2015年9月13日大陆托福阅读解析

今日托福阅读考试词汇题汇总如下:

第一篇：

　　内容:Dorset and Thule

有很多适宜生活在Arctic区域内的methods，先说Dorset和Pre-Dorset的区别，比如用工具，在summer的时候去tundra捕食。这里有except题。后来说Dorset小时了，一个原因是气候的变化，气候变暖，而Dorset已经适应变冷的环境所以被影响，然后说了Dorset可能消失还有一个原因就是Thule，absorb or destroy了他们，Thule一过来是因为他们原来住的地方没有足够的吃的了，最后说公众的观点认为两种文化没有联系，但是研究表明还是有一定联系的。

解析：本文属于人文历史类文章，从机经来看，仍然是人文类常用的因果型文章，主要从两方面展开，学员在阅读时结构上应该难度不大，不过人文类文章一般生僻词汇偏多，而且句子偏长，对学员的句子理解功底要求比较高。人文类的文章在TPO中历来不缺，可以通过多做TPO来针对性准备。

参考阅读：

The origins of the Dorset people are not well understood. They may have developed from the previous cultures of Pre-Dorset, Saqqaq or (less likely) Independence I. There are, however, problems with this theory: these earlier cultures had bow and arrow technology which the Dorsets lacked. Possibly due to a shift from terrestrial to aquatic hunting, the bow and arrow became lost to the Dorset. Another piece of technology that is missing from the Dorset are drills: there are no drill holes in Dorset artifacts. Instead, the Dorset gouged lenticular holes. For example, bone needles are common in Dorset sites, but they have long and narrow holes that have been painstakingly carved or gouged. Both the Pre-Dorset and Thule (Inuit) had drills.

Dorset culture and history is divided into four periods: the Early (which began around 500 BCE), Middle, Late (starting around CE 800), and Terminal (CE 1000 to 1500) phases. The Terminal phase was already in progress when the Thule entered the Canadian Arctic, migrating east from Alaska. It is probably closely related to the onset of the Medieval Warm Period, which started to warm the Arctic considerably around AD 800. With the warmer climates, the sea ice became less predictable and was isolated from the High Arctic.

The Dorset were highly adapted to living in a very cold climate, and much of their food came from hunting sea mammals through holes in the ice. The massive decline in sea-ice which the Medieval Warm Period produced would have had a devastating impact upon their way of life. They seem to have had great difficulty adapting to this change. They apparently followed the ice north. During the Late and Terminal periods, they concentrated their settlements in the High Arctic.[citation needed] As mentioned below, an isolated remnant of the Dorset may have survived on a few small Hudson Bayislands until 1902. Most of the evidence demonstrates that by 1500 they had essentially disappeared.

Scholars credit the Dorset with a faultless understanding of their local environment (which they may have shared with the newly arrived Inuit).[citation needed] But, their adaptation was different from that of the whaling-based Thule Inuit. Specifically, the Dorset did little hunting of land animals, such as polar bears and caribou. They lacked bow and arrow technology. Instead, they relied upon sea mammals (mostly seal), which they hunted from holes in the ice. Their clothing was well adapted to extremely cold weather.

Technological diagnostics of the Dorset culture include small, triangular end-blades; soapstone; and burins. The end-blades were hafted onto harpoon heads. They primarily used the harpoons to hunt seal, but also hunted larger sea mammals such aswalrus and narwhals. They used soapstone to make lamps, which when filled with seal oil, would heat the Dorset dwellings during the cold and dark months. The distinctive burins were a special type of stone flake with a chisel-like edge. They were probably used for engraving, or for carving wood or bone. The burins were also used by Pre-Dorset groups; they usually had a distinctive mitten shape.

The Dorset were highly skilled at making refined miniature carvings, and striking masks. Both indicate an active shamanistictradition. The Dorset culture was remarkably homogeneous across the Canadian Arctic, but there were some important variations which have been noted in both Greenland and Newfoundland/Labrador regions.

