综合点评

本次考试阅读难度总体不难，比较友好，主要围绕生物和自然科学话题考的比较多，比如鸟类和恐龙相关的文章多多关注， 自然科学涉及大洋岛如何形成的相关内容。

Passage

one

学科分类

题目

历史

待回忆

内容回忆

人们初用牛作为畜力，后来有了马， 但原来用在牛身上的缰绳不适合用在马身上， 然后随着新工具的发明， 马逐渐在中世纪普遍出现， 文中还提及马铁蹄以及改变牵引方式让其成为中世纪主要的运输动物。

参考阅读

The Plow and the Horse in Medieval Europe

One of the most important factors driving Europe’s slow emergence from the economic stagnation of the Early Middle Ages (circa 500-1000 B.C.E.) was the improvement of agricultural technology. One innovation was a new plow, with a curved attachment (moldboard) to turn over wet, heavy soils, and a knife (or coulter) in front of the blade to allow a deeper and easier cut. This more complex plow replaced the simpler “scratch” plow that merely made a shallow, straight furrow in the ground. In the lands around the Mediterranean, with light rains and mild winters, this had been find, but in the wetter terrain north and west of the Danube and the Alps, such a plow left much to be desired, and it is to be wondered if it was used at all. Cleared lands would more likely have been worked by hand tilling, with little direct help from animals, and the vast forests natural to Northern Europe remained either untouched, or perhaps cleared in small sections by fire, and the land probably used only so long as the ash-enriched soil yielded good crops and then abandoned for some others similarly cleared field. Such a pattern of agriculture and settlement was no basis for sustained cultural or economic life.

With the new heavy plow, however, fields could be cleared, sowed, and maintained with little more difficulty than in the long-settled lands of Southern Europe, while the richness of the new soils, the reliability of the rains, and the variety of crops now possible made for an extremely productive agriculture. The new tool, however, imposed new demands, technical, economic, and social. The heavy plow was a substantial piece of capital, unlike a simple hand hoe, and this had the same sorts of implications that capitalization always has—it favored the concentration of wealth and control. Moreover, making full use of it required more animal power, and this had a host of implications of its own. The full importance of this was even more apparent in the centuries after 1000, when oxen began to give way in certain parts of Western Europe to horses.

The powerful, rugged farm horse was itself a product of improvement during the Middle Ages, and it was part of a complex set of technical changes and capabilities. The introduction of new forms of equipment for horses transformed this animal into the single most important assist to human labor and travel. Instead of the old harness used by the ancient Greeks and Romans, there appeared from Central Asia the rigid, padded horse collar. Now, when the horse pulled against a load, no longer did the load pull back against its neck and windpipe but rather rode on the sturdy shoulders. When this innovation was combined with the iron horseshoe, the greater speed and stamina of the horse displaced oxen wherever it could be afforded. The larger importance of this lay not only in more efficient farm work, but in swifter and surer transportation between town and countryside. The farmer with horses could move products to market more frequently and at greater distances than with only oxen, and the urban development that was to transform the European economic and social landscape after the eleventh century was propelled in large part by these new horse-centered transport capabilities.

Another indicator of how compelling and important was the new horse agriculture was its sheer cost. Unlike oxen and other cattle, horses cannot be supported exclusively on hay and pasturage, they require, particularly in northern climates where pasturing seasons are short, cropped food, such as oats and alfalfa. Unlike grass and hay, these are grown with much of the same effort and resources applied to human nourishment, and thus their acquisition represents a sacrifice, in a real sense, of human food. The importance of this in a world that usually lived at the margins of sufficient diet is hard to overstate. The increased resources that went into making the horse central to both the medieval economy and, in a separate but related development, medieval warfare, are the surest signs of the great utility the animal now assumed.

Passage

two

学科分类

题目

动物

T-rex: Carnivore or Scavenger?

内容回忆

通过文中呈现的线索来讨论霸龙是食肉动物还是食腐动物？

参考阅读

Jack Horner is an unlikely academic: his dyslexia is so bad that he has trouble reading a book. But he can read the imprint of life in sandstone or muddy shale across a distance of 100 years, and it is this gift that has made him curator of palaeontology at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies, the leader of a multi-million dollar scientific project to expose a complete slice of life 68 million years ago, and a consultant to Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood figures.

