Human beings are the only species to perform sophisticated creative acts regularly. If we can break this process down into computer code, where does that leave human creativity? 'This is a question at the very core of humanity, ' says Geraint Wiggins, a computational creativity researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. 'It scares a lot of people. They are worried that it is taking something special away from what it means to be human.'To some extent, we are all familiar with computerised art. The question is: where does the work of the artist stop and the creativity of the computer begin? Consider one of the oldest machine artists, Aaron, a robot that has had paintings exhibited in London's Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Aaron can pick up a paintbrush and paint on canvas on its own. Impressive perhaps, but it is still little more than a tool to realise the programmer's own creative ideas.Simon Colton, the designer of the Painting Fool, is keen to make sure his creation doesn't attract the same criticism. Unlike earlier 'artists' such as Aaron, the Painting Fool only needs minimal direction and can come up with its own concepts by going online for material. The software runs its own web searches and trawls through social media sites. It is now beginning to display a kind of imagination too, creating pictures from scratch. One of its original works is a series of fuzzy landscapes, depicting trees and sky. While some might say they have a mechanical look, Colton argues that such reactions arise from people's double standards towards software-produced and human-produced art. After all, he says, consider that the Painting Fool painted the landscapes without referring to a photo. 'If a child painted a new scene from its head, you'd say it has a certain level of imagination, ' he points out. 'The same should be true of a machine.' Software bugs can also lead to unexpected results. Some of the Painting Fool's paintings of a chair came out in black and white, thanks to a technical glitch. This gives the work an eerie, ghostlike quality. Human artists like the renowned Ellsworth Kelly are lauded for limiting their colour palette -so why should computers be any different?Researchers like Colton don't believe it is right to measure machine creativity directly to that of humans who 'have had millennia to develop our skills'. Others, though, are fascinated by the prospect that a computer might create something as original and subtle as our best artists. So far, only one has come close. Composer David Cope invented a program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI. Not only did EMI create compositions in Cope's style, but also that of the most revered classical composers, including Bach, Chopin and Mozart. Audiences were moved to tears, and EMI even fooled classical music experts into thinking they were hearing genuine Bach. Not everyone was impressed however. Some, such as Wiggins, have blasted Cope's work as pseudoscience, and condemned him for his deliberately vague explanation of how the software worked. Meanwhile, Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University said EMI created replicas which still rely completely on the original artist's creative impulses. When audiences found out the truth they were often outraged with Cope, and one music lover even tried to punch him. Amid such controversy, Cope destroyed EMI's vital databases.But why did so many people love the music, yet recoil when they discovered how it was composed? A study by computer scientist David Moffat of Glasgow Caledonian University provides a clue. He asked both expert musicians and non-experts to assess six compositions. The participants weren't told beforehand whether the tunes were composed by humans or computers,but were asked to guess, and then rate how much they liked each one. People who thought the composer was a computer tended to dislike the piece more than those who believed it was human. This was true even among the experts, who might have been expected to be more objective in their analyses.Where does this prejudice come from? Paul Bloom of Yale University has a suggestion: he reckons part of the pleasure we get from art stems from the creative process behind the work. This can give it an 'irresistible essence', says Bloom. Meanwhile, experiments by Justin Kruger of New York University have shown that people's enjoyment of an artwork increases if they think more time and effort was needed to create it. Similarly, Colton thinks that when people experience art, they wonder what the artist might have been thinking or what the artist is trying to tell them. It seems obvious, therefore, that with computers producing art, this speculation is cut short - there's nothing to explore. But as technology becomes increasingly complex, finding those greater depths in computer art could become possible. This is precisely why Colton asks the Painting Fool to tap into online social networks for its inspiration: hopefully this way it will choose themes that will already be meaningful to us.Questions 27-31Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write the correct letter in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.27 What is the writer suggesting about computer-produced works in the first paragraph?A People's acceptance of them can vary considerably.B A great deal of progress has already been attained in this field.C They have had more success in some artistic genres than in others.D The advances are not as significant as the public believes them to be.28 According to Geraint Wiggins, why are many people worried by computer art?A It is aesthetically inferior to human art.B It may ultimately supersede human art.C It undermines a fundamental human quality.D It will lead to a deterioration in human ability.29 What is a key difference between Aaron and the Painting Fool?A its programmer's backgroundB public response to its workC the source of its subject matterD the technical standard of its output30 What point does Simon Colton make in the fourth paragraph?A Software-produced art is often dismissed as childish and simplistic.B The same concepts of creativity should not be applied to all forms of art.C It is unreasonable to expect a machine to be as imaginative as a human being.D People tend to judge computer art and human art according to different criteria.31 The writer refers to the paintings of a chair as an example of computer art whichA achieves a particularly striking effect.B exhibits a certain level of genuine artistic skill.C closely resembles that of a well-known artist.D highlights the technical limitations of the software.Questions 32-37Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G below.Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 32-37 on your answer sheet.32 Simon Colton says it is important to consider the long-term view when33 David Cope's EMI software surprised people by34 Geraint Wiggins criticised Cope for not35 Douglas Hofstadter claimed that EMI was36 Audiences who had listened to EMI's music became angry after37 The participants in David Moffat's study had to assess music withoutDo the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?In boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet, writeYES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writerNO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writerNOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this38 Moffat's research may help explain people's reactions to EMI.39 The non-experts in Moffat's study all responded in a predictable way.40 Justin Kruger's findings cast doubt on Paul Bloom's theory about people's prejudice towards computer art.参考答案1 update2 environment3 captain4 films5 season6 accommodation7 blog8 FALSE9 NOT GIVEN10 FALSE11 TRUE12 NOT GIVEN13 TRUE14 iv15 vi16 i17 v18 viii19 iii20 E21 B22 D23 A24 focus25 pleasure26 curiosity27 B28 C29 C30 D31 A32 D33 A34 E35 C36 G37 B38 YES39 NOT GIVEN40 NO。
雅思阅读真题附答案(完整版)
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雅思阅读真题附答案版(部分内容)：题型:人名观点配对他在寻找古老的湖泊，这名Mungo 女子是被火葬的 A持怀疑态度的教授对一些化石的DNA 进行了可靠的分析 E教授测定的人的年龄要比62000 年前年轻的多的结果 A确定Mungo 人的年龄，争议了澳大利亚人的起源 B在澳洲，研究小组谁先恢复生物的证据，发现尼安德特人 C年代的支持者认为澳大利亚巨型动物的灭绝是由于古代人类狩猎造成的 D多区域的解释已经被提出，而不是坚持认为单一的起源 B史前人类活动导致气候变化而不是巨型动物的灭绝 A判断题Mungo 湖仍然为考古学家提供了图解说明人类活动的证据True在Mungo 湖发现Mungo 使用的武器Not givenMungo 人是在复杂的文化世界上已知最古老的考古证据之一，如埋葬仪式TrueMungo 男人和女人的骨架是被发现在同一年False澳大利亚教授使用古老的研究方法对“走出非洲”支持者的批判Not given以上就是关于雅思阅读真题附答案的相关汇总，考生可以通过上方下载完整版历年雅思阅读真题解析，提升资深雅思阅读能力。
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雅思阅读真题文章：失落城市
雅思阅读真题文章：失落城市（经典版）编制人：__________________审核人：__________________审批人：__________________编制单位：__________________编制时间：____年____月____日序言下载提示：该文档是本店铺精心编制而成的，希望大家下载后，能够帮助大家解决实际问题。
文档下载后可定制修改，请根据实际需要进行调整和使用，谢谢!并且，本店铺为大家提供各种类型的经典范文，如工作报告、致辞讲话、条据书信、合同范本、规章制度、应急预案、心得体会、教学资料、作文大全、其他范文等等，想了解不同范文格式和写法，敬请关注!Download tips: This document is carefully compiled by this editor. I hope that after you download it, it can help you solve practical problems. The document can be customized and modified after downloading, please adjust and use it according to actual needs, thank you!Moreover, our store provides various types of classic sample essays, such as work reports, speeches, policy letters, contract templates, rules and regulations, emergency plans, insights, teaching materials, essay encyclopedias, and other sample essays. If you want to learn about different sample formats and writing methods, please pay attention!雅思阅读真题文章：失落城市为了帮助大家在备考雅思的时候能够练习到更多的真题材料，下面本店铺给大家带来雅思阅读真题文章：失落城市，望喜欢！雅思阅读真题文章：失落城市文章标题失落城市Lost of the city文章大意讲多少年前什么个地方科学家感兴趣，怎样用电子设备探测考古的。
剑桥雅思真题4-阅读test3(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题4-阅读test3（附答案）Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.Although small-scale business training and credit programs have become more common throughout the world, relatively little attention has been paid to the need to direct such opportunities to young people. Even less attention has been paid to children living on the street or in difficult circumstances.Over the past nine years, Street Kids International (S.K.I.) has been working with partner organisations in Africa, Latin America and India to support the economic lives of street children. The purpose of this paper is to share some of the lessons S.K.I. and our partners have learned.BackgroundTypically, children do not end up on the streets due to a single cause, but to a combination of factors: a dearth of adequately funded schools, the demand for income at home, family breakdown and violence. The street may be attractive to children as a place to find adventurous play and money. However, it is also a place where some children are exposed, with little or no protection, to exploitative employment, urban crime, and abuse.Children who work on the streets are generally involved in unskilled, labour-intensive tasks which require long hours, such as shining shoes, carrying goods, guarding or washing cars, and informal trading. Some may also earn income through begging, or through theft and other illegal activities. At the same time, there are street children who take pride in supporting themselves and their families and who often enjoy their work. Many children may choose entrepreneurship because it allows them a degree of independence, is less exploitative than many forms of paid employment, and is flexible enough to allow them to participate in other activities such as education and domestic tasks.Street Business PartnershipsS.K.I. has worked with partner organisations in Latin America, Africa and India to develop innovative opportunities for street children to earn income.The S.K.I. Bicycle Courier Service first started in the Sudan. Participants in this enterprise were supplied with bicycles, which they used to deliver parcels and messages, and which theywere required to pay for gradually from their wages. A similar program was taken up in Bangalore, India.Another successful project, The Shoe Shine Collective, was a partnership program with the Y.W.C.A. in the Dominican Republic. In this project, participants were lent money to purchase shoe shine boxes. They were also given a safe place to store their equipment, and facilities for individual savings plans.The Youth Skills Enterprise Initiative in Zambia is a joint program with the Red Cross Society and the Y.W.C.A. Street youths are supported to start their own small business through business training, life skills training and access to credit.Lessons learnedThe following lessons have emerged from the programs that S.K.I. and partner organisations have created.•Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone, nor for every street child. Ideally, potential participants will have been involved in the organisation's programs for at least six months, and trust and relationship-building will have already been established.•The involvement of the participants has been essential to the development of relevant programs. When children have had a major role in determining procedures, they are more likely to abide by and enforce them.•It is critical for all loans to be linked to training programs that include the development of basic business and life skills.•There are tremendous advantages to involving parents or guardians in the program, where such relationships exist. Home visits allow staff the opportunity to know where the participants live, and to understand more about each individual's situation.•Small loans are provided initially for purchasing fixed assets such as bicycles, shoe shine kits and basic building materials for a market stall. As the entrepreneurs gain experience, the enterprises can be gradually expanded and consideration can be given to increasing loan amounts. The loan amounts in S.K.I. programs have generally ranged from US$30-$100.