综合点评

本次考试阅读难度总体持平，主要围绕生物、地质和历史类话题考的比较多。

Passage

one

学科分类

题目

自然科学-生物

水母数量增加

内容回忆

水母数量增加的原因/解决办法

参考阅读

The Cambrian Explosion

The geologic timescale is marked by significant geologic and biological events, including the origin of Earth about 4.6 billion years ago, the origin of life about 3.5billion years ago, the origin of eukaryotic life-forms (living things that have cells with true nuclei) about 1.5billion years ago, and the origin of animals about 0.6 billion years ago. The last event marks the beginning of the Cambrian period. Animals originated relatively late in the history of Earth-in only the last 10 percent of Earth's history. During a geologically brief 100-million-year period, all modern animal groups (along with other animals that are now extinct) evolved. This rapid origin and diversification of animals is often referred to as "the Cambrian explosion."

Scientists have asked important questions about this explosion for more than a century. Why did it occur so late in the history of Earth? The origin of multicellular forms of life seems a relatively simple step compared to the origin of life itself. Why does the fossil record not document the series of evolutionary changes during the evolution of animals? Why did animal life evolve so quickly? Paleontologists continue to search the fossil record for answers to these questions.

One interpretation regarding the absence of fossils during this important 100-million-year period is that early animals were soft bodied and simply did not fossilize. Fossilization of soft-bodied animals is less likely than fossilization of hard-bodied animals, but it does occur. Conditions that promote fossilization of soft-bodied animals include very rapid covering by sediments that create an environment that discourages decomposition. In fact, fossil beds containing soft-bodied animals have been known for many years.

The Ediacara fossil formation, which contains the oldest known animal fossils, consists exclusively of soft-bodied forms. Although named after a site in Australia, the Ediacara formation is worldwide in distribution and dates to Precambrian times. This 700-million-year-old formation gives few clues to the origins of modern animals, however, because paleontologists believe it represents an evolutionary experiment that failed. It contains no ancestors of modern animal groups.

A slightly younger fossil formation containing animal remains is the Tommotian formation, named after a locale in Russia. It dates to the very early Cambrian period, and it also contains only soft-bodied forms. At one time, the animals present in these fossil beds were assigned to various modern animal groups, but most paleontologists now agree that all Tommotian fossils represent unique body forms that arose in the early Cambrian period and disappeared before the end of the period, leaving no descendants in modern animal groups.

A third fossil formation containing both soft-bodied and hard-bodied animals provides evidence of the result of the Cambrian explosion. This fossil formation, called the Burgess Shale, is in Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains of British Columbia. Shortly after the Cambrian explosion, mud slides rapidly buried thousands of marine animals under conditions that favored fossilization. These fossil beds provide evidence of about 32 modern animal groups, plus about 20 other animal body forms that are so different from any modern animals that they cannot be assigned to any one of the modern groups. These unassignable animals include a large swimming predator called Anomalocaris and a soft-bodied animal called Wiwaxia, which ate detritus or algae. The Burgess Shale formation also has fossils of many extinct representatives of modern animal groups. For example, a well-known Burgess Shale animal called Sidneyia is a representative of a previously unknown group of arthropods (a category of animals that includes insects, spiders, mites, and crabs).

Fossil formations like the Burgess Shale show that evolution cannot always be thought of as a slow progression. The Cambrian explosion involved rapid evolutionary diversification, followed by the extinction of many unique animals. Why was this evolution so rapid? No one really knows. Many zoologists believe that it was because so many ecological niches were available with virtually no competition from existing species. Will zoologists ever know the evolutionary sequences in the Cambrian explosion? Perhaps another ancient fossil bed of soft-bodied animals from 600-million-year-old seas is awaiting discovery.

Passage

two

学科分类

题目

自然科学 环境

微塑料问题

内容回忆

待补充

参考阅读

Rain Forest Soils

On viewing the lush plant growth of a tropical rain forest, most people would conclude that the soil beneath it is rich in nutrients. However, although rain forest soils are highly variable, they have in common the fact that abundant rainfall washes mineral nutrients out of them and into streams. This process is known as leaching. Because of rain leaching, most tropical rain forest soils have low to very low mineral nutrient content, in dramatic contrast to mineral-rich grassland soils. Tropical forest soils also often contain particular types of clays that, unlike the mineral-binding clays of temperate forest soils, do not bind mineral ions well. Aluminum is the dominant cation (positively charged ion) present in tropical soils; but plants do not require this element, and it is moderately toxic to a wide range of plants. Aluminum also reduces the availability of phosphorus, an element in high demand by plants.