His father had a sand and gravel quarry in Montana, and the young Horner was a collector of stones and bones, complete with notes about when and where he found them. “My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana,” he says. “He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur bones. So when I was eight years old he took me back to the area that had been his ranch, to where he had seen these big old bones. I picked up one. I am pretty sure it was the upper arm bone of a duckbilled dinosaur: it probably wasn’t a duckbilled dinosaur but closely related to that. I catalogued it, and took good care of it, and then later when I was in high school, excavated my first dinosaur skeleton. It obviously started earlier than eight and I literally have been driven ever since. I feel like I was born this way.”

Horner spent seven years at university, but never graduated. “I have a learning disability, I would call it a learning difference — dyslexia, they call it — and I just had a terrible time with English and foreign languages and things like that. For a degree in geology or biology they required two years of a foreign language. There was no way in the world I could do that. In fact, I didn’t really pass English. So I couldn’t get a degree, I just wasn’t capable of it. But I took all of the courses required and I wrote a thesis and I did all sorts of things. So I have the education, I just don’t have the piece of paper.” he says.

“We definitely know we are working on a very broad coastal plain with the streams and rivers bordered by conifers and hardwood plants, and the areas in between these rivers were probably fern-covered. There were no grasses at all: just ferns and bushes — an unusual landscape, kind of taking the south-eastern United States — Georgia, Florida — and mixingit with the moors of England and flattening it out,” he says. “Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous, they are everywhere. Duckbilled dinosaurs are relatively common but not as common as triceratops and T-rex, for a meat-eating dinosaur, is very common. What we would consider the predator-prey ratio seems really off the scale. What is interesting is the little dromaeosaurs, the ones we know for sure were good predators, are haven’t been found.”

That is why he sees T-rex not as the lion of the Cretaceous savannah but its vulture. “Look at the wildebeest that migrate in the Serengeti of Africa, a million individuals lose about 200,000 individuals in that annual migration. There is a tremendous carrion base there. And so you have hyenas, you have tremendous numbers of vultures that are scavenging; you don’t have all that many animals that are good predators. If T-rex was a top predator, especially considering how big it is, you’d expect it to be extremely rare, much rarer than the little dromaeosaurs, and yet they are everywhere, they are a dime a dozen,” he says. A 12-tonne T-rex is a lot of vulture, but he doesn’t see the monster as clumsy. He insisted his theory and finding, dedicated to further research upon it, of course, he would like to reevaluate if there is any case that additional evidence found or explanation raised by others in the future.

He examined the leg bones of the T-rex, and compared the length of the thigh bone (upper leg) to the shin bone (lower leg). He found that the thigh bone was equal in length or slightly longer than the shin bone, and much thicker and heavier, which proves that the animal was built to be a slow walker rather than fast running. On the other hand, the fossils of fast hunting dinosaurs always showed that the shin bone was longer than the thigh bone. This same truth can be observed in many animals of today which are designed to run fast: the ostrich, cheetah, etc.

He also studied the fossil teeth of the T-rex, and compared them with the teeth of the Velociraptor, and put the nail in the coffin of the “hunter T-rex theory”. The Velociraptor’s teeth which like stake knifes: sharp, razor-edged, and capable of tearing through flesh with ease. The T-rex’s teeth were huge, sharp at their tip, but blunt, propelled by enormous jaw muscles, which enabled them to only crush bones.

With the evidence presented in his documentary, Horner was able to prove that the idea of the T-rex as being a hunting and ruthless killing machine is probably just a myth. In light of the scientific clues he was able to unearth, the T-rex was a slow, sluggish animal which had poor vision, an extraordinary sense of smell, that often reached its “prey” after the real hunters were done feeding, and sometimes it had to scare the hunters away from a corpse. In order to do that, the T-rex had to have been ugly, nasty-looking, and stinky. This is actually true of nearly all scavenger animals. They are usually vile and nasty looking.

Passage Three

学科分类

题目

地理

Oceanic Island

内容回忆

主要讲解大洋岛屿是如何形成的，如何成为动植物的栖息地，以及对洋流的影响。

参考阅读

The formation of volcanic islands

题目27

Earth’s surface is not made up of a single sheet of rock that forms a crust but rather a number of “tectonic plates” that fit closely, like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Some plates carry islands or continents, others form the seafloor. All are slowly moving because the plates float on a denser semi-liquid mantle, the layer between the crust and Earth’s core. The plates have edges that are spreading ridges (where two plates are moving apart and new seafloor is being created), subduction zones (where two plates collide and one plunges beneath the other), or transform faults (where two plates neither converge nor diverge but merely move past one another). It is at the boundaries between plates that most of Earth’s volcanism and earthquake activity occur.