•All S.K.I. programs have charged interest on the loans, primarily to get the entrepreneurs used to the concept of paying interest on borrowed money. Generally the rates have been modest (lower than bank rates).ConclusionThere is a need to recognise the importance of access to credit for impoverished young people seeking to fulfil economic needs. The provision of small loans to support the entrepreneurial dreams and ambitions of youth can be an effective means to help them change their lives. However, we believe that credit must be extended in association with other types of support that help participants develop critical life skills as well as productive businesses.Questions 1-4Choose the correct letter, A, B C or D.Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.1 The quotations in the box at the beginning of the articleA exemplify the effects of S.K.I.B explain why S.K.I. was set up.C outline the problems of street children.D highlight the benefits to society of S.K.I.2 The main purpose of S.K.I. is toA draw the attention of governments to the problem of street children.B provide schools and social support for street children.C encourage the public to give money to street children.D give business training and loans to street children.3 Which of the following is mentioned by the writer as a reason why children end up living on the streets?A unemploymentB warC povertyD crime4 In order to become more independent, street children mayA reject paid employment.B leave their families.C set up their own businesses.D employ other children.Questions 5-8Complete the table below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 1 for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet.Questions 9-12Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 9-12 on your answer sheet writeYES if the statement agrees with the claims of the wirterNO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writerNOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this9 Any street child can set up their own small business if given enough support.10 In some cases, the families of street children may need financial support from S.K.I.11 Only one fixed loan should be given to each child.12 The children have to pay back slightly more money than they borrowed.Question 13Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.Write your answer in box 13 on your answer sheet.The writers conclude that money should only be lent to street childrenA as part of a wider program of aid.B for programs that are not too ambitious.C when programs are supported by local businesses.D if the projects planned are realistic and useful.READING PASSAGE 2You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 on the following pages.Volcanoes-earth-shattering newsWhen Mount Pinatubo suddenly erupted on 9 June 1991, the power of volcanoes past and present again hit the headlinesA Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. A violent eruption can blow the top few kilometres off a mountain, scatter fine ash practically all over the globe and hurl rock fragments into the stratosphere to darken the skies a continent away.But the classic eruption —cone-shaped mountain, big bang, mushroom cloud and surges of molten lava —is only a tiny part of a global story. Vulcanism, the name given to volcanic processes, really has shaped the world. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has a basement of volcanic basalt.V olcanoes have not only made the continents, they are also thought to have made the world’s first stable atmosphere and provided all the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. There are now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometres of rock to the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes smoking away for the last 3,500 million years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust.What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapour from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The rest of the gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the mass of the world’s atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water we need.B Geologists consider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material bubbles out and sets like a tiny mountain chain over the crack — like an archipelago of volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so much hotter.Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly ‘flow’ like thick treacle. The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough to fracture the ‘eggshell’ of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding againsteach other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimetres a year. These fracture zones, where the collisions occur, are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes.C These zones are lines of weakness, or hot spots. Every eruption is different, but put at its simplest, where there are weaknesses, rocks deep in the mantle, heated to 1,350℃, will start to expand and rise. As they do so, the pressure drops, and they expand and become liquid and rise more swiftly.Sometimes it is slow: vast bubbles of magma —molten rock from the mantle —inch towards the surface, cooling slowly, to show through as granite extrusions (as on Skye, or the Great Whin Sill, the lava dyke squeezed out like toothpaste that carries part of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England). Sometimes — as in Northern Ireland, Wales and the Karoo in South Africa — the magma rose faster, and then flowed out horizontally on to the surface in vast thick sheets. In the Deccan plateau in western India, there are more than two million cubic kilometres of lava, some of it 2,400 metres thick, formed over 500,000 years of slurping eruption.Sometimes the magma moves very swiftly indeed. It does not have time to cool as it surges upwards. The gases trapped inside the boiling rock expand suddenly, the lava glows with heat, it begins to froth, and it explodes with tremendous force. Then the slightly cooler lava following it begins to flow over the lip of the crater. It happens on Mars, it happened on the moon, it even happens on some of the moons of Jupiter and Uranus. By studying the evidence, vulcanologists can read the force of the great blasts of the past. Is the pumice light and full of holes? The explosion was tremendous. Are the rocks heavy, with huge crystalline basalt shapes, like the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? It was a slow, gentle eruption.The biggest eruptions are deep on the mid-ocean floor, where new lava is forcing the continents apart and widening the Atlantic by perhaps five centimetres a year. Look at maps of volcanoes, earthquakes and island chains like the Philippines and Japan, and you can see the rough outlines of what are called tectonic plates — the plates which make up the earth’s crust and mantle. The most dramatic of these is the Pacific ‘ring of fire’ where there have been the most violent explosions — Mount Pinatubo near Manila, Mount St Helen’s in the Rockies and El Chichón in Mexico about a decade ago, not to mention world-shaking blasts like Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits in 1883.D But volcanoes are not very predictable. That is because geological time is not like human time. During quiet periods, volcanoes cap themselves with their own lava by forming a powerful cone from the molten rocks slopping over the rim of the crater; later the lava cools slowly into a huge, hard, stable plug which blocks any further eruption until the pressure below becomes irresistible. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, this took 600 years.Then, sometimes, with only a small warning, the mountain blows its top. It did this at Mont Pelée in Martinique at 7.49 a.m. on 8 May, 1902. Of a town of 28,000, only two people survived. In 1815, a sudden blast removed the top 1,280 metres of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The eruption was so fierce that dust thrown into the stratosphere darkened the skies, cancelling the following summer in Europe and North America. Thousands starved as the harvests failed, after snow in June and frosts in August. V olcanoes are potentially world news, especially the quiet ones.Questions 14-17Reading Passage 2 has four sections A-D.Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.Write the correct number i-vi in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.14 Section A15 Section B16 Section C17 Section DQuestions 18-21Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.18 What are the sections of the earth’s crust, often associated with volcanic activity, called?19 What is the name given to molten rock from the mantle?20 What is the earthquake zone on the Pacific Ocean called?21 For how many years did Mount Pinatubo remain inactive?Questions 22-26Complete the summary below.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.V olcanic eruptions have shaped the earth’s land surface. They may also have produced the world’s atmosphere and 22…… . Eruptions occur when molten rocks from the earth’s mantle rise and expand. When they become liquid, they move quickly through cracks in the surface. There are different types of eruption. Sometimes the 23…… . moves slowly and forms outcrops of granite on the earth’s surface. When it moves more quickly it may flow out in thick horizontal sheets. Examples of this type of eruption can be found in Northern Ireland, Wales, South Africa and 24…… . A third type of eruption occurs when the lava emerges very quickly and 25…… violently. This happens because the magma moves so suddenly that 26…… are emitted.READING PASSAGE 3You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.Obtaining Linguistic DataA Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a casual introspection about one’s mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.B In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data —an informant. Informants are (ideally) native speakers of a language, who provide utterances for analysis and other kinds of information about the language (e.g. translations, comments about correctness, or judgements on usage). Often, when studying their mother tongue, linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity, acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. The convenience of this approach makes it widely used, and it is considered the norm in the generativeapproach to linguistics. But a linguist’s personal judgements are often uncertain, or disagree with the judgements of other linguists, at which point recourse is needed to more objective methods of enquiry, using non-linguists as informants. The latter procedure is unavoidable when working on foreign languages, or child speech.C Many factors must be considered when selecting informants —whether one is working with single speakers (a common situation when languages have not been described before), two people interacting, small groups or large-scale samples. Age, sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are known to influence the kind of language used. The topic of conversation and the characteristics of the social setting (e.g. the level of formality) are also highly relevant, as are the personal qualities of the informants (e.g. their fluency and consistency). For larger studies, scrupulous attention has been paid to the sampling theory employed, and in all cases, decisions have to be made about the best investigative techniques to use.D Today, researchers often tape-record informants. This enables the linguist’s claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those claims more accurate (‘difficult’ pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly). But obtaining naturalistic, good-quality data is never easy. People talk abnormally when they know they are being recorded, and sound quality can be poor. A variety of tape-recording procedures have thus been devised to minimise the ‘observer’s paradox’ (how to observe the way people behave when they are not being observed). Some recordings are made without the speakers being aware of the fact — a procedure that obtains very natural data, though ethical objections must be anticipated. Alternatively, attempts can be made to make the speaker forget about the recording, such as keeping the tape recorder out of sight, or using radio microphones. A useful technique is to introduce a topic that quickly involves the speaker, and stimulates a natural language style (e.g. asking older informants about how times have changed in their locality).E An audio tape recording does not solve all the linguist’s problems, however. Speech is often unclear and ambiguous. Where possible, therefore, the recording has to be supplemented by the observer’s written comments on the non-verbal behaviour of the participants, and about the context in general. A facial expression, for example, can dramatically alter the meaning of what is said. Video recordings avoid these problems to a large extent, but even they have limitations (the camera cannot be everywhere), and transcriptions always benefit from any additional commentary provided by an observer.F Linguists also make great use of structured sessions, in which they systematically ask their informants for utterances that describe certain actions, objects or behaviours. With a bilingual informant, or through use of an interpreter, it is possible to use translation techniques (‘How do you say table in your language?’). A large number of points can be covered in a short time, using interview worksheets and questionnaires. Often, the researcher wishes to obtain information about just a single variable, in which case a restricted set of questions may be used: a particular feature of pronunciation, for example, can be elicited by asking the informant to say a restricted set of words. There are also several direct methods of elicitation, such as asking informants to fill in the blanks in a substitution frame (e.g. I___ see a car), or feeding them the wrong stimulus for correction (‘Is it possible to say I no can see?’).G A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic analysis, is known as a corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make unbiased statements about frequency ofusage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researchers. Its range and size are variable. Some corpora attempt to cover the language as a whole, taking extracts from many kinds of text; others are extremely selective, providing a collection of material that deals only with a particular linguistic feature. The size of the corpus depends on practical factors, such as the time available to collect, process and store the data: it can take up to several hours to provide an accurate transcription of a few minutes of speech. Sometimes a small sample of data will be enough to decide a linguistic hypothesis; by contrast, corpora in major research projects can total millions of words. An important principle is that all corpora, whatever their size, are inevitably limited in their coverage, and always need to be supplemented by data derived from the intuitions of native speakers of the language, through either introspection or experimentation.Questions 27-31Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs labeled A-G.