High moisture and temperatures speed the growth of soil microbes that decompose organic compounds, so tropical soils typically contain far lower amounts of organic materials (humus) than do other forest or grassland soils. Because organic compounds help loosen compact clay soils, hold water, and bind mineral nutrients, the relative lack of organic materials in tropical soils is deleterious to plants. Plant roots cannot penetrate far into hard clay soils, and during dry periods, the soil cannot hold enough water to supply plant needs. Because the concentration of dark-colored organic materials is low in tropical soils, they are often colored red or yellow by the presence of iron, aluminum, and manganese oxides; when dry, these soils become rock hard. The famous Cambodian temples of Angkor Wat , which have survived for many centuries, were constructed from blocks of such hard rain forest soils.

Given such poor soils, how can lush tropical forests exist? The answer is that the forest`s minerals are held in its living biomass-the trees and other plants and the animals. In contrast to grasslands, where a large proportion of plant biomass is produced underground, that of tropical forests is nearly all aboveground. Dead leaves, branches, and other plant parts, as well as the wastes and bodies of rain forest animals, barely reach the forest floor before they are rapidly decayed by abundant decomposers-bacterial and fungal. Minerals released by decay are quickly absorbed by multitudinous shallow, fine tree feeder roots and stored in plant tissues. Many tropical rain forest plants (like those in other forests) have mycorrhizal (fungus-root) partners whose delicate hyphae spread through great volumes of soil, from which they release and absorb minerals and ferry them back to the host plant in exchange for needed organic compounds. The fungal hyphae are able to absorb phosphorus that plant roots could not themselves obtain from the very dilute soil solutions, and fungal hyphae can transfer mineral nutrients from one forest plant to another. Consequently , tropical rain forests typically have what are known as closed nutrient systems, in which minerals are handed off from one organism to another with little leaking through to the soil. When mineral nutrients do not spend much time in the soil, they cannot be leached into streams. Closed nutrient systems have evolved in response to the leaching effects of heavy tropical rainfall. Evidence for this conclusion is that nutrient systems are more open in the richest tropical soils and tightest in the poorest soils.

The growth of organisms is dependent on the availability of nutrients, none of which is more important than nitrogen. Although there is an abundant supply of nitrogen in Earth`s atmosphere, it cannot be absorbed by plants unless it is "fixed," or combined chemically with other elements to form nitrogen compounds. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria help tropical rain forest plants cope with the poor soils there by supplying them with needed nitrogen. Many species of tropical rain forest trees belong to the legume family, which is known for associations of nitrogen-fixing bacteria within root nodules. Also, cycads (a type of tropical plant that resembles a palm tree) produce special aboveground roots that harbor nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. By growing above the ground, the roots are exposed to sunlight, which the cyanobacteria require for growth. Nitrogen fixation by free-living bacteria in tropical soils is also beneficial.

Passage Three

学科分类

题目

自然科学-地质

早期地球形成和地磁场

内容回忆

形成过程及其产生的影响

参考阅读

Geothermal Energy

Earth's internal heat, fueled by radioactivity, provides the energy for plate tectonics and continental drift, mountain building, and earthquakes. It can also be harnessed to drive electric generators and heat homes. Geothermal energy becomes available in a practical form when underground heat is transferred by water that is heated as it passes through a subsurface region of hot rocks (a heat reservoir) that may be hundreds or thousands of feet deep. The water is usually naturally occurring groundwater that seeps down along fractures in the rock; less typically, the water is artificially introduced by being pumped down from the surface. The water is brought to the surface, as a liquid or steam, through holes drilled for the purpose.

By far the most abundant form of geothermal energy occurs at the relatively low temperatures of 80° to 180° centigrade. Water circulated through heat reservoirs in this temperature range is able to extract enough heat to warm residential, commercial, and industrial spaces. More than 20,000 apartments in France are now heated by warm underground water drawn from a heat reservoir in a geologic structure near Paris called the Paris Basin. Iceland sits on a volcanic structure known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is entirely heated by geothermal energy derived from volcanic heat.

