【托福阅读】精选阅读真题长难句50句1、 Later experiments in which researchers played recordings of songs to youngbirds showed just how precise this influence was, many of them would learnthe exact pattern of the recording they had heard.2、 The crude song of a bird reared in isolation gives some clues as to what thisrough idea may be the length, the frequency range and the breaking up intonotes are all aspects of chaffinch song shared between normal birds andthose reared in isolation.3、 Whatever the nature of the learning rules in a particular species, there is nodoubt that they are effective, it is very unusual to hear a wild bird singing asong which is not typical of its own species despite the many different songswhich often occur in a small patch of woodland.4、 Chemical analysis of bones enables archaeologists to determine theproportion of meat to vegetable foods in the diet by measuring the proportionof calcium to strontium in ancient bone because strontium in place of calciumin bones comes primarily from ingested plants.5、 Each dwelling had a different arrangement of the giant bones, which camefrom the skeletons of long-dead animals retrieved from the surrounding areaby occupants of the site, not from animals they had recently hunted.6、 In a precedent-setting decision, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissionordered the dam removed after concluding that the environmental andeconomic benefits of a free-flowing river outweighed the electricity generatedby the dam.7、 Built nearly a century ago to provide power to lumber and paper mills in thetown of Port Angeles, these dams blocked access to upstream spawning bedsfor six species of salmon on what once was one of the most productivesalmon rivers in the world.8、 The Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park might be taken down toreveal what John Muir, the founder of the prestigious environmentalorganization Sierra Club, called a valley “just as beautiful and worthy ofpreservation as the maj estic Yosemite.”9、 A chance collision between two comets, or the gravitational influence of oneof the Jovian planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—mayoccasionally alter the orbit of a comet in these regions enough to send it tothe inner solar system and into our view.10、 These comets appear to be distributed in all directions from the Sun, forminga spherical shell around the solar system, called the Oort cloud, after theDutch astronomer Jan Oort.11、 After the arrival of hunter-gatherers in the southwestern region of NorthAmerica, several alternative types of agriculture emerged, all involvingdifferent solutions to the Southwest’s fundamental problem: how to obtainenough water to grow crops in an environment in which rainfall is so low andunpredictable that little or no farming is practiced there today.12、 That fate actually befell the Mimbres, who started by farming the floodplainand then began to farm adjacent land above the floodplain as theirpopulation ca me to exceed the floodplain’s capacity to support it.13、 However, when drought conditions returned, that gamble left them with apopulation double what the floodplain could support, and Mimbres societycollapsed suddenly under the stress.14、 One more strategy was to plant crops at many sites even though rainfall waslocally unpredictable and then to harvest crops at whichever sites did getenough rain to produce a good harvest and to redistribute some of theharvest to the people still living at all the sites that did not happen to receiveenough rain that year.15、 Sanitation problems caused by larger, more sedentary populations wouldhave helped transmit diseases in human waste, as would the use of animaldung for fertilizer.16、 The increase in many of these came not only from the fact that fewer peoplewere dying from infectious disease and were living longer but also from theresults of modern lifestyles in developed countries and among the upperclasses of developing countries – a more sedentary life leading to lessphysical activity, more stress; environmental pollution, andhigh-fat diets.17、 This evolution may have been encouraged by what some authorities considerour overuse of antibiotics, giving microorganisms a greater chance to evolveresistance by exposing them to a constant barrage of selective challenges.18、 Therefore, on many reefs it is the fast-growing, branching corals thatultimately dominate at the upper, shallower portion of the reef, whereasmore massive forms dominate in deeper areas.19、 The fact that almost all small invertebrates on reefs are so well hidden orhighly camouflaged is another indicator of how prevalent predation is onreefs and its importance in determining reef structure.20、 Finally, they need reliable methods of storage because, where plant foodscannot provide a dietary safety net, planning has to be precise and detailedto ensure that there is enough to tide them over in periods of shortage.21、 Coins also provide a valuable source of written records: they can revealinformation about the location where they are found, which can provideevidence about trade practices there, and their inscriptions can beinformative about the issuing authority, whether they werecity-states (as inancient Greece) or sole rulers (as in Imperial Rome or in the kingdoms ofmedieval Europe).22、 The great risk with historical records is that they can impose their ownperspective so that they begin not only to supply the answers to ourquestions but subtly to determine the nature of those questions and even ourconcepts and terminology.23、 Not all botanists agree with an African-South American center for theevolution and dispersal of the angiosperms, pointing out that many of themost primitive forms of flowering plants are found in the South Pacific,including portions of Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea, eastern Australia, andthe Malay Archipelago.24、 To elaborate, before the eighth century, the elite marriage practice, whichwas an important instrument of political alliance making, had encouragedrulers to maintain multiple palaces: that of their own family and those of theirspouses, who commonly remained at or near their native family headquarters,at least for some years after marriage.25、 Nearly five billion years ago, some external influence, such asa shock wavetraveling from a catastrophic explosion (supernova), may have triggered thecollapse of this huge cloud of gases and minute grains of heavier elements,causing the cloud to begin to slowly contract due to the gravitationalinteractions among its particles.26、 Nearly