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any letter more than once.27 the effect of recording on the way people talk28 the importance of taking notes on body language29 the fact that language is influenced by social situation30 how informants can be helped to be less self-conscious31 various methods that can be used to generate specific dataQuestions 32-36Complete the table below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.Complete the summary of paragraph G below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.A linguist can use a corpus to comment objectively on 37…… . Some corpora include a wide range of language while others are used to focus on a 38…… . The length of time the process takes will affect the 39…… of the corpus. No corpus can ever cover the whole language and so linguists often find themselves relying on the additional information that can be gained from the 40…… of those who speak the language concerned.参考答案1 A2 D3 C4 C5 Sudan India (IN EITHER ORDER, BOTH REQUIRED FOR ONE MARK)6 bicycles7 Shoe Shine / Shoe Shine Collective8 life skills9 NO10 NOT GIVEN11 NO12 YES13 A14 iii15 i16 iv17 vi18 plates/the plates/the tectonic plates19 magma20 ring of fire21 600 /600 years / for 600 years22 water / the water / oceans / the oceans23 lava /magma / molten rock24 India / western India25 explodes26 gases / the gases / trapped gases27 D28 E29 C30 D31 F32 (the) linguist (acts)/(the) linguists (act)33 foreign languages34 quality / the quality / the poor quality35 non-verbal behaviour / non-verbal behavior / facial expression / facial expressions36 camera / video camera / recording / video recording37 frequency of usage / usage frequency38 particular linguistic feature39 size40 intuitions。
雅思阅读官方真题一套
READING PASSAGE 1You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage 1. Spider silk cuts weight of bridgesA strong, light bio-material made by genes from spiders could transform construction and industry.A Scientists have succeeded in copying the silk-producing gene of the Golden Orb Weaverspider and are using them to create a synthetic material which they believe is the model for a new generation of advanced bio-materials. The new material, biosilk, which has been spun for the first time by researchers at DuPont, has an enormous range of potential uses in construction and manufacturing.B The attraction of the silk spun by the spider is a combination of great strength and enormouselasticity, which man-made fibres have been unable to replicate. On an equal-weight basis, spider silk is far stronger than steel and it is estimated that if a single strand could be made about 10m in diameter, it would be strong enough to stop a jumbo jet in flight. A third important factor is that it is extremely light. Army scientists are already looking at the possibilities of using it for lightweight, bullet-proof vests and parachutes.C For some time, biochemists have been trying to synthesise the drag-line silk of the Golden OrbWeaver. The drag-line silk, which forms the radial arms of the web, is stronger than the other parts of the web and some biochemists believe a synthetic version could prove to be as important a material as nylon, which has been around for 50 years, since the discoveries of Wallace Carothers and his team ushered in the age of polymers.D To recreate the material, scientists, including Randolph Lewis at the University of Wyoming,first examined the silk-producing gland of the spider. "We took out the glands that produce the silk and looked at the coding for the protein material they make, which is spun into a web. We then went looking for clones with the right DNA," he says.E At DuPont, researchers have used both yeast and bacteria as hosts to grow the raw material,which they have spun into fibres. Robert Dorsch, DuPont’s director of biochemical development, says the globules of protein, comparable with marbles in an egg, are harvested and processed. "We break open the bacteria, separate out the globules of protein and use them as the raw starting material. With yeast, the gene system can be designed so that the material excretes the protein outside the yeast for better access," he says.F "The bacteria and the yeast produce the same protein, equivalent to that which the spider usesin the drag lines of the web. The spider mixes the protein into a water-based solution and then spins it into a solid fibre in one go. Since we are not as clever as the spider and we are not using such sophisticated organisms, we substituted man-made approaches and dissolved the protein in chemical solvents, which are then spun to push the material through small holes to form the solid fibre.”G Researchers at DuPont say they envisage many possible uses for a new biosilk material. Theysay that earthquake-resistant suspension bridges hung from cables of synthetic spider silk fibres may become a reality. Stronger ropes, safer seat belts, shoe soles that do not wear out so quickly and tough new clothing are among the other applications. Biochemists such as Lewis see the potential range of uses of biosilk as almost limitless. "It is very strong and retains elasticity; there are no man-made materials that can mimic both these properties. It is also a biological material with all the advantages that has over petrochemicals," he says.H At DuPond’s laboratories, Dorsc h is excited by the prospect of new super-strong materials buthe warns they are many years away. "We are at an early stage but theoretical predictions are that we will wind up with a very strong, tough material, with an ability to absorb shock, which is stronger and tougher than the man-made materials that are conventionally available to us," he says.I The spider is not the only creature that has aroused the interest of material scientists. They havealso become envious of the natural adhesive secreted by the sea mussel. It produces a protein adhesive to attach itself to rocks. It is tedious and expensive to extract the protein from the mussel, so researchers have already produced a synthetic gene for use in surrogate bacteria.Questions 1-5The passage has nine paragraphs A-I.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter A-I in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.1 a comparison of the ways two materials are used to replace silk-producing glands2 predictions regarding the availability of the synthetic silk3 on-going research into other synthetic materials4 the research into the part of the spider that manufactures silk5 the possible application of the silk in civil engineeringQuestions 6- 11Complete the flow chart below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 6-11 on your answer sheet..Synthetic gene growth in 6_______ or 7_________globules of 8 ________dissolved in 9__________passed through 10 ________to produce 11 ___________Questions 12- 14Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 12-14 on your answer sheet writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this12 Biosilk has already replaced nylon in parachute manufacture.13 The spider produces silk of varying strengths.14 Lewis and Dorsch co-operated in the synthetic production of silk.READING PASSAGE 2You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2.TEACHING IN UNIVERSITIESIn the 19th century, an American academic, Newman, characterised a university as: “a place of teaching universal kn owledge…(a plane for) thediffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement.”Newman argued that if universities were not for teaching but rather for scientific discovery, then they would not need students.Interestingly, during this century, while still teaching thousands of students each year, the resources of most universities have been steadily channelled away from teaching into research activities. Most recently, however, there have been strong moves in both North America and the United Kingdom to develop initiatives that would enhance the profile of the teaching institutions of higher education. In the near future, therefore, as well as the intrinsic rewards gained from working with students and the sense that they are contributing to their overall growth and development, there should soon be extrinsic rewards, in the form of job promotion, for those pursuing academic excellence in teaching in universities.In the future, there will be more focus in universities on the quality of their graduates and their progression rates. Current degree courses, whose assessment strategies require students to learn by rote and reiterate the course material, and which do not require the student to interact with the material, or construct a personal meaning about it or even to understand the discipline, are resulting in poor learning outcomes. This traditional teaching approach does not take into account modern theories of education, the individual needs of the learner, nor his or her prior learning experience.In order for universities to raise both the quality and status of teaching, it is first necessary to have some kind of understanding of what constitutes good practice. A 1995 report, compiled in Australia, lists eight qualities that researchers agree are essential to good teaching.Good teachers...A are themselves good learners - resulting in teaching that is dynamic, reflective and constantlyevolving as they learn more and more about teaching;B display enthusiasm for their subject and the desire to share it with their students;C recognise the importance of context and adjust their teaching accordingly;D encourage deep learning approaches and are concerned with developing their students' criticalthinking skills, problem solving skills and problem-approach behaviours:E demonstrate an ability to transform and extend knowledge, rather than merely transmit it;F recognise individual differences in their students and take advantage of these;G set clear goals, use valid assessment techniques and provide high-quality feedback to theirstudents;In addition to aiming to engage students in the learning process, there is also a need to address the changing needs of the marketplace. Because in many academic disciplines the body of relevant knowledge is growing at an exponential rate, it is no longer possible, or even desirable, for an individual to have a complete knowledge base. Rather, it is preferable that he or she should have an understanding of the concepts and the principles of the subject, have the ability to apply this understanding to new situations and have the wherewithal to seek out the information that is needed.As the world continues to increase in complexity, university graduates will need to be equipped to cope with rapid changes in technology and to enter careers that may not yet be envisaged, with change of profession being commonplace. To produce graduates equipped for this workforce, it is essential that educators teach in ways that encourage learners to engage in deep learning, which may be built upon in the later years of their course, and also be transferred to the workplace.The new role of the university teacher, then, is one that focuses on the students' learning rather than the instructor's teaching. The syllabus is more likely to move from being a set of learning materials made up of lecture notes, to a set of learning materials made up of print, cassettes, disks and computer programs. Class contact hours will cease to be the major determinant of an academic workload. The teacher will then be released from being the sole source of information transmission and will become instead more a learning manager, able to pay more attention to the development and delivery of education rather than content.Student-centred learning activities will also require innovative assessment strategies. Traditional assessment and reporting has aimed to produce a single mark or grade for each student. The