Generally speaking, the interiors of plates are geologically uneventful. However, there are exceptions. A glance at a map of the Pacific Ocean reveals that there are many islands far out at sea that are actually volcanoes----many no longer active, some overgrown with coral----that originated from activity at points in the interior of the Pacific Plate that forms the Pacific seafloor.

How can volcanic activity occur so far from a plate boundary? The Hawaiian islands provide a very instructive answer. Like many other island groups, they form a chain. The Hawaiian Islands Chain extends northwest from the island of Hawaii. In the 1840s American geologist James Daly observed that the different Hawaii islands seem to share a similar geologic evolution but are progressively more eroded, and therefore probable older, toward the northwest. Then in 1963, in the early days of the development of the theory of plate tectonics. Canadian geophysicist Tuzo Wilson realized that this age progression could result if the islands were formed on a surface plate moving over a fixed volcanic source in the interior. Wilson suggested that the long chain of volcanoes stretching northwest from Hawaii is simply the surface expression of a long-lived volcanic source located beneath the tectonic plate in the mantle. Today’s most northwest island would have been the first to form. They as the plate moved slowly northwest, new volcanic islands would have forms as the plate moved over the volcanic source. The most recent island, Hawaii, would be at the end of the chain and is now over the volcanic source.

Although this idea was not immediately accepted, the dating of lavas in the Hawaii (and other) chains showed that their ages increase away from the presently active volcano, just as Daly had suggested. Wilson’s analysis of these data is now a central part of plate tectonics. Most volcanoes that occur in the interiors of plates are believed to be produced by mantle plumes, columns of molten rock that rise from deep within the mantle. A volcano remains an active “hot spot” as long as it is over the plume. The plumes apparently originate at great depths, perhaps as deep as the boundary between the core and the mantle, and many have been active for a very long time. The oldest volcanoes in the Hawaii hot-spot trail have ages close to 80 million years. Other islands, including Tahiti and Easter Islands in the pacific, Reunion and Mauritius in the India Ocean, and indeed most of the large islands in the world’s oceans, owe their existence to mantle plumes.

The oceanic volcanic islands and their hot-spot trails are thus especially useful for geologist because they record the past locations of the plate over a fixed source. They therefore permit the reconstruction of the process of seafloor spreading, and consequently of the geography of continents and of ocean basins in the past. For example, given the current position of the Pacific Plate, Hawaii is above the Pacific Ocean hot spot. So the position of The Pacific Plate 50 million years ago can be determined by moving it such that a 50-million-year-old volcano in the hot-spot trail sits at the location of Hawaii today. However because the ocean basins really are short-lived features on geologic times scale, reconstruction the world’s geography by backtracking along the hot-spot trail works only for the last 5 percent or so of geologic time.

Passage Four

学科分类

题目

生物

待回忆

内容回忆

主要讲了aquatic insects在temporary pool和permanent pool两种环境下哪个更适合生存

参考阅读

Feeding Strategies In The Ocean

题目45

In the open sea, animals can often find food reliably available in particular regions or seasons (e g., in coastal areas in springtime). In these circumstances, animals are neither constrained to get the last calorie out of their diet nor is energy conservation a high priority. In contrast, the food levels in the deeper layers of the ocean are greatly reduced, and the energy constraints on the animals are much more severe. To survive at those levels, animals must maximize their energy input, finding and eating whatever potential food source may be present.

In the near-surface layers, there are many large, fast carnivores as well as an immense variety of planktonic animals, which feed on plankton (small, free-floating plants or animals) by filtering them from currents of water that pass through a specialized anatomical structure. These filter-feeders thrive in the well-illuminated surface waters because oceans have so many very small organisms, from bacteria to large algae to larval crustaceans. Even fishes can become successful filter-feeders in some circumstances. Although the vast majority of marine fishes are carnivores, in near-surface regions of high productivity the concentrations of larger phytoplankton (the plant component of plankton) are sufficient to support huge populations of filter-feeding sardines and anchovies. These small fishes use their gill filaments to strain out the algae that dominate such areas. Sardines and anchovies provide the basis for huge commercial fisheries as well as a food resource for large numbers of local carnivores, particularly seabirds. At a much larger scale, baleen whales and whale sharks are also efficient filter-feeders in productive coastal or polar waters, although their filtered particles comprise small animals such as copepods and krill rather than phytoplankton.