第二篇：

　　内容：Development of Agriculture

古代的时候今冬那块就是流着奶和蜜啊，想吃啥都有。随便采集就行了。结果半干旱的地方植物先进化出好吃的种子啊。捕食不能吃的有营养的种子，因为那里有段时间是植物没法过的。但是非地不这样啊，那里种地的成本比采集野生的谷物还高。而且人们以种地为生，天天吃谷子，获得的营养单一，不健康。有饭吃谁种地啊。后来人们发现了种地的技术，但是还是靠打猎(这里貌似考到了intact，有个选项typical)。然后人们发现那一段时间里，某种植物的面积疯狂扩大，几乎可以确定是人为种植。

解析：本文属于农业类文章，从机经来看讲述的是农业出现的过程。农业类文章在TPO里不太多，但是在近年来的托福考试中出现频率较高，而且由于农业类文章一般句子偏长，背景知识偏生僻，学员在理解时不是特别好，在备考过程中需要专门针对性训练，具体可以参考TPO21的The Origin of Agriculture,TPO33的The First Civilizations 以及TPO35的The Development of Social Complexity等。

参考阅读：

The Origins of Agriculture

How did it come about that farming developed independently in a number of world centers (the Southeast Asian mainland, Southwest Asia, Central America, lowland and highland South America, and equatorial Africa) at more or less the same time? Agriculture developed slowly among populations that had an extensive knowledge of plants and animals. Changing from hunting and gathering to agriculture had no immediate advantages. To start with, it forced the population to abandon the nomad's life and become sedentary, to develop methods of storage and, often, systems of irrigation. While hunter-gatherers always had the option of moving elsewhere when the resources were exhausted, this became more difficult with farming. Furthermore, as the archaeological record shows, the state of health of agriculturalists was worse than that of their contemporary hunter-gatherers.

Traditionally, it was believed that the transition to agriculture was the result of a worldwide population crisis. It was argued that once hunter-gatherers had occupied the whole world, the population started to grow everywhere and food became scarce; agriculture would have been a solution to this problem. We know, however, that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies control their population in a variety of ways. The idea of a world population crisis is therefore unlikely, although population pressure might have arisen in some areas.

Climatic changes at the end of the glacial period 13,000 years ago have been proposed to account for the emergence of farming. The temperature increased dramatically in a short period of time (years rather than centuries), allowing for a growth of the hunting-gathering population due to the abundance of resources. There were, however, fluctuations in the climatic conditions, with the consequences that wet conditions were followed by dry ones, so that the availability of plants and animals oscillated brusquely.

It would appear that the instability of the climatic conditions led populations that had originally been nomadic to settle down and develop a sedentary style of life, which led in turn to population growth and to the need to increase the amount of food available. Farming originated in these conditions. Later on, it became very difficult to change because of the significant expansion of these populations. It could be argued, however, that these conditions are not sufficient to explain the origins of agriculture. Earth had experienced previous periods of climatic change, and yet agriculture had not been developed.

It is archaeologist Steven Mithen's thesis, brilliantly developed in his book The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), that approximately 40,000 years ago the human mind developed cognitive fluidity, that is, the integration of the specializations of the mind: technical, natural history (geared to understanding the behavior and distribution of natural resources), social intelligence, and the linguistic capacity. Cognitive fluidity explains the appearance of art, religion, and sophisticated speech. Once humans possessed such a mind, they were able to find an imaginative solution to a situation of severe economic crisis such as the farming dilemma described earlier. Mithen proposes the existence of four mental elements to account for the emergence of farming: (1) the ability to develop tools that could be used intensively to harvest and process plant resources; (2) the tendency to use plants and animals as the medium to acquire social prestige and power; (3) the tendency to develop "social relationships" with animals structurally similar to those developed with people—specifically, the ability to think of animals as people (anthropomorphism) and of people as animals (totemism); and (4) the tendency to manipulate plants and animals.

The fact that some societies domesticated animals and plants, discovered the use of metal tools, became literate, and developed a state should not make us forget that others developed pastoralism or horticulture (vegetable gardening) but remained illiterate and at low levels of productivity; a few entered the modern period as hunting and gathering societies. It is anthropologically important to inquire into the conditions that made some societies adopt agriculture while others remained hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. However, it should be kept in mind that many societies that knew of agriculture more or less consciously avoided it. Whether Mithen's explanation is satisfactory is open to contention, and some authors have recently emphasized the importance of other factors.