mark is intended to indicate three things: the extent to which the learned material was mastered or understood; the level at which certain skills were performed and the degree to which certain attitudes were displayed.A deep learning approach would test a student’s ab ility to identify and tackle new and unfamiliar 'real world' problems. A major assessment goal will be to increase the size and complexity of assignments and minimise what can be achieved by memorising or reproducing content. Wherever possible, students will be involved in the assessment process to assist them to learn how to make judgments about themselves and their work.Questions 15-18Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?In the boxes 15-18 on your answer sheet writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this15Newman believed that the primary focus of universities was teaching.16Job promotion is already used to reward outstanding teaching.17Traditional approaches to assessment at degree level are having a negative effect on the learning process.Questions 19-23Look at the eight qualities A-H of “good teachers” in Reading Passage 2 and the statements below (Questions 19-23).Match each quality to the statement with the same meaning.Write the correct letter A-H in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.Good teachers19 can adapt their materials to different learning situations.20 assist students to understand the aims of the course.21 are interested in developing the students as learners.22treat their students with dignity and concern.23continually improve their teaching by monitoring their skills.Questions 24-27Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or DWrite your answers in boxes 24-27 on your answer sheet.24 In the future, university courses will focus more onA developing students’ skills and concepts.B expanding students’ knowledge.C providing work experience for students.D graduating larger numbers of students.25 According to the author, university courses should prepare students toA do a specific job well.B enter traditional professions.C change jobs easily.D create their own jobs.26 The author believes that new learning materials in universities will result inA more work for teachers.B a new role for teachers.C more expensive courses.D more choices for students.27 The author predicts that university assessment techniques will include moreA in-class group assignments.B theoretical exams.C problem-solving activities.D student seminar presentations.READING PASSAGE 3Rising Sea LevelsADuring the night of 1st February 1953, a deadly combination of winds and tide raised the level of the North Sea, broke through the dykes which protected the Netherlands arid inundated farmland and villages as far as 64 km from the coast, killing thousands. For people around the world who inhabit low-lying areas, variations in sea levels are of crucial importance and the scientific study of oceans has attracted increasing attention. Towards the end of the 1970s, some scientists began suggesting that global warming could cause the world's oceans to rise by several metres. The warming, they claimed, was an inevitable consequence of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which acted like a greenhouse to trap heat in the air. The greenhouse warming was predicted to lead to rises in sea levels in a variety of ways. Firstly, heating the ocean water would cause it to expand. Such expansion might be sufficient to raise the sea level by 300mm in the next 100 years. Then there was the observation that in Europe's Alpine valleys glaciers had been shrinking for the past century. Meltwater from the mountain glaciers might have raised the oceans 50mm over the last 100 years and the rate is likely to increase in future. A third threat is that global warming might cause a store of frozen water in Antarctica to melt which would lead to a calamitous rise in sea level of up to five metres.BThe challenge of predicting how global warming will change sea levels led scientists of several disciplines to adopt a variety of approaches. In 1978 J H Mercer published a largely theoretical statement that a thick slab of ice covering much of West Antarctica is inherently unstable. He suggested that this instability meant that, given just 5 degrees Celsius of greenhouse warming in the south polar region, the floating ice shelves surrounding the West Antarctic ice sheet would begin to disappear. Without these buttresses the grounded ice sheet would quickly disintegrate and coastlines around the world would be disastrously flooded. In evidence Mercer pointed out that between 130,000 and 110,000 years ago there had been just such a global warming as we have had in the past 20,000 years since the last ice age. In the geological remains of that earlier period there are indications that the sea level was five metres above the current sea level- just the level that would be reached if the West Antarctic ice sheet melted. The possibility of such a disastrous rise led a group of American investigators to form SeaRISE (Sea-level Response to Ice Sheet Evolution) in 1990. SeaRISE reported the presence of Five active "ice streams" drawing ice from the interior of West Antarctica into the Ross Sea. They stated that these channels in the West Antarctic ice sheet "may be manifestations of collapse already under way."CBut doubt was cast on those dire warnings by the use of complex computer models of climate. Models of atmospheric and ocean behaviour predicted that greenhouse heating would cause warmer, wetter air to reach Antarctica, where it would deposit its moisture as snow. Thus, the sea ice surrounding the continent might even expand causing sea levels to drop. Other observations have caused scientists working on Antarctica to doubt that sea levels will be pushed upward several metres by sudden melting. For example, glaciologists have discovered that one of the largest ice streams stopped moving about 130 wars ago. Ellen Mosley-Thompson, questioning the SeaRISE theory, notes that ice streams "seem to start and stop, and nobody really knows why." Her own measurements of the rate of snow accumulation near the South Pole show that snowfalls have increased substantially in recent decades as global temperature has increased.DMost researchers are now willing to accept that human activities have contributed to global warming, but no one can say with any assurance whether the Antarctic ice cap is growing or shrinking in response.A satellite being planned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will use laser range finders to map changes in the elevation of the polar ice caps, perhaps to within 10 millimetres, and should end the speculation.EWhatever the fate of the polar ice caps may be, most researchers agree that the sea level is currently rising. That, however, is difficult to prove. Tide gauges in ports around the world have been measuring sea levels for decades but the data are flawed because the land to which the gauges are attached can itself be moving up and down. In Stockholm the data from the sea level gauge show the sea level to be falling at four millimetres a year, but that is because all Scandinavia is still rebounding after being crushed by massive glaciers during the last ice age. By contrast, the gauge at Honolulu, which is more stable, shows the sea level to be rising at a rate of one and a half millimetres a year. Unstable regions cannot be omitted from the data because that would eliminate large areas of the world. Most of the eastern seaboard of North America is still settling after a great ice sheet which covered Eastern Canada 20,000 years ago tilted it up. And then there is buckling occurring at the edges of the great tectonic plates as they are pressed against each other. There is also land subsidence as oil and underground water is tapped. In Bangkok, for example, where the residents have been using groundwater, land subsidence makes it appear as if the sea has risen by almost a metre in the past 30 years.FUsing complex calculations on the sea level gauge data, Peltier and Tushingham found that the global sea level has been rising at a rate of 2mm a year over the past few decades. Confirmation came from the TOPEX satellite which used radar altimeters to calculate changes in ocean levels. Steven Nerem, working on the TOPEX data, found an average annual sea level rise of 2mm which is completely compatible with the estimates that have come from 50 years of tide gauge records. The key question still facing researchers is whether this trend will hold steady or begin to accelerate in response to a warming climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives the broad prediction for the next century of a rise between 200mm and 1 metre.Questions 33 - 40Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-L from the box below. Write the correct letter A-L in boxes 33-40 on your answer sheet.。
雅思阅读真题集1(附答案)
SECTION 1: QUESTIONS 1-13READING PASSAGE 1You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.William Gilbert and MagnetismAThe 16th and 17th centuries saw two great pioneers of modern science: Galileo and Gilbert. The impact of their findings is eminent. Gilbert was the first modern scientist, also the accredited father of the science of electricity and magnetism, an Englishman of learning and a physician at the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of electricity and magnetism was what the ancients knew, nothing more than that the lodestone possessed magnetic properties and that amber and jet, when rubbed, would attract bits of paper or other substances of small specific gravity. However, he is less well known than he deserves.BGilbert’s birth pre-dated Galileo. Born in an eminent local family in Colchester County in the UK, on May 24, 1544, he went to grammar school, and then studied medicine at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1573. Later he travelled in the continent and eventually settled down in London.CHe was a very successful and eminent doctor. All this culminated in his election to the president of the Royal Science Society. He was also appointed personal physician to the Queen (Elizabeth I), and later knighted by the Queen. He faithfully served her until her death. However, he didn’t outlive the Queen for long and died on November 30, 1603, only a few months after his appointment as personal physician to King James.DGilbert was first interested in chemistry but later changed his focus due to the large portion of mysticism of alchemy involved (such as the transmutation of metal). He gradually developed his interest in physics after the great minds of the ancient, particularly about the knowledge the ancient Greeks had about lodestones, strange minerals with the power to attract iron. In the meantime, Britain became a major seafaring nation in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was defeated, opening the way to British settlement of America. British ships depended on the magnetic compass, yet no one understood why it worked. Did the Pole Star attract it, as Columbus once speculated; or was there a magnetic mountain at the pole, as described in Odyssey, which ships would never approach, because the sailors thought its pull would yank out all their iron nails and fittings? For nearly 20 years, William Gilbert conducted ingenious experiments to understand magnetism. His works include On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth.EGilbert’s discovery was so important to modern physics. He investigated the nature of magnetism and electricity. He even coined the word “electric”. Though the early beliefs of magnetism were also largely entangled with superstitions such as that rubbing garlic on lodestone can neutralise its magnetism, one example being that sailors even believed the smell of garlic would even interfere with the action of compass, which is why helmsmen were forbidden to eat it near a ship’s compass. Gilbert also found that metals can be magnetised by rubbing materials such as fur, plastic or the like on them. He named the ends of a magnet “north pole” and “south pole”. The magnetic poles can attract or repel, depending on polarity. In addition, however, ordinary iron is always attracted to a magnet. Though he started to study the relationship between magnetism and electricity, sadly he didn’t complete it. His research of static electricity using amber and jet only demonstrated that objects with electrical charges can work like magnets attracting small pieces of paper and stuff. It is a French guy named du Fay that discovered that there are actually two electrical charges, positive and negative.FHe also questioned the traditional astronomical beliefs. Though a Copernican, he didn’t express in his quintessential beliefs whether the earth is at the centre of the universe or in orbit around the sun. However, he believed that stars are not equidistant from the earth but have their own earth-like planets orbiting around them. The earth itself is like a giant magnet, which is also why compasses always point north. They spin on an axis that is aligned with the earth’s polarity. He even likened the polarity of the magnet to the polarity of the earth and built an entire magnetic philosophy on this analogy. In his explanation, magnetism is the soul of the earth. Thus a perfectly spherical lodestone, when aligned with the earth’s poles, would wobble all by itself in 24 hours. Further, he also believed that the sun and other stars wobble just like the earth does around a crystal core, and speculated that the moon might also be a magnet caused to orbit by its magnetic attraction to the earth. This was perhaps the first proposal that a force might cause a heavenly orbit.GHis research method was revolutionary in that he used experiments rather than pure logic and reasoning like the ancient Greek philosophers did. It was a new attitude towards scientific investigation. Until then, scientific experiments were not in fashion. It was because of this scientific attitude, together with his contribution to our knowledge of magnetism, that a unit of magneto motive force, also known as magnetic potential, was named Gilbert in his honour. His approach of careful observation and experimentation rather than the authoritative opinion or deductive philosophy of others had laid the very foundation for modern science.Questions 1-7Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-G.Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.Write the correct number i-x in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.List of headingsi Early years of Gilbertii What was new about his scientific research methodiii The development of chemistryiv Questioning traditional astronomyv Pioneers of the early sciencevi Professional and social recognitionvii Becoming the president of the Royal Science Societyviii The great works of Gilbertix His discovery about magnetismx His change of focus1 _____ Paragraph A2 _____ Paragraph B3 _____ Paragraph C4 _____ Paragraph D5 _____ Paragraph E6 _____ Paragraph F7 _____ Paragraph GQuestions 8-10Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 8-10 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN If there is no information on this8 _____ He is less famous than he should be.9 _____ He was famous as a doctor before he was employed by the Queen.10 _____ He lost faith in the medical theories of his time.Questions 11-13Choose THREE letters A-F.Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.Which THREE of the following are parts of Gilbert’s discovery?A _____ Metal can be transformed into another.B _____ Garlic can remove magnetism.C _____ Metals can be magnetized.D _____ Stars are at different distances from the earth.E _____ The earth wobbles on its axis.F _____ There are two charges of electricity.SECTION 2: QUESTIONS 14-26READING PASSAGE 2You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.The 2003 Heat waveIt was the summer, scientists now realise, when global warming at last made itself unmistakably felt. We knew that summer 2003 was remarkable: Britain experienced its record high temperature and continental Europe saw forest fires raging out of control, great rivers drying to a trickle and thousands of heat-related deaths. But just how remarkable is only now becoming clear.The three months of June, July and August were the warmest ever recorded in western and central Europe, with record national highs in Portugal, Germany and Switzerland as well as in Britain. And they were the warmest by a very long way. Over a great rectangular block of the earth stretching from west of Paris to northern Italy, taking in Switzerland and southern Germany, the average temperature for the summer months was 3.78°C above the long-term norm, said the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, which is one of the world's leading institutions for the monitoring and analysis of temperature records.That excess might not seem a lot until you are aware of the context - but then you realise it is enormous. There is nothing like this in previous data, anywhere. It is considered so exceptional that Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director, is prepared to say openly - in a way few scientists have done before - that the 2003 extreme may be directly attributed, not to natural climate variability, but to global warming caused by human actions.Meteorologists have hitherto contented themselves with the formula that recent high temperatures are “consistent with predictions” of climate change. For the great block of the map - that stretching between 35-50N and 0-20E - the CRU has reliable temperature records dating back to 1781. Using as a baseline the average summer temperature recorded between 1961 and 1990, departures from the temperature norm, or “anomalies”, over the area as a whole can easily be plotted. As the graph shows, such is the variability of our climate that over the past 200 years, there have been at least half a dozen anomalies, in terms of excess temperature - the peaks on the graph denoting very hot years - approaching, or even exceeding, 2°C. But there has been nothing remotely like 2003, when the anomaly is nearly four degrees.“This is quite remarkable,’ Professor Jones told The Independent. “It’s very unusual in a statisticalsense. If this series had a normal statistical distribution, you wouldn’t get this number. The return period [how often it could be expected to recur] would be something like one in a thousand years. If we look at an excess above the average of nearly four degrees, then perhaps nearly three degrees of that is natural variability, because we’ve seen that in past summers. But the final degree of it is likely to be due to global warming, caused by human actions.”The summer of 2003 has, in a sense, been one that climate scientists have long been expecting. Until now, the warming has been manifesting itself mainly in winters that have been less cold than in summers that have been much hotter. Last week, the United Nations predicted that winters were warming so quickly that winter sports would die out in Europe’s lower-level ski resorts. But sooner or later, the unprecedented hot summer was bound to come, and this year it did.One of the most dramatic features of the summer was the hot nights, especially in the first half of August. In Paris, the temperature never dropped below 23°C (73.4°F) at all between 7 and 14 August, and the city recorded its warmest-ever night on 11-12 August, when the mercury did not drop below 25.5°C (77.9°F). Germany recorded its warmest-ever night at Weinbiet in the Rhine Valley with a lowest figure of 27.6°C (80.6°F) on 13 August, and similar record-breaking nighttime temperatures were recorded in Switzerland and Italy.The 15,000 excess deaths in France during August, compared with previous years, have been related to the high night-time temperatures. The number gradually increased during the first 12 days of the month, peaking at about 2,000 per day on the night of 12-13 August, then fell off dramatically after 14 August when the minimum temperatures fell by about 5°C. The elderly were most affected, with a 70 per cent increase in mortality rate in those aged 75-94.For Britain, the year as a whole is likely to be the warmest ever recorded, but despite the high temperature record on 10 August, the summer itself - defined as the June, July and August period -still comes behind 1976 and 1995, when there were longer periods of intense heat. “At the moment, the year is on course to be the third hottest ever in the global temperature record, which goes back to 1856, behind 1998 and 2002, but when all the records for October, November and December are collated, it might move into second place/' Professor Jones said. The ten hottest years in the record have all now occurred since 1990. Professor Jones is in no doubt about the astonishing nature of European summer of 2003. “The temperatures recorded were out of all proportion to the previous record," he said.“It was the warmest summer in the past 500 years and probably way beyond that. It was enormously exceptional."His colleagues at the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research are now planning a special study of it. “It was a summer that has not been experienced before, either in terms of the temperature extremes that were reached, or the range and diversity of the impacts of the extreme heat," said the centre's executive director, Professor Mike Hulme.“It will certainly have left its mark on a number of countries, as to how they think and plan for climate change in the future, much as the 2000 floods have revolutionised the way the Government is thinking about flooding in the UK. The 2003 heatwave will have similar repercussions across Europe."Questions 14-19Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes14-19 on your answer sheet writeYES if the statement agrees with the views of the writerNO if the statement contradicts the views of the writerNOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this14 _____ The average summer temperature in 2003 is almost 4 degrees higher than the average temperature of the past.15 _____ Global warming is caused by human activities.16 _____ Jones believes the temperature variation is within the normal range.17 _____ The temperature is measured twice a day in major cities.18 _____ There were milder winters rather than hotter summers.19 _____ Governments are building new high-altitude ski resorts.Questions 20-21Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR NUMBERS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet.What are the other two hottest years in Britain besides 2003?20 _____What has also influenced government policies like the hot summer in 2003?21 _____Questions 22-25Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.The other two hottest years around the globe were 22 _____The ten hottest years on record all come after the year 23 _____This temperature data has been gathered since 24 _____Thousands of people died in the country of 25_____Question 26Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.Write your answer in box 26 on your answer sheet.26 _____Which one of the following can be best used as the title of this passage?A Global WarmingB What Caused Global WarmingC The Effects of Global WarmingD That Hot Year in EuropeSECTION 3: QUESTIONS 27-40READING PASSAGE 3You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.Amateur NaturalistsFrom the results of an annual Alaskan betting contest to sightings of migratory birds, ecologists are using a wealth of unusual data to predict the impact of climate change.ATim Sparks slides a small leather-bound notebook out of an envelope. The book's yellowing pages contain bee-keeping notes made between 1941 and 1969 by the late Walter Coates of Kilworth, Leicestershire. He adds it to his growing pile of local journals, birdwatchers' lists and gardening diaries. "We're uncovering about one major new record each month," he says, "I still get surprised." Around two centuries before Coates, Robert Marsham, a landowner from Norfolk in the east of England, began recording the life cycles of plants and animals on his estate - when the first wood anemones flowered, the dates on which the oaks burst into leaf and the rooks began nesting. Successive Marshams continued compiling these notes for 211 years.BToday, such records are being put to uses that their authors could not possibly have expected. These data sets, and others like them, are proving invaluable to ecologists interested in the timing of biological events, or phenology. By combining the records with climate data, researchers can reveal how, for example, changes in temperature affect the arrival of spring, allowing ecologists to make improved predictions about the impact of climate change. A small band of researchers is combing through hundreds of years of records taken by thousands of amateur naturalists. And more systematic projects have also started up, producing an overwhelming response. "The amount of interest is almost frightening," says Sparks, a climate researcher at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Monks Wood, Cambridgeshire.CSparks first became aware of the army of "closet phenologists”, as he describes them, when a retiring colleague gave him the Marsham records. He now spends much of his time followingleads from one historical data set to another. As news of his quest spreads, people tip him off to other historical records, and more amateur phenologists come out of their closets. The British devotion to recording and collecting makes his job easier - one man from Kent sent him 30 years' worth of kitchen calendars, on which he had noted the date that his neighbour's magnolia tree flowered.DOther researchers have unearthed data from equally odd sources. Rafe Sagarin, an ecologist at Stanford University in California, recently studied records of a betting contest in which participants attempt to guess the exact time at which a specially erected wooden tripod will fall through the surface of a thawing river. The competition has taken place annually on the Tenana River in Alaska since 1917, and analysis of the results showed that the thaw now arrives five days earlier than it did when the contest began.EOverall, such records have helped to show that, compared with 20 years ago, a raft of natural events now occur earlier across much of the northern hemisphere, from the opening of leaves to the return of birds from migration and the emergence of butterflies from hibernation. The data can also hint at how nature will change in the future. Together with models of climate change, amateurs' records could help guide conservation. Terry Root, an ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has collected birdwatchers' counts of wildfowl taken between 1955 and 1996 on seasonal ponds in the American Midwest and combined them with climate data and models of future warming. Her analysis shows that the increased droughts that the models predict could halve the breeding populations at the ponds. "The number of waterfowl in North America will most probably drop significantly with global warming," she says.FBut not all professionals are happy to use amateur data. "A lot of scientists won't touch them, they say