Filtering seawater for its particulate nutritional content can be an energetically demanding method of feeding, particularly when the current of water to be filtered has to be generated by the organism itself, as is the case for all planktonic animals. Particulate organic matter of at least 2.5 micrograms per cubic liter is required to provide a filter-feeding planktonic organism with a net energy gain.This value is easily exceeded in most coastal waters, but in the deep sea, the levels of organic matter range from next to nothing to around 7 micrograms per cubic liter. Even though mean levels may mask much higher local concentrations, it is still the case that many deep-sea animals are exposed to conditions in which a normal filter-feeder would starve.

There are, therefore, fewer successful filter-feeders in deep water, and some of those that are there have larger filtering systems to cope with the scarcity of particles. Another solution for such animals is to forage in particular layers of water where the particles may be more concentrated. Many of the groups of animals that typify the filter-feeding lifestyle in shallow water have deep-sea representatives that have become predatory. Their filtering systems, which reach such a high degree of development in shallow- water species, are greatly reduced. Alternative methods of active or passive prey capture have been evolved, including trapping and seizing prey, entangling prey, and sticky tentacles.

■ A In the deeper waters of the oceans, there is a much greater tendency for animals to await the arrival of food particles or prey rather than to search them out actively (thus minimizing energy expenditure). ■ B This has resulted in a more stealthy style of feeding, with the consequent emphasis on lures and/or the evolution of elongated appendages that increase the active volume of water controlled or monitored by the animal. ■ C Another consequence of the limited availability of prey is that many animals have developed ways of coping with much larger food particles, relative to their own body size, than the equivalent shallower species can process. ■ D Among the fishes there is a tendency for the teeth and jaws to become appreciably enlarged. In such creatures, are the teeth hugely enlarged and/or the jaws elongated but the size of the mouth opening may be greatly increased by making the jaw articulations so flexible that they can be effectively dislocated. Very large or long teeth provide almost no room for cutting the prey into a convenient size for swallowing; the fish must gulp the prey down whole.

Passage

Five

学科分类

题目

社会科学

Domestication

内容回忆

文章涉及人类定居生活引起的植物驯化， 比如玉米小麦的种植。

参考阅读

About 10,000 years ago, after nearly 4 million years of human evolution and over 100,000 years of successful foraging for food, human beings, although isolated, nearly simultaneously developed a subsistence strategy that involved domesticated plants and animals. Why? Some scholars seek a single, universal explanation that would be valid for all cases of domestication. Thus, it has been argued that domestication is the outcome of population pressure, as the increasing hunting-and-gathering human population overwhelmed the existing food resources. Others point to climate change or famine, as the post-glacial climate got drier. Increasing archaeological research has made it clear, however, that the evidence in favor of any single-cause, universally applicable explanation is not strong.

Some scholars have proposed universally applicable explanations that take several different phenomena into account. One such explanation, called the broad-spectrum foraging argument (the argument that humans employed a subsistence strategy based on obtaining a wide range of plants and animals), is based on a reconstruction of the environmental situation that followed the retreat of the most recent glaciers. The very large animals of the Ice Age began to die out and were replaced by increased numbers of smaller animals. As sea levels rose to cover the continental shelves, fish and shellfish became more plentiful in the warmer, shallower waters. The effects on plants were equally dramatic, as forests and woodlands expanded into new areas. Consequently, scholars argue, people had to change their diets from big-game hunting to broad-spectrum foraging for plants and animals by hunting, fishing, and gathering. This broadening of the economy is said to have led to a more secure subsistence base, the emergence of sedentary communities, and a growth in population. In turn, population growth pressured the resource base of the area, and people were forced to eat so-called third-choice, foods, particularly wild grain, which was difficult to harvest。

Passage Six

学科分类

题目

鸟类

待回忆

内容回忆

讨论鸟类的散热和人类一样，皮肤都会变红， 并漏出羽毛打开腿，肺的呼吸也不是单向， 而是很复杂，而且可以让水在体内蒸发散热。

参考阅读

待回忆