five billion years ago, some external influence, such asa shock wavetraveling from a catastrophic explosion (supernova), may have triggered thecollapse of this huge cloud of gases and minute grains of heavier elements,causing the cloud to begin to slowly contract due to the gravitationalinteractions among its particles.27、 Steady overseas demand for colonial products created a prosperity thatenabled colonists to consume ever-larger amounts not only of clothing but ofdishware, home furnishings, tea, and a range of other items both produced inBritain and imported by British and colonial merchants from elsewhere.28、 Such materials as iron and nickel and the elements of which the rock-formingminerals are composed—silicon, calcium, sodium, and so forth—formedmetallic and rocky clumps that orbited the Sun.29、 This act was intended less to raise revenue than to serve as a protective tariff(tax) that would benefit British West Indian sugar producers at the expenseof their French rivals.30、 Parliament used British tax money to pay modest incentives to Americansproducing such items as silk, iron, dyes, hemp, and lumber, which Britainwould otherwise have had to import from other countries, and it raised theprice of commercial rivals’ imports by imposing protective tariffs on them.31、 The concept of chromatic adaptation was proposed in 1883; and thehypothesis was accepted for about 100 years, until it was realized that suchzonation did not necessarily occur and that the distribution of seaweedsdepended more on herbivory (the consumption of plant material),competition, varying concentration of the specialized pigments, and the abilityof seaweeds to alter their forms of growth.32、First, demand for news increased as Europe’s commercial and politicalinterests spread around the globe—merchants in London, Liverpool, orGlasgow, for example, came to depend on early news of Caribbean harvestsand gains and losses in colonial wars.33、 Industries with high concentrations of employment in urban areas, where aworker’s change of employer does not necessarily require investing in achange of residence, appear to have higher rates of job turnover thanindustries concentrated in nonmetropolitan areas do.34、 Some researchers, for example, have argued that a particular kind of pottery,called Ramey incised (which is incised with figures of eyes, fish, arrows, andabstract objects and was used by the people in the area of present-dayMissouri and Illinois at about A.D 900), was primarily used to distribute foodbut was also used to communi cate the idea that the society’s elite, for whomthe pots were made, were mediators of cosmic forces.35、 There are several limiting factors, but results from a recent experimentsuggest that in areas of the ocean where other nutrients are plentiful, ironmay be one of the most important and, until recently, unrecognized variablescontrolling phytoplankton production.36、 In 1894, C. Lloyd Morgan, an early comparative behaviorist, insisted thatanimal behavior be explained as simply as possible without reference toemotions or motivations since these could not be observed or measured.37、 Assuming that in the early 1770s at least half of the demand for grain fromfarmers with surpluses was satisfied through long-distance channels, theproportion of grain produced for consumption beyond the local marketprobably accounted for about a quarter of total grain production consumedby humans.38、Sea turtles’ eggs are laid at night to minimize the likelihood of their discoveryby predators, and the offspring, when ready to emerge from their eggshellsand dig their way out of the sand, hatch at night for the same reason.39、 In short, therefore, the site Memphis offered the rulers of the Early DynasticPeriod an ideal location for controlling internal trade within their realm, anessential requirement for a state-directed economy that depended on themovement of goods.40、 In particular, research has focused on determining why such an apparentlyinhospitable place as Chaco, which today is extremely arid and has very shortgrowing seasons, should have favored the concentration of labor that musthave been required for such massive construction projects over brief periodsof time.41、 In one case, seeds of the arctic lupine, a member of the pea family recoveredfrom ancient lemming burrows in the Arctic, germinated in three days eventhough they were carbon-dated at more than 10,000years old!42、 In fact, unpredictability is probably a greater problem than is the severity ofthe unfavorable period.43、 Similar reasoning suggested that one could estimate total elapsed geologictime by dividing the average thickness of sediment transported annually tothe oceans into the total thickness of sedimentary rock that had ever beendeposited in the past.44、 The process that marine creatures use to create light is like that of thecommon firefly and similar to that which creates the luminous green colorseen in plastic glow sticks, often used as children’s toys or for illuminationduring nighttime events.45、 But its appearance under a microscope is even more spectacular, the livingcopepod appears as if constructed of delicately handcrafted, multicoloredpieces of stained glass.46、 Cleared lands would more likely have been worked by hand tilling, with littledirect help from animals, and the vast forests natural to Northern Europeremained either untouched, or perhaps cleared in small sections by fire, andthe land probably used only so long as the ash-enriched soil yielded goodcrops and then abandoned for some other similarly cleared field.47、 Because nests at the edges of breeding colonies are more vulnerable topredators than those in the centers, the preference for advantageous centralsites promotes dense centralized packing of nests.48、 In discussing the growth of cities in the United States in the nineteenthcentury, one cannot really use the term “urban planning,” as it suggestsmodern concerns for spatial and service organization which, in most instances,did not exist before the planning revolution called the City Beautiful Movement that began in the 1890s.49、 There the limits that topography imposed on production have been tightenedby climate, with the result that agricultural output has been more modest andless reliable, making the risk of crop failure and hardship commensuratelygreater.50、 Because liquid water was present, self-replicating molecules of carbon,hydrogen, and oxygen developed life early in Earth’s history and haveradically modified its surface, blanketing huge parts of the continents withgreenery.。