they're too full of problems," says Root. Because different observers can have different ideas of what constitutes, for example, an open snowdrop. "The biggest concern with ad hoc observations is how carefully and systematically they were taken," says Mark Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who studies the interactions between plants and climate. "We need to know pretty precisely what a person's been observing - if they just say 'I noted when the leaves came out', it might not be that useful." Measuring the onset of autumn can be particularly problematic because deciding when leaves change colour is a more subjectiveprocess than noting when they appear.GOverall, most phenologists are positive about the contribution that amateurs can make. "They get at the raw power of science: careful observation of the natural world," says Sagarin. But the professionals also acknowledge the need for careful quality control. Root, for example, tries to gauge the quality of an amateur archive by interviewing its collector. "You always have to worry -things as trivial as vacations can affect measurement. I disregard a lot of records because they're not rigorous enough," she says. Others suggest that the right statistics can iron out some of theproblems with amateur data. Together with colleagues at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, environmental scientist Arnold van Vliet is developing statistical techniques to account for the uncertainty in amateur phenological data. With the enthusiasm of amateur phenologists evident from past records, professional researchers are now trying to create standardised recording schemes for future efforts. They hope that well-designed studies will generate a volume of observations large enough to drown out the idiosyncrasies of individual recorders. The data are cheap to collect, and can provide breadth in space, time and range of species. "It's very difficult to collect data on a large geographical scale without enlisting an army of observers," says Root.HPhenology also helps to drive home messages about climate change. "Because the public understand these records, they accept them," says Sparks.It can also illustrate potentially unpleasant consequences, he adds, such as the finding that more rat infestations are reported to local councils in warmer years. And getting people involved is great for public relations. "People are thrilled to think that the data they've been collecting as a hobby can be used for something scientific - it empowers them," says Root.Questions 27-33Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs A-H.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter A-H in boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet.27 _____ The definition of phenology28 _____ How Sparks first became aware of amateur records29 _____ How people reacted to their involvement in data collection30 _____ The necessity to encourage amateur data collection31 _____ A description of using amateur records to make predictions32 _____ Records of a competition providing clues to climate change33 _____ A description of a very old record compiled by generations of amateur naturalistsQuestions 34-36Complete the sentences below with NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 34-36 on your answer sheet.Walter Coates’s records largely contain the information of 34 _____Robert Marsham is famous for recording the 35_____ of animals and plants on his land.According to some phenologists, global warming may cause the number of waterfowl in NorthAmerica to drop significantly due to increased 36 _____ Questions 37-40Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.37 _____Why do a lot of scientists discredit the data collected by amateurs?A Scientific methods were not used in data collection.B Amateur observers are not careful in recording their data.C Amateur data is not reliable.D Amateur data is produced by wrong candidates.38 _____Mark Schwartz used the example of leaves to illustrate thatA amateur records can’t be used.B amateur records are always unsystematic.C the colour change of leaves is hard to observe.D valuable information is often precise.39 _____How do the scientists suggest amateur data should be used?A Using improved methodsB Being more careful in observationC Using raw materialsD Applying statistical techniques in data collection40 _____What’s the implication of phenology for ordinary people?A It empowers the public.B It promotes public relations.C It warns people of animal infestation.D It raises awareness about climate change in the public.参考答案2. i3. vi4. x5. ix6. iv7. ii8. TRUE9. TRUE10. NOT GIVEN多选11-13C Metals can be magnetized.D Stars are at different distances from the earth.E The earth wobbles on its axis.14. YES15. YES16. No17. NOT GIVEN18. YES19. NOT GIVEN20. 1976 and 199521. 2000 floods22. 1998 and 200223. 199024. 185625. France26. D27. B28. C29. H31. E32. D33. A34. bee-keeping notes35. life cycle(s)36. drought(s)37. C38. D39. A40. D。
剑桥雅思真题6-阅读Test1(附答案)
剑桥雅思真题6-阅读Test 1（附答案）Reading Passage 1You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.Australia’s Sporting SuccessA They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and expensive network of sporting academies underpinned by science and medicine. At the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), hundreds of youngsters and pros live and train under the eyes of coaches. Another body, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) finances programs of excellence in a total of 96 sports for thousands of sportsmen and women. Both provide intensive coaching, training facilities and nutritional advice.B Inside the academies, science takes centre stage. The AIS employs more than 100 sports scientists and doctors, and collaborates with scores of others in universities and research centres. AIS scientists work across a number of sports, applying skills teamed in one - such as building muscle strength in golfers -to others, such as swimming and squash. They are backed up by technicians who design instruments to collect data from athletes. They all focus on one aim: winning. We can't waste our time looking at ethereal scientific questions that don't help the coach work with an athlete and improve performance,' says Peter Fricker, chief of science at AIS.C A lot of their work comes down to measurement -everything from the exact angle of a swimmer’s dive to the second-by-second power output of a cyclist. This data is used to wring improvements out of athletes. The focus is on individuals, tweaking performances to squeeze an extra hundredth of a second here, an extra millimetre there. No gain is too slight to bother with. It’s the tiny, gradual improvements that add up to world-beating results. To demonstrate how the system works, Bruce Mason at AIS shows off the prototype of a 3D analysis tool for studying swimmers. A wire-frame model of a champion swimmer slices through the water, her arms moving in slow motion. Looking side-on, Mason measures the distance between strokes. From above, he analyses how her spine swivels. When fully developed, this system will enable him to build a biomechanical profile for coaches to use to help budding swimmers. Mason's contribution to sport also includes the development of the SWAN (Swimming Analysis) system now used in Australian national competitions. It collects images from digital cameras running at 50 frames a second and breaks down each part of a swimmer's performance into factors that can be analysed individually - stroke length, stroke frequency, average duration of each stroke, velocity, start, lap and finish times, and so on. At the end of each race, SW AN spits out data on each swimmer.D‘Take a look,' says Mason, pulling out a sheet of data. He points out the data on the swimmers in second and third place, which shows that the one who finished third actually swam faster. So why did he finish 35 hundredths of a second down? ‘His turn times were 44 hundredths of a second behind the other guy,' says Mason. ‘If he can improve on his turns, he can do much better’. This is the kind of accuracy that AIS scientists' research is bringing to a range of sports. With the Cooperative Research Centre for Micro Technology in Melbourne, they are developing unobtrusive sensors that will be embedded in an athlete's clothes or running shoes to monitor heartrate, sweating, heat production or any other factor that might have an impact on an athlete's ability to run. There's more to it than simply measuring performance. Fricker gives the example of athletes who may be down with coughs and colds 11 or 12 times a year. After years of experimentation, AIS and the University of Newcastle in New South Wales developed a test that measures how much of the immune-system protein immunoglobulin A is present in athletes' saliva. If IgA levels suddenly fall below a certain level, training is eased or dropped altogether. Soon, IgA levels start rising again, and the danger passes. Since the tests were introduced, AIS athletes in all sports have been remarkably successful at staying healthy.E Using data is a complex business. Well before a championship, sports scientists and coaches start to prepare the athlete by developing a ‘competition model', based on what they expect will be the winning times. ‘You design the model to make that time,' says Mason. ‘A start of this much, each free-swimming period has to be this fast, with a certain stroke frequency and stroke length, with turns done in these times.' All the training is then geared towards making the athlete hit those targets, both overall and for each segment of the race. Techniques like these have transformed Australia into arguably the world's most successful sporting nation.F Of course, there's nothing to stop other countries copying-and many have tried. Some years ago, the AIS unveiled coolant-lined jackets for endurance athletes. At the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, these sliced as much as two per cent off cyclists' and rowers' times. Now everyone uses them. The same has happened to the ‘altitude tent', developed by AIS to replicate the effect of altitude training at sea level. But Australia's success story is about more than easily copied technological fixes, and up to now no nation has replicated its all-encompassing system. Question 1-7Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any letter more than once.1. a reference to the exchange of expertise between different sports2. an explanation of how visual imaging is employed in investigations3. a reason for narrowing the scope of research activity4. how some AIS ideas have been reproduced5. how obstacles to optimum achievement can be investigated6. an overview of the funded support of athletes7. how performance requirements are calculated before an eventQuestion 8-11Classify the following techniques according to whether the writer states theyA. are currently exclusively used by AustraliansB. will be used in the future by AustraliansC. are currently used by both Australians and their rivalsWrite the correct letter, A, B or C, in boxes 8-11 on your answer sheet.8. cameras9. sensors10. protein tests11. altitude tentsQuestion 12-13Answer the questions below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet.12 What is produced to help an athlete plan their performance in an event?13 By how much did some cyclists' performance improve at the 1996 Olympic Games?Reading Passage 2You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.Delivering the GoodsThe vast expansion in international trade owes much to a revolution in the business ofmoving freightA International trade is growing at a startling pace. While the global economy has been expanding at a bit over 3% a year, the volume of trade has been rising at a compound annual rate of about twice that. Foreign products, from meat to machinery, play a more important role in almost every economy in the world, and foreign markets now tempt businesses that never much worried about sales beyond their nation's borders.B What lies behind this explosion in international commerce? The general worldwide decline in trade barriers, such as customs duties and import quotas, is surely one explanation. The economic opening of countries that have traditionally been minor players is another. But one force behind the import-export boom has passed all but unnoticed: the rapidly falling cost of getting goods to market. Theoretically, in the world of trade, shipping costs do not matter. Goods, once they have been made, are assumed to move instantly and at no cost from place to place. The real world, however, is full of frictions. Cheap labour may make Chinese clothing competitive in America, but if delays in shipment tie up working capital and cause winter coats to arrive in spring, trade may lose its advantages.C At the turn of the 20th century, agriculture and manufacturing were the two most important sectors almost everywhere, accounting for about 70% of total output in Germany, Italy and France, and 40-50% in America, Britain and Japan. International commerce was therefore dominated by raw materials, such as wheat, wood and iron ore, or processed commodities, such as meat and steel. But these sorts of products are heavy and bulky and the cost of transporting them relatively high.D Countries still trade disproportionately with their geographic neighbours. Over time, however, world output has shifted into goods whose worth is unrelated to their size and weight. Today, it is finished manufactured products that dominate the flow of trade, and, thanks to technological advances such as lightweight components, manufactured goods