第三篇：

　　内容：Frogs’ Chorus

　　讲青蛙的叫声在繁殖上发挥了重要作用。先说声音信号传播的各种好处，例如不受方向限制，能远距离传播，都比视觉信号好。一般都是雄性青蛙叫，可以用来表示自己的攻击性，吸引雌性青蛙，雄青蛙会表达自己的体型，年龄，还有处于的地方等信息，还会用声音的频率和音调和长度去表示信息，然后这些各种信息都是去吸引雌青蛙。

解析：本文属于生物类文章，重点关注的是动物行为，从机经来看，主要是从青蛙的叫声入手，讲解叫声的功能。动物行为类文章在TPO中也比较常见，而具体的动物行为以及信号相关的文章也有，学员在理解时只需要重点理解出不同的行为表达特定信息的方式即可，可以重点参考TPO28里的Buck Rubs and Buck Scrapes

参考阅读：

Buck Rubs and Buck Scrapes

A conspicuous sign indicating the presence of white-tailed deer in a woodlot is a buck rub. A male deer makes a buck rub by striping the bark (outer layer) of a small tree with its antlers. When completed, the buck rub is an obvious visual signal to us and presumable to other deer in the area. A rub is usually located at the shoulder height of a deer (one meter or less above the ground) on a smooth-barked, small-diameter (16-25 millimeters) tree. The smooth bark of small red maples makes this species ideal for buck rubs in the forests of the mid-eastern United States.

Adult male deer usually produce rubs in late summer or early autumn when the outer velvet layer is being shed from their antlers. Rubs are created about one to two months before the breeding season (the rut). Hence for a long time biologists believed that male deer used buck rubs not only to clean and polish antlers but also to provide practice for the ensuing male-to-male combat during the rut. However, biologists also noted deer sniff and lick an unfamiliar rub, which suggests that this visual mark on a small tree plays an important communication purpose in the social life of deer.

Buck rubs also have a scent produced by glands in the foreheads of deer that is transferred to the tree when the rub is made. These odors make buck rubs an important means of olfactory communication between deer. The importance of olfactory communication (using odors to communicate) in the way of life of deer was documented by a study of captive adult male deer a few decades ago, which noted that males rubbed their foreheads on branches and twigs, especially as autumn approached. A decade later another study reported that adult male white-tailed deer exhibited forehead rubbing just before and during the rut. It was found that when a white-tailed buck makes a rub, it moves both antlers and forehead glands along the small tree in a vertical direction. This forehead rubbing behavior coincides with a high level of glandular activity in the modified scent glands found on the foreheads of male deer; the glandular activity causes the forehead pelage (hairy covering) of adult males to be distinctly darker than in females or younger males.

Forehead rubbing by male deer on buck rubs presumably sends a great deal of information to other members of the same species. First, the chemicals deposited on the rub provide information on the individual identity of an animal; no two mammals produce the same scent. For instance, as we all know, dogs recognize each other via smell. Second, because only male deer rub, the buck rub and its associated chemicals indicate the sex of the deer producing the rub. Third, older, more dominant bucks produce more buck rubs and probably deposit more glandular secretions on a given rub. Thus the presence of many well-marked rubs is indicative of older, higher-status males being in the general vicinity rather than simply being a crude measure of relative deer abundance in a given area. The information conveyed by the olfactory signals on a buck rub make it the social equivalent of some auditory signals in other deer species, such as trumpeting by bull elk.

Because both sexes of white-tailed respond to buck rubs by smelling and licking them, rubs may serve a very important additional function. Fresher buck rubs (less than two days old), in particular, are visited more frequently by adult females than older rubs. In view of this behavior it has been suggested that chemicals present in fresh buck rubs may help physiologically induce and synchronize fertility in females that visit these rubs. This would be an obvious advantage to wide-ranging deer, especially to a socially dominant buck when courting several adult females during the autumn rut. Another visual signal produced by while-tailed deer is termed a buck scrape. Scrapes consist of a clearing (about 0.5 meter in diameter) and shallow depression made by pushing aside the leaves covering the ground; after making the scrape, the deer typically urinates in the depression. Thus, like a buck rub, a scrape is both a visual and an olfactory signal. Buck scrapes are generally created after leaf-fall in autumn, which is just before or during the rut. Scrapes are usually placed in open or conspicuous places, such as along a deer trail. Most are made by older males, although females and younger males (2.5 years old or less) occasionally make scrapes.