Geothermal reservoirs with temperatures above 180° centigrade are useful for generating electricity. They occur primarily in regions of recent volcanic activity as hot, dry rock; natural hot water; or natural steam. The latter two sources are limited to those few areas where surface water seeps down through underground faults or fractures to reach deep rocks heated by the recent activity of molten rock material. The world's largest supply of natural steam occurs at The Geysers, 120 kilometers north of San Francisco, California. In the 1990s enough electricity to meet about half the needs of San Francisco was being generated there. This facility was then in its third decade of production and was beginning to show signs of decline, perhaps because of over development. By the late 1990s some 70 geothermal electric-generating plants were in operation in California, Utah, Nevada, and Hawaii, generating enough power to supply about a million people. Eighteen countries now generate electricity using geothermal heat.

Extracting heat from very hot, dry rocks presents a more difficult problem: the rocks must be fractured to permit the circulation of water, and the water must be provided artificially. The rocks are fractured by water pumped down at very high pressures. Experiments are under way to develop technologies for exploiting this resource.

Like most other energy sources, geothermal energy presents some environmental problems. The surface of the ground can sink if hot groundwater is withdrawn without being replaced. In addition, water heated geothermally can contain salts and toxic materials dissolved from the hot rock. These waters present a disposal problem if they are not returned to the ground from which they were removed.

The contribution of geothermal energy to the world's energy future is difficult to estimate. Geothermal energy is in a sense not renewable, because in most cases the heat would be drawn out of a reservoir much more rapidly than it would be replaced by the very slow geological processes by which heat flows through solid rock into a heat reservoir. However, in many places (for example, California, Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, the rift valleys of Africa) the resource is potentially so large that its future will depend on the economics of production. At present, we can make efficient use of only naturally occurring hot water or steam deposits. Although the potential is enormous, it is likely that in the near future geothermal energy can make important local contributions only where the resource is close to the user and the economics are favorable, as they are in California, New Zealand, and Iceland.

Geothermal energy probably will not make large-scale contributions to the world energy budget until well into the twenty-first century, if ever.

Passage Four

学科分类

题目

自然科学 生物

花的进化

内容回忆

按时间顺序讲花的进化史

参考阅读

The Arrival of Plant Life in Hawaii

When the Hawaiian Islands emerged from the sea as volcanoes, starting about five million years ago, they were far removed from other landmasses. Then, as blazing sunshine alternated with drenching rains, the harsh, barren surfaces of the black rocks slowly began to soften. Winds brought a variety of life-forms.

Spores light enough to float on the breezes were carried thousands of miles from more ancient lands and deposited at random across the bare mountain flanks. A few of these spores found a toehold on the dark, forbidding rocks and grew and began to work their transformation upon the land. Lichens were probably the first successful flora. These are not single individual plants; each one is a symbiotic combination of an alga and a fungus. The algae capture the sun's energy by photosynthesis and store it in organic molecules. The fungi absorb moisture and mineral salts from the rocks, passing these on in waste products that nourish algae. It is significant that the earliest living things that built communities on these islands are examples of symbiosis, a phenomenon that depends upon the close cooperation of two or more forms of life and a principle that is very important in island communities.

Lichens helped to speed the decomposition of the hard rock surfaces, preparing a soft bed of soil that was abundantly supplied with minerals that had been carried in the molten rock from the bowels of Earth. Now, other forms of life could take hold: ferns and mosses (two of the most ancient types of land plants) that flourish even in rock crevices. These plants propagate by producing spores–tiny fertilized cells that contain all the instructions for making a new plant–but the spore are unprotected by any outer coating and carry no supply of nutrient. Vast numbers of them fall on the ground beneath the mother plants. Sometimes they are carried farther afield by water or by wind. But only those few spores that settle down in very favorable locations can start new life; the vast majority fall on barren ground. By force of sheer numbers, however, the mosses and ferns reached Hawaii, survived, and multiplied. Some species developed great size, becoming tree ferns that even now grow in the Hawaiian forests.