themselves have tended to become lighter and less bulky. As a result, less transportation is required for every dollar's worth of imports or exports.E To see how this influences trade, consider the business of making disk drives for computers. Most of the world's disk-drive manufacturing is concentrated in South-east Asia. This is possible only because disk drives, while valuable, are small and light and so cost little to ship. Computer manufacturers in Japan or Texas will not face hugely bigger freight bills if they import drives from Singapore rather than purchasing them on the domestic market. Distance therefore poses no obstacle to the globalisation of the disk-drive industry.F This is even more true of the fast-growing information industries. Films and compact discs cost little to transport, even by aeroplane. Computer software can be 'exported' without ever loading it onto a ship, simply by transmitting it over telephone lines from one country to another, so freight rates and cargo-handling schedules become insignificant factors in deciding where to make the product. Businesses can locate based on other considerations, such as the availability of labour, while worrying less about the cost of delivering their output.G In many countries deregulation has helped to drive the process along. But, behind the scenes, a series of technological innovations known broadly as containerization and inter-modal transportation has led to swift productivity improvements in cargo-handling. Forty years ago, the process of exporting or importing involved a great many stages of handling, which risked portions of the shipment being damaged or stolen along the way. The invention of the container crane made it possible to load and unload containers without capsizing the ship and the adoption of standard container sizes allowed almost any box to be transported on any ship. By 1967, dual-purpose ships, carrying loose cargo in the hold* and containers on the deck, were giving way to all-container vessels that moved thousands of boxes at a time.*hold: ship's storage area below deckH The shipping container transformed ocean shipping into a highly efficient, intensely competitive business. But getting the cargo to and from the dock was a different story. National governments, by and large, kept a much firmer hand on truck and railroad tariffs than on charges for ocean freight. This started changing, however, in the mid-1970s, when America began to deregulate its transportation industry. First airlines, then road hauliers and railways, were freed from restrictions on what they could carry, where they could haul it and what price they could charge. Big productivity gains resulted. Between 1985 and 1996, for example, America's freight railways dramatically reduced their employment, trackage, and their fleets of locomotives - while increasing the amount of cargo they hauled. Europe's railways have also shown marked, albeit smaller, productivity improvements.I America the period of huge productivity gains in transportation may be almost over, but in most countries the process still has far to go. State ownership of railways and airlines, regulation of freight rates and toleration of anti-competitive practices, such as cargo-handling monopolies, all keep the cost of shipping unnecessarily high and deter international trade. Bringing these barriers down would help the world's economies grow even closer.Question 14-17Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter, A-I in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.14. a suggestion for improving trade in the future15. the effects of the introduction of electronic delivery16. the similar cost involved in transporting a product from abroad or from a local supplier17. the weakening relationship between the value of goods and the cost of their delivery Question 18-22Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?In boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage18. International trade is increasing at a greater rate than the world economy.19. Cheap labour guarantees effective trade conditions.20. Japan imports more meat and steel than France.21. Most countries continue to prefer to trade with nearby nations.22. Small computer components are manufactured in Germany.Question 23-26Complete the summary using the list of words, A-K, below.Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.The Transport RevolutionModern cargo-handling methods have had a significant effect on 23 ………… as the business of moving freight around the world becomes increasingly streamlined. Manufacturers of computers, for instance, are able to import 24 ………… from overseas, rather than having to rely on a local supplier. The introduction of 25 ………… has meant that bulk cargo can be safely and efficiently moved over long distances. While international shipping is now efficient, there is still a need for governments to reduce 26 ………… in order to free up the domestic cargo sector.You should spend about 20 minutes on QUESTIONS 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.Climate Change and the InuitThe threat posed by climate change in the Arctic and the problems faced by Canada’s InuitpeopleA Unusual incidents are being reported across the Arctic. Inuit families going off on snowmobiles to prepare their summer hunting camps have found themselves cut off from home by a sea of mud, following early thaws. There are reports of igloos losing their insulating properties as tile snow drips and refreezes, of lakes draining into the sea as permafrost melts, and sea ice breaking up earlier than usual, carrying seals beyond the reach of hunters. Climate change may still be a rather abstract idea to most of us, but in the Arctic it is already having dramatic effects — if summertime ice continues to shrink at its present rate, the Arctic Ocean could soon become virtually ice-free in summer. The knock-on effects are likely to include more warming, cloudierskies, increased precipitation and higher sea levels. Scientists are increasingly keen to find out what's going on because they consider the Arctic the 'canary in the mine' for global warming — a warning of what's in store for the rest of the world.B For the Inuit the problem is urgent. They live in precarious balance with one of the toughest environments on earth. Climate change, whatever its causes, is a direct threat to their way of life. Nobody knows the Arctic as well as the locals, which is why they are not content simply to stand back and let outside experts tell them what's happening. In Canada, where the Inuit people are jealously guarding their hard-won autonomy in the country's newest territory, Nunavut, they believe their best hope of survival in this changing environment lies in combining their ancestral knowledge with the best of modern science. This is a challenge in itself.C The Canadian Arctic is a vast, treeless polar desert that's covered with snow for most of the year. Venture into this terrain and you get some idea of the hardships facing anyone who calls this home. Farming is out of the question and nature offers meagre pickings. Humans first settled in the Arctic a mere 4,500 years ago, surviving by exploiting sea mammals and fish. The environment tested them to the limits: sometimes the colonists were successful, sometimes they failed and vanished. But around a thousand years ago, one group emerged that was uniquely well adapted to cope with the Arctic environment. These Thule people moved in from Alaska, bringing kayaks, sleds, dogs, pottery and iron tools. They are the ancestors of today's Inuit people.D Life for the descendants of the Thule people is still harsh. Nunavut is 1.9 million square kilometres of rock and ice, and a handful of islands around the North Pole. It's currently home to 2,500 people, all but a handful of them indigenous Inuit. Over the past 40 years, most have abandoned their nomadic ways and settled in the territory's 28 isolated communities, but they still rely heavily on nature to provide food and clothing. Provisions available in local shops have to be flown into Nunavut on one of the most costly air networks in the world, or brought by supply ship during the few ice-free weeks of summer. It would cost a family around ￡7,000 a year to replace meat they obtained themselves through hunting with imported meat. Economic opportunities are scarce, and for many people state benefits are their only income.E While the Inuit may not actually starve if hunting and trapping are curtailed by climate change, there has certainly been an impact on people's health. Obesity, heart disease and diabetes are beginning to appear in a people for whom these have never before been problems. There has been a crisis of identity as the traditional skills of hunting, trapping and preparing skins have begun to disappear. In Nunavut's 'igloo and email' society, where adults who were born in igloos have children who may never have been out on the land, there's a high incidence of depression.F With so much at stake, the Inuit are determined to play a key role in teasing out the mysteries of climate change in the Arctic. Having survived there for centuries, they believe their wealth of traditional knowledge is vital to the task. And Western scientists are starting to draw on this wisdom, increasingly referred to as 'Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit', or IQ. 'In the early days scientists ignored us when they came up here to study, anything. They just figured these people don't know very much so we won't ask them,' says John Amagoalik, an Inuit leader and politician. 'But in recent years IQ has had much more credibility and weight.' In fact it is now a requirement for anyone hoping to get permission to do research that they consult the communities, who are helping to set the research agenda to reflect their most important concerns. They can turn down applications from scientists they believe will work against their interests, or research projects that will impinge too much on their daily lives and traditional activities.G Some scientists doubt the value of traditional knowledge because the occupation of the Arctic doesn't go back far enough. Others, however, point out that the first weather stations in the far north date back just 50 years. There are still huge gaps in our environmental knowledge, and despite the scientific onslaught, many predictions are no more than best guesses. IQ could help to bridge the gap and resolve the tremendous uncertainty about how much of what we're seeing is natural capriciousness and how much is the consequence of human activity.Question 27-32Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-G from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, i-ix, into boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.Example Paragraph A Answer viii27 Paragraph B28 Paragraph C29 Paragraph D30 Paragraph E31 Paragraph F32 Paragraph GQuestion 33-40Complete the summary of paragraphs C and D belowChoose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from paragraphs C and D for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 33-40 on your answer sheet.If you visit the Canadian Arctic, you immediately appreciate the problems faced by people for whom this is home. It would clearly be impossible for the people to engage in 33 ………… as a means of supporting themselves. For thousands of years they have had to rely on catching 34 ………… and 35 ………… as a means of sustenance. The harsh surroundings saw many who tried to settle there pushed to their limits, although some were successful. The 36 ………… people were an example of the latter and for them the environment did not prove unmanageable. For the present inhabitants, life continues to be a struggle. The territory of Nunavut consists oflittle more than ice, rock and a few 37 …………. In recent years, many of them have been obliged to give up their 38 ………… lifestyle, but they continue to depend mainly on 39 ………… for their food and clothes. 40 ………… produce is particularly expensive.参考答案1 B2 C3 B4 F5 D6 A7 E8 A9 B10 A11 C12 (a) competition model13 (by) 2 per cent/%14 I15 F16 E17 D18 TRUE19 FALSE20 NOT GIVEN21 TRUE22 NOT GIVEN23 G24 B25 C26 A27 i28 vi29 iii30 vii31 iv32 ii33 farming34 & 35 (IN EITHER ORDER): sea mammals; fish36 Thule37 islands38 nomadic39 nature40 Imported。
雅思(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编13(题后含答案及解析)
