Download 2013年1月12日托福写作真题回忆

2015 年 3 月 28 日托福阅读真题解析下载
这次考试整体难度中等，第一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
第一篇：
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),
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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there are many islands far out at sea that are actually volcanoes----many no longer
active, some overgrown with coral----that originated from activity at points in the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
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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
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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.
第三篇
题材划分： 社科类文章
主要内容：
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是一个地区社会文化的变迁。
发现了很多工具，举例。。。，但是没有发现罐子。他们跟之前生活在这里的人不一样。
生活范围变得很大，有些房子可以住一年或半年。 他们吃肉，肉类提供很多的必须的盐，
他们也更需要盐，为了保存肉。他们会用装饰物，然后这促进了身份和阶级发展，社会形态
更加复杂。
解析：
就整体的文章结构来看，考生可通过阅读对应的 TS 句来了解段落的大意，相对比较容
易把握，题目难度也不高，基本上都可以从原文中找到对应的信息点。
相似 TPO 练习推荐：
TPO5— The Origin of the Pacific Island People
TPO 9-Colonizing the Americas via the Northwest Coast
相关文章：
The greater Pacific region, traditionally called Oceania, consists of three
cultural areas: Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Melanesia, in the southwest
Pacific, contains the large islands of New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New
Caledonia. Micronesia, the area north of Melanesia, consists primarily of small
scattered islands. Polynesia is the central Pacific area in the great triangle
defined by Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. Before the arrival of Europeans,
the islands in the two largest cultural areas, Polynesia and Micronesia, together
contained a population estimated at 700,000.
Speculation on the origin of these Pacific islanders began as soon as outsiders
encountered them, in the absence of solid linguistic, archaeological, and biological
data, many fanciful and mutually exclusive theories were devised. Pacific islanders
are variously thought to have come from North America, South America, Egypt, Israel,
and India, as well as Southeast Asia. Many older theories implicitly deprecated the
navigational abilities and overall cultural creativity of the Pacific islanders.
For example, British anthropologists G. Elliot Smith and W. J. Perry assumed that
only Egyptians would have been skilled enough to navigate and colonize the Pacific.
They inferred that the Egyptians even crossed the Pacific to found the great
civilizations of the New World (North and South America). In 1947 Norwegian
adventurer Thor Heyerdahl drifted on a balsa-log raft westward with the winds and
currents across the Pacific from South America to prove his theory that Pacific
islanders were Native Americans (also called American Indians). Later Heyerdahl
suggested that the Pacific was peopled by three migrations: by Native Americans from
the Pacific Northwest of North America drifting to Hawaii, by Peruvians drifting
to Easter Island, and by Melanesians. In 1969 he crossed the Atlantic in an
Egyptian-style reed boat to prove Egyptian influences in the Americas. Contrary to
these theorists, the overwhelming evidence of physical anthropology, linguistics,
and archaeology shows that the Pacific islanders came from Southeast Asia and were
skilled enough as navigators to sail against the prevailing winds and currents.
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The basic cultural requirements for the successful colonization of the Pacific
islands include the appropriate boat-building, sailing, and navigation skills to
get to the islands in the first place, domesticated plants and gardening skills
suited to often marginal conditions, and a varied inventory of fishing implements
and techniques. It is now generally believed that these prerequisites originated
with peoples speaking Austronesian languages (a group of several hundred related
languages) and began to emerge in Southeast Asia by about 5000 B.C.E. The culture
of that time, based on archaeology and linguistic reconstruction, is assumed to have
had a broad inventory of cultivated plants including taro, yarns, banana, sugarcane,
breadfruit, coconut, sago, and rice. Just as important, the culture also possessed
the basic foundation for an effective maritime adaptation, including outrigger
canoes and a variety of fishing techniques that could be effective for overseas
voyaging.
Contrary to the arguments of some that much of the pacific was settled by
Polynesians accidentally marooned after being lost and adrift, it seems reasonable
that this feat was accomplished by deliberate colonization expeditions that set out
fully stocked with food and domesticated plants and animals. Detailed studies of
the winds and currents using computer simulations suggest that drifting canoes would
have been a most unlikely means of colonizing the Pacific. These expeditions were
likely driven by population growth and political dynamics on the home islands, as
well as the challenge and excitement of exploring unknown waters.
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