Many millions of years after ferns evolved (but long before the Hawaiian Islands were born from the sea), another kind of flora evolved on Earth: the seed-bearing plants. This was a wonderful biological invention. The seed has an outer coating that surrounds the genetic material of the new plant, and inside this covering is a concentrated supply of nutrients. Thus the seed's chances of survival are greatly enhanced over those of the naked spore. One type of seed-bearing plant, the angiosperm, includes all forms of blooming vegetation. In the angiosperm the seeds are wrapped in an additional layer of covering. Some of these coats are hard–like the shell of a nut–for extra protection. Some are soft and tempting, like a peach or a cherry a cherry. In some angiosperms the seeds are equipped with gossamer wings, like the dandelion and milkweed seeds. These new characteristics offered better ways for the seed to move to new habitats. They could travel through the air, float in water, and lie dormant for many months.

Plants with large, buoyant seeds-like coconuts-drift on ocean currents and are washed up on the shores. Remarkably resistant to the vicissitudes of ocean travel, they can survive prolonged immersion in saltwater when they come to rest on warm beaches and the conditions are favorable, the seed coats soften. Nourished by their imported supply of nutrients, the young plants push out their roots and establish their place in the sun.

By means of these seeds, plants spread more widely to new locations, even to isolated islands like the Hawaiian archipelago, which lies more than 2,000 miles west of California and 3,500 miles east of Japan. The seeds of grasses, flowers, and blooming trees made the long trips to these islands. (Grasses are simple forms of angiosperms that bear their encapsulated seeds on long stalks.) In a surprisingly short time, angiosperms filled many of the land areas on Hawaii that had been bare.

Passage

Five

学科分类

题目

社会科学-历史

古埃及人渔猎行为，

内容回忆

尼罗三角洲的形成、渔猎行为

参考篇目

Agriculture, Iron, and the Bantu Peoples

There is evidence of agriculture in Africa prior to 3000 B.C. It may have developed independently, but many scholars believe that the spread of agriculture and iron throughout Africa linked it to the major centers of the Near East and Mediterranean world. The drying up of what is now the Sahara desert had pushed many peoples to the south into sub-Sahara Africa. These peoples settled at first in scattered hunting-and-gathering bands, although in some places near lakes and rivers, people who fished, with a more secure food supply, lived in larger population concentrations. Agriculture seems to have reached these people from the Near East, since the first domesticated crops were millets and sorghums whose origins are not African but west Asian. Once the idea of planting diffused, Africans began to develop their own crops, such as certain varieties of rice, and they demonstrated a continued receptiveness to new imports. The proposed areas of the domestication of African crops lie in a band that extends from Ethiopia across southern Sudan to West Africa. Subsequently, other crops, such as bananas, were introduced from Southeast Asia.

Livestock also came from outside Africa. Cattle were introduced from Asia, as probably were domestic sheep and goats. Horses were apparently introduced by the Hyksos invaders of Egypt (1780-1560 B.C.) and then spread across the Sudan to West Africa. Rock paintings in the Sahara indicate that horses and chariots were used to traverse the desert and that by 300-200 B.C., there were trade routes across the Sahara. Horses were adopted by peoples of the West African savannah, and later their powerful cavalry forces allowed them to carve out large empires. Finally, the camel was introduced around the first century A.D. This was an important innovation, because the camel`s abilities to thrive in harsh desert conditions and to carry large loads cheaply made it an effective and efficient means of transportation. The camel transformed the desert from a barrier into a still difficult, but more accessible, route of trade and communication.

Iron came from West Asia, although its routes of diffusion were somewhat different than those of agriculture. Most of Africa presents a curious case in which societies moved directly from a technology of stone to iron without passing through the intermediate stage of copper or bronze metallurgy, although some early copper-working sites have been found in West Africa. Knowledge of iron making penetrated into the forest and savannahs of West Africa at roughly the same time that iron making was reaching Europe. Evidence of iron making has been found in Nigeria, Ghana, and Mali.

This technological shift cause profound changes in the complexity of African societies. Iron represented power. In West Africa the blacksmith who made tools and weapons had an important place in society, often with special religious powers and functions. Iron hoes, which made the land more productive, and iron weapons, which made the warrior more powerful, had symbolic meaning in a number of West Africa societies. Those who knew the secrets of making iron gained ritual and sometimes political power.