雅思（阅读）历年真题试卷汇编13(题后含答案及解析) 题型有：1.You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.Man or Machine?MIT’s humanoid robots showcase both human creativity and contemporary pessimism.Humanoid robots were once the stuff of political and science fiction. Today, scientists working in Japan and the USA have been turning fiction into a physical reality.A During July 2003, the Museum of Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts exhibited what Honda calls ‘the world’s most advanced humanoid robot’, ASIMO(the Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility). Honda’s brainchild is on tour in North America and delighting audiences wherever it goes. After 17 years in the making, ASIMO stands at four feet tall, weighs around 115 pounds and looks like a child in an astronaut’s suit. Though it is difficult to see ASIMO’s face at a distance, on closer inspection it has a smile and two large ‘eyes’that conceal cameras. The robot cannot work autonomously —its actions are ‘remote controlled’ by scientists through the computer in its backpack. Yet watching ASMIO perform at a show in Massachusetts it seemed uncannily human. The audience cheered as ASIMO walked forwards and backwards, side to side and up and downstairs. It can even dance to the Hawaiian Hula.B While the Japanese have made huge strides in solving some of the engineering problems of human kinetics and bipedal movements, for the past 10 years scientists at MIT’s former Artificial Intelligence(Al)lab(recently renamed the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL)have been making robots that can behave like humans and interact with humans. One of MIT’s robots, Kismet, is an anthropomorphic head and has two eyes(complete with eyelids), ears, a mouth, and eyebrows. It has several facial expressions, including happy, sad, frightened and disgusted. Human interlocutors are able to read some of the robot’s facial expressions, and often change their behaviour towards the machine as a result - for example, playing with it when it appears ‘sad’. Kismet is now in MIT’s museum, but the ideas developed here continue to be explored in new robots.C Cog(short for Cognition)is another pioneering project from MIT’s former Al lab. Cog has a head, eyes, two arms, hands and a torso —and its proportions were originally measured from the body of a researcher in the lab. The work on Cog has been used to test theories of embodiment and developmental robotics, particularly getting a robot to develop intelligence by responding to its environment via sensors, and to learn through these types of interactions. This approach to Al was thought up and developed by a team of students and researchers led by the head of MIT’s former Al lab, Rodney Brooks(now head of CSAIL), and represented a completely new development.D This work at MIT is getting furthest down the road to creating human-like and interactive robots. Some scientists argue that ASIMO is a great engineering feat but not an intelligent machine —because it is unable to interact autonomously with unpredictabilities in its environment inmeaningful ways, and learn from experience. Robots like Cog and Kismet and new robots at MIT’s CSAIL and media lab, however, are beginning to do this.E These are exciting developments. Creating a machine that can walk, make gestures and learn from its environment is an amazing achievement. And watch this space: these achievements are likely rapidly to be improved upon. Humanoid robots could have a plethora of uses in society, helping to free people from everyday tasks. In Japan, for example, there is an aim to create robots that can do the tasks similar to an average human, and also act in more sophisticated situations as firefighters, astronauts or medical assistants to the elderly in the workplace and in homes —partly in order to counterbalance the effects of an ageing population.F So in addition to these potentially creative plans there lies a certain dehumanisation. The idea that companions can be replaced with machines, for example, suggests a mechanical and degraded notion of human relationships. On one hand, these developments express human creativity —our ability to invent, experiment, and to extend our control over the world. On the other hand, the aim to create a robot like a human being is spurred on by dehumanised ideas —by the sense that human companionship can be substituted by machines; that humans lose their humanity when they interact with technology; or that we are little more than surface and ritual behaviours, that can be simulated with metal and electrical circuits.G The tension between the dehumanised and creative aspects of robots has long been explored in culture. In Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, a 1921 play in which the term ‘robot’ was first coined, although Capek’s robots had human-like appearance and behaviour, the dramatist never thought these robots were human. For Capek, being human was about much more than appearing to be human. In part, it was about challenging a dehumanising system, and struggling to become recognised and given the dignity of more than a machine. A similar spirit would guide us well through twenty-first century experiments in robotics.Questions 1-7Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.1．The different uses of robots in society正确答案：E解析：利用反向思维词“different uses”可以推断原文对应信息应该提及具体的机器人的使用，例如替代人类工作、照顾老年人、机械战士等等。
雅思(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编11(题后含答案及解析)
雅思（阅读）历年真题试卷汇编11(题后含答案及解析) 题型有：1.You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.The Origins of LaughterWhile joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, laugh. The fact that they laugh suggests that laughter has been around for a lot longer than we have.There is no doubt that laughing typically involves groups of people. “Laughter evolved as a signal to others —it almost disappears when we are alone,” says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as “see you later”, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behavior —they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But after removing the context, the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter? New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalizations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman believes the closeness of baby laughter to chimp laughter supports the idea that laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps 8 million years ago, but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals can do too. Scientists arecurrently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by Jaak Panksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained the most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is what makes it a reliable signal of trust, according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angels. “Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,” says Flamson. “These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.”We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quite serious, we owe human laughter and our language-based humor to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech —and no jokes to endure.Questions 1-6Look at the following research findings(Questions 1-6)and the list of people below.Match each finding with the correct person, A, B, C or D.Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any letter more than once.List of PeopleA ProvineB ZimmermanC PankseppD Flamson1．Babies and some animals produce laughter which sounds similar.正确答案：B解析：利用细节词“babies”和“some animals”定位于原文第三段中间Elke Zimmerman的观点“she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the samepattern”，其中“follow the same pattern”对应题目的“similar”，所以答案为B。
雅思阅读真题管理学之父
雅思阅读真题管理学之父Father of Modern ManagementPeter Drucker (born in 1909) in known as a the father of modern management. As a prolific writer, business consultant and lecturer, he introduced many management concepts that have been embraced by corporations around the world.A It's been said that Peter Drucker invented the discipline of management. Before he wrote his first book on the topic, he knew of only two companies in the world with management development programs. Ten years after the book's publication, 3,000 companies were teaching the subject. Widely considered as the father of “modern management” he wrote 39 books and countless scholarly and popular articles exploring how humans are organized in all sectors of society-business, government and the nonprofit world. His writings have predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to a world economic power; the decisive importance of marketing; and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning.B Drucker has said that writing is the foundation of everything he does. In 1937, he published his first book, which was written in Europe. The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism examined the spiritual and social origins of fascism. In 1940, before the United States entered World War II, he wrote The Future of Industrial Man, in which he presented his social vision for the postwar world. In 1943, General Motors asked Drucker to study its management practices. Drucker accepted and spent 18 months researching and writing the 1945 book Concept of the Corporation.C The concepts Drucker introduced in the 1940s and l950s have endured. In 1954, Drucker wrote his first book that taught people how to manage. Titled The Practice of Management, it introduced the concept of “management by objectives”. Management by objectives requiresmanagers to establish goals for their subordinates and devise means of measuring results. Workers are then left alone to perform as they will and measure their performance. Drucker wrote, “It is not possible to be effective unless one first decides what one wants to accomplish.” He went on to explain that every worker must be given the tools “to appraise himself, rather than be appraised and controlled from the outside” Management by objectives has become an accepted business concept and is probably Drucker’s most important contribution. Drucker issued challenges to junior, middle and senior management: “The very term‘middle management’ is becoming meaningless as some will have to learn how to work with people over whom they have no direct line control, to work transnationally, and to create, maintain, and run systems-none of which are traditionally middle manage ment tasks.” It is top management that faces the challenge of setting directions for the enterprise, of managing the fundamentals.D Drucker interviewed executives and workers, visited plants, and attended board meetings. While the book focused on General Motors. Drucker went on to discuss the industrial corporation as a social institution and economic policy in the postwar era. He introduced previously unknown concepts such as cooperation between labor and management, decentralization of management, and viewing workers as resources rather than costs. Drucker saw people as a resource, and considered that they would be more able to satisfy customers if they had more involvement in their jobs and gained some satisfaction from doing them. Drucker claimed that an industrial society allows people to realize their dreams of personal achievement and equal opportunity-the need to manage business by balancing a variety of needs and goals，rather than subordinating an institution to a single value. This concept of management by objectives forms the keynote of his 1954 landmark The Practice of Management. He referred to decentralization as ‘a system of local self-government, in which central management tells division managers what to do, but nothow to do it. The young executives are given the freedom to make decisions-and mistakes-and learn from the experience. Top leaders at General Motors disliked the book and discouraged their executives from reading it. Many other American executives criticized his concept for its challenge to management authority.E Drucker wasn’t immune to criticism. The Wall Street Journal researched Several of his lectures in 1987 and reported that he was sometimes loose with facts. Drucker was off the mark, for example, when he told an audience that English was the official language for all employees at Japan’s Mitsui trading company. And he was known for his prescience. Given the recent involvement of the us government with financial companies, he was probably correct in his forecast when he anticipated, for instance, that the nation's financial center would shift from New York to Washington. Others maintain that one of Drucke r’s core concepts“- management by objectives”-is flawed and has never really been proven to work effectively. Specifically, critics say that the system is difficult to implement, and that companies often wind up overemphasizing control, as opposed to fostering creativity, to meet their goals. Drucker didn’t shy away from controversy, either.F Throughout his career, Drucker expanded his position that management was “a liberal art” and he infused his management advice with interdisciplinary lessons including history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, culture and religion. He also strongly believed that all institutions, including those in the private sector, had a responsibility for the whole society. “The fact is?” Drucker wrote in 1973, “that in modern society there is no other leadership group but managers. If the managers of our major institutions, especially in business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will.” In his books, lectures and interviews, the emergence of knowledge workers is only one of the demographic changes Drucker warns businesses to prepare for. Others include a decreasing birth rate in developed countries, a shift in populationfrom rural to urban centers, shifts in distribution of disposable income and global competitiveness. Drucker believes these changes will have a tremendous impact on business. Drucker held a profound skepticism of macroeconomic theory and contended that economists of all schools fail to explain significant aspects of modem economies. Business “gurus” have come and gone during the last 50 years, but Drucker’s message continues to inspire managers. During the 1990s, Drucker wrote about social, political and economic changes of the “postcapitalist” era, which he says are as profound as those of the industrial revolution.Questions 33-36Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?33 Drucker believed the workers should bear the equal position as the employers in a company.34 Middle management tasks will change since companies have become more complex and run business globally.35 Drucker pointed out that economists of schools are not capable of explaining the problems of modem economies at least in a macroeconomics scope.36 Drucker’s conc eptions proposed half a century ago have no effect on modem days.。