真题机经：2015年3月28日TOEFL考试阅读真题解析

　　这次考试整体难度中等，**篇和第二篇相对难度较低，第三篇中的专有名词容易造成考生的阅读障碍,词汇题基本上都是属于比较基础的词汇，在平时的TPO阅读中也有碰到过。三篇文章题材较常见，分别是地质类，历史类和社科类。TPO中也有相似练习篇章。

　　词汇题：

　　attest to=provide evidence of

　　modest=small

　　severely=very seriously

　　permanent=simultaneously at the same time

　　readily=easily

　　reflect=indicate

　　exploit=make use of

　　accumulate=build up

　　curious=strange ties=connection

　　abrupt=sudden

　　**篇：

　　题材划分：地质类文章

　　主要内容：

　　bar, 冲击扇，delta的形成, upstream和downstream的sediment的比较。

　　upstream的部分沉淀物多是鹅卵石之类的大块东西，downstream大部分沉淀物是粘土。按理说downstream冲击力大，应该是大块的东西才对，原因是downstream的沉积物多半是对upstream的冲蚀作用。

　　河流的水速度不一样，就像气流，冲积扇往往形成新的河道，还有地上河，有些河道一部分在水面之上，一部分在水面之下。

　　Point bar的话是河流内外侧流速不一样，干旱半干旱山区和冰川地区容易形成冲积扇，在湖泊和海边流速慢的地方会形成delta

　　大部分的冲积扇面积很广，但是有个地方千年来的冲积扇面积不是很大，这个地方有7个河道，最近有关部门费了很大力气整改，想让它稳定.

　　解析：整体文章结构清晰，对比清楚，考生只要抓住各段主旨即可。学生如果有这方面的背景知识也可帮助做题。

　　相似TPO练习推荐：

　　TPO7- The Geologic History of the Mediterranean

　　TPO27- The Formation of Volcanic Islands

　　相关文章：

　　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at a map of the Pacific Ocean reveals that there are many islands far out at sea that are actually volcanoes----many no longer active, some overgrown with coral----that originated from activity at points in the interior of the Pacific Plate that forms the Pacific seafloor.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-oil 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.

　　第二篇

　　题材划分：历史类文章

　　主要内容：

　　非洲农牧业的迁徙。

　　非洲雨水充足的地方，一开始不种地，后来一个地方的人引进了一种植物，然后他们开始种地。后来干旱了，往东边高原去了，旱季的时候打猎，雨季就种地。

　　牧业的话养牛要克服很多条件。农业的话是先开垦一片土地，然后土地没有肥力了就抛弃再去下一个地方，但是这种农业模式也是需要很多技能不是那么简单粗暴的。

　　解析：

　　就文章题材而言，是考生相对不是很陌生的话题，就阅读而言不存在太大的问题，放好心态即可。

　　相似TPO练习推荐：

　　TPO21- The Origins of Agriculture

　　TPO14- Pastoralism in Ancient Inner Eurasia

　　相关文章：

　　Pastoralism is a lifestyle in which economic activity is based primarily on livestock. Archaeological evidence suggests that by 3000 B.C., and perhaps even earlier, there had emerged on the steppes of Inner Eurasia the distinctive types of pastoralism that were to dominate the region's history for several millennia. Here, the horse was already becoming the animal of prestige in many regions, though sheep, goats, and cattle could also play a vital role. It is the use of horses for transportation and warfare that explains why Inner Eurasian pastoralism proved the most mobile and the most militaristic of all major forms of pastoralism. The emergence and spread of pastoralism had a profound impact on the history of Inner Eurasia, and also, indirectly, on the parts of Asia and Europe just outside this area. In particular, pastoralism favors a mobile lifestyle, and this mobility helps to explain the impact of pastoralist societies on this part of the world.

　　The mobility of pastoralist societies reflects their dependence on animal-based foods. While agriculturalists rely on domesticated plants, pastoralists rely on domesticated animals. As a result, pastoralists, like carnivores in general, occupy a higher position on the food chain. All else being equal, this means they must exploit larger areas of land than do agriculturalists to secure the same amount of food, clothing, and other necessities. So pastoralism is a more extensive lifeway than farming is. However, the larger the terrain used to support a group, the harder it is to exploit that terrain while remaining in one place. So, basic ecological principles imply a strong tendency within pastoralist lifeways toward nomadism (a mobile lifestyle). As the archaeologist Roger Cribb puts it, “The greater the degree of pastoralism, the stronger the tendency toward nomadism.” A modern Turkic nomad interviewed by Cribb commented: "The more animals you have, the farther you have to move."

　　Nomadism has further consequences. It means that pastoralist societies occupy and can influence very large territories. This is particularly true of the horse pastoralism that emerged in the Inner Eurasian steppes, for this was the most mobile of all major forms of pastoralism. So, it is no accident that with the appearance of pastoralist societies there appear large areas that share similar cultural, ecological, and even linguistic features. By the late fourth millennium B.C., there is already evidence of large culture zones reaching from Eastern Europe to the western borders of Mongolia. Perhaps the most striking sign of mobility is the fact that by the third millennium B.C., most pastoralists in this huge region spoke related languages ancestral to the modern Indo-European languages. The remarkable mobility and range of pastoral societies explain, in part, why so many linguists have argued that the Indo-European languages began their astonishing expansionist career not among farmers in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), but among early pastoralists from Inner Eurasia. Such theories imply that the Indo-European languages evolved not in Neolithic (10,000 to 3,000 B.C.) Anatolia, but among the foraging communities of the cultures in the region of the Don and Dnieper rivers, which took up stock breeding and began to exploit the neighboring steppes.

　　Nomadism also subjects pastoralist communities to strict rules of portability. If you are constantly on the move, you cannot afford to accumulate large material surpluses. Such rules limit variations in accumulated material goods between pastoralist households (though they may also encourage a taste for portable goods of high value such as silks or jewelry). So, by and large, nomadism implies a high degree of self-sufficiency and inhibits the appearance of an extensive division of labor. Inequalities of wealth and rank certainly exist, and have probably existed in most pastoralist societies, but except in periods of military conquest, they are normally too slight to generate the stable, hereditary hierarchies that are usually implied by the use of the term class. Inequalities of gender have also existed in pastoralist societies, but they seem to have been softened by the absence of steep hierarchies of wealth in most communities, and also by the requirement that women acquire most of the skills of men, including, often, their military skills.