Unlike in the Americas, where metallurgy was a very late and limited development, Africans had iron from a relatively early date, developing ingenious furnaces to produce the high heat needed for production and to control the amount of air that reached the carbon and iron ore necessary for making iron. Much of Africa moved right into the Iron Age, taking the basic technology and adapting it to local conditions and resources.

The diffusion of agriculture and later of iron was accompanied by a great movement of people who may have carried these innovations. These people probably originated in eastern Nigeria. Their migration may have been set in motion by an increase in population caused by a movement of peoples fleeing the desiccation, or drying up, of the Sahara. They spoke a language, proto-Bantu ("Bantu" means "the people"), which is the parent tongue of a language of a large number of Bantu languages still spoken throughout sub-Sahara Africa. Why and how these people spread out into central and southern Africa remains a mystery, but archaeologists believe that their iron weapons allowed them to conquer their hunting-gathering opponents, who still used stone implements. Still, the process is uncertain, and peaceful migration-or simply rapid demographic growth-may have also caused the "Bantu explosion".

                          综合点评

听力维持近期风格，没有加大难度，有个别同学遇到原题

                         Conversation1

话题分类

住宿

内容回忆

关于宿舍，想从大房间换到小房间的讨论

                         Conversation2

话题分类

生物

内容回忆

向老师请教叶子为什么从树上落下

                               Lecture1

话题分类

生物

内容回忆

生物/海洋生物黑暗中发光的特性以及对于人类科学研究的意义

                               Lecture2

话题分类

地质

内容回忆

矿物的性质特点以及矿物的进化史

Lecture 3

话题分类

艺术

内容回忆

介绍一对兄妹

Task 1

内容回忆

团体运动好还是一个人运动好

参考答案

Activities that are played alone can develop our sense of self-reliance and responsibility. This is because in such activities, success is entirely a matter of personal efforts, and we will have to learn to rely on ourselves and face the consequences of our own decisions and action. Furthermore, playing alone means that we must motivate ourselves as there is no team pressure and there is nobody else to blame for our failure. Further still, we can perhaps derive more happiness and satisfaction from our success in individual sports, and this sense of self-recognition is essential in our work and life.

Task 2

阅读

学校买一台3D打印机

给建筑系学生打印模型

放在图书馆，方便使用

听力

agree

对建筑学生有帮助，可以不用借用其他学校的打印机。

应该放在建筑系楼里而不是图书馆，因为其他学生用不到，也不安全。

Task 3

阅读

杀虫剂

听力

减少杀虫剂对其他动植物的危害，有一种中和剂，可以让杀虫剂只对昆虫作用。

Task 4

话题

听力

动物不同种类在一起觅食的优点

1. 互相警觉捕猎者

2. 不会有食物的冲突

综合点评

这次托福考试写作部分整体难度适中。

其中，综合写作考查天文类，围绕火星是否有液态水展开讨论。这个主题虽然有些难度，但是听力、阅读和综合写作的练习题中都出现过，认真做过练习的同学应该还是比较容易掌握内容的。

独立写作考查家庭教育类话题，同学们对这类题型还比较熟悉。类似的题目在2015年出现过。

综合写作

话题分类

天文类

考题回忆

总论点

火星上是否有液态水

阅读部分

阅读总观点：火星上的streaks不是液态水留下的

阅读分论点一：可能是陨石撞击形成的

阅读分论点二：火星的低温并不可能存在液态水

阅读分论点三：探测器并未检测到液态水

听力部分

听力总观点：是液态水

听力分论点一：streaks的形状并不符合陨石撞击的情况。按理说，陨石撞击形成的痕迹应该偏圆偏大，而非streaks

听力分论点二：火星低温不代表一直低温，可能有固态水在偶然的高温环境下变成液态水，所以形成的痕迹成streaks状

听力分论点三：环绕火星的探测器是一直在运转的，那很有可能没探测到是因为时机不对，而不是真的没有

解题思路

按照总分结构，做好阅读部分的总结并展现出听力对应阅读提出的反驳。

参考范文

The materials focus on whether liquid water once existed on Mars. Although photographic images show streaks on the surface of Mars, the author maintains that these streaks were not shaped by liquid water, which contradicts with the lecturer’s standpoint.

First, the passage points out that the streaks may be the result of meteorite strikes. But the professor challenges this idea by providing the truth that the traces of meteorite crashes should be large and circular craters rather than streaks. Thus, this is contrary to the writer's notion.

Second, the passage asserts that the temperature on Mars is too low to allow liquid water to exist. Again, this is retorted by the lecture, which asserts that Mars was not in a low-temperature environment all the time. When the temperature rose, solid water might become liquid and formed streaks as its traces. Obviously, this forms a sharp contradiction against what is stated by the writer.

Finally, the writer claims in the passage that the detector on Mars did not find any liquid water; conversely, the speaker refutes it by proposing in the listening passage that it might not be the right time when the detector was in operation. Thus, the absence of clues of liquid water can not indicate that liquid water never existed.  

独立写作

话题分类

家庭教育类

考题回忆

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement？

The best way for parents to teach their children about responsibility is to ask them to care for an animal.

Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

解题思路

类似题目在2015年也出现过

【20150704】Do you agree or disagree with the following statement？

Children can benefit in important ways from taking care of a pet animal.

题目出现the best way，可以从other ways to cultivate responsibility出发去反驳。

1.让步

对方观点：agree

对方前提条件：可以通过喂食，清洁，洗澡等方式培养责任感

反驳：

1）即使真的可以培养孩子的责任感，也不代表这是佳方式

2）养宠物也有风险，比如动物可能会伤到孩子

2.从children的角度

1）因为有些孩子还很小，并不是很会照顾小动物，所以很有可能关注点都放在了和动物玩上，导致后并没有学到如何照顾动物，反而沉迷于玩乐。这样的话，优点就不突出了，不能称为佳方式。

3.从other ways的角度

1）培养责任感不仅限于照顾小动物，其实也可以通过分担父母的负担来培养。比如，平时承担家务活，整理自己的房间，自己洗自己的衣服等，也可以帮助孩子培养自己的事应该自己做的责任感。并且，这种情况下，孩子做的都是力所能及的事，比较容易完成。

参考范文

范文：

The society has an increasing demand for responsible citizens. Unfortunately, not everyone is capable of carrying responsibilities. The cultivation of such ability involves a complicated range of elements, including patience, meticulous cares and whole-hearted devotions. As a result, it is extremely necessary to teach children to be responsible before they grow up. Looking after animals could be an effective way to achieve such a goal, but it may not be the best way. I will further elaborate my viewpoint as follows.

Admittedly, taking good care of others is a primary step to become a responsible individual. Just like a baby who lives under the endless care from its mother, an animal also relies largely on the affectionate care from its owner. If a child has been given the chance to play the role of a little father or mother, he or she would have a further comprehension about what love and care really mean. This child may be determined to render the greatest care to the animal and try to make it healthier and stronger. In fact, such a psychological feedback is helpful to children's mental growth and prepares them for greater responsibilities.

However, this approach has its flaws. A simple task as it seems, raising animals requires not only sense of responsibility but also feeding skills and other abilities. As children are not fully eligible to take care of animals, they may not succeed in raising animals on their own. For example, my nephew kept some goldfish in a beautiful tank when he was seven years old. He fed them and cleaned the tank regularly before a fish died of a disease that was not detected in time. It cast a serious blow to him and discouraged him from feeding animals anymore. It was a signal that he became less willing to take responsibilities than before. This unexpected result clearly suggests the risk of asking children to take care of animals. In some other cases, children do not fail in feeding animals, but they just like playing with these animals rather than taking the responsibility of caring for them, leading to neglectable effect of this method.

Compared with nurturing small animals, some methods are more convenient and effective in fostering children’s sense of responsibility. Assigning children regular chores is an excellent option. A child at the age of four or above is capable of doing some housework, such as tidying his or her room, cleaning bowls and plates, doing his or her own laundry. By fulfilling these tasks, they may take pride in being considered mature enough to take care of themselves and share the responsibility of the family. Since the house chores chosen for them to do are not beyond their capabilities, the risk of being frustrated and disheartened from taking responsibilities will be reduced.

In brief, taking care of an animal presents to children the nature of responsibility, but it may not be the best choice because it has some drawbacks. Parents can draw on other ways to achieve better effects.