雅思A类阅读考题回顾（第二季度）Passage 2 资料考证来源于维基百科/wiki/SS_Great_Eastern After repairs, she plied for several years as a passenger liner between Britain and America, before being conv erted to a cable-laying ship and laying the first lasting”Brunel worked for several years as assistant engineer on the project to create a tunn el under London's River Thames 题目配对tunnel under river Thames -- which Brune was not responsible for itThough ultimately unsuccessful, another of Brunel's interesting use of technical inno vations was the atmospheric railway 配对建成不久就停止运营那项吧Great Eastern was designed to cruise non-stop from London to Sydney and back (s ince engineers of the time misunderstood that Australia had no coal reserves), and she remained the largest ship built until the turn of the century. Like many of Brunel's am bitious projects, the ship soon ran over budget and behind schedule in the faceof a series of technical problems.great eastern 配对建设推迟了很对次和财务上不成功我配了两个Great Britain is considered the first modern ship, being built of metal rather than wood, powered by an engine rather than wind or oars, and driven by propeller rather than paddle wheel. 配对成为广泛认可的标准忘了这个是不是第一题的段落包含信息题了其他记不住了有个火车站什么的配对Brunel 影响了反对者这个乱配的Passage 3According to science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, "a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on ade quate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the na ture and significance of the scientific method."Vladimir Nabokov argued that if we were rigorous with our definitions, Shakespeare's play Th e Tempest would have to be termed science fiction.Y/N/NG 第一题就纠结了题目是科幻小说很难下定义文中不是两种观点都有么但是自己答的Y 然后信息配对有一道是The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a 1966 science fiction novel by A merican writer Robert A. Heinlein, about a lunar colony's revolt against rule from Earth. 这门书貌似是配对它成功预测了人类登月Academic Reading 04/09/2010（，等考区）雅思阅读真题题源9.4号《九分达人》迷失的城CAMEL allows archaeologists to survey ancient cities without digging in the dirt, disturbing sitesLike a dromedary that cantravel a long distancewithout taking a drink ofwater, the OrientalInstitute’s CAMEL computerproject can traverse vast distances of ancient andmodern space withoutpausing for the usualrefreshment known best by archaeologists —digging in the soil. CAMEL (the Center forAncient Middle Eastern Landscapes) is at the leading edge of archaeology because of what it does not do and what it can do. First, it does not actually excavate. For a science based on the destructive removal of buried artifacts and an examination of them for meaning, CAMEL works in quite the opposite way: it aims to survey ancient sites and disturb them as little as possible.What CAMEL can do however, is remarkable. It organizes maps, aerial photography, satellite images and other data into one place, allowing archaeologists to see how ancient trade routes developed and to prepare simulations of how people may have interacted, given the limitations of their space, the availability of resources and the organization of their cities.CAMEL provides the wonderful opportunity “to see beyond the horizon,” said Scott Branting, Director of the project.Branting oversees the CAMEL project from a second-floor computer lab at the Oriental Institute. As he walks around, he shows off the dozen PCs that form the nucleus of the project, which invites faculty and students to pore through electronic images from throughout the Middle East. “;“The Near Eastern area is defined for the purposes of our collections as an enormous box stretching from Greece on the west to Afghanistan on the east, from the middle of the Black Sea on the north to the horn of Africa on the south,” he said as he turned on a computer to summon an image from the area.Up popped an aerial surveillance photograph taken for defense purposes during the Cold War. The image showed mounds on the surface of the steppe regions of modern Iraq, sites that are among the hundreds unexplored there Overlying aerial photographs show the ancient city wall at Kerkenes Dag in Turkey.that are potentially valuable sites for future excavation when archaeologists can safely return.“Because these images are images from the 1950s and 1960s, they show a terrain much different from what exists today,” he explained. Fields have covered much of the formally barren areas of the Middle East as irrigation has expanded farming. Sites that show up as mounds in photographs may today be leveled and hard to recognize. Some of the ancient material they contain, however, is still buried deep below the surface.Besides the aerial surveillance photographs, the collection includes some photographs taken by small planes in the early days of aerial photography.James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute, was an early pioneer in the field and began taking photographs from a plane over sites in Egypt in 1920. Some of his early shots are a bit shaky, though, as he also experienced air sickness during that path-breaking effort.When the Oriental Institute launched an excavation in the 1930s at Persepolis in Iran, the art of aerial photography had progressed greatly, and stunning pictures of the ancient Persian capital helped demonstrate the scope of the city in a way nothing else could. Some of those photographs are on the walls of the Persian Gallery of the Museum of the Oriental Institute, and others are part of the CAMEL database.Oriental Institute scholars also used balloons rigged with cameras to catch overall shots of excavation sites.In addition to the aerial photographs, the collection also includes shots taken by NASA, Digital Globe and other organizations from satellites.Branting is in Turkey this summer working on a site that shows the value of nondestructive techniques such as those developed at CAMEL. He has been studying the ancient and mysterious city of Kerkenes Dag in central Turkey.The city, surrounded by a wall, is a square mile, huge by ancient standards, and is the largest preclassical site in Anatolia, the name for the ancient region that now includes Turkey. The city is about 30 miles from Hattusa, the capital of the ancient Hittite Empire.Although the city was an Iron Age site and was planned and built by powerful leaders capable of controlling a large work force, it is uncertain who held that power. Early scholars had speculated it may have been a rival to the Hittites, but a research team from the Oriental Instituteestablished in 1928 that the city was built sometime after the fall of the Hittites in about 1180 B.C.Geoffrey Summers of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara directed a new dig at the site beginning in 1993. Branting joined the project in 1995 as an Oriental Institute graduate student. Researchers from the Middle East Technical University and the Oriental Institute then joined efforts to work on the project together.From the beginning of the latest work at Kerkenes Dag, archaeologists have used nondestructive techniques to learn more about the site. Random trench work would probably not turn up much more information than was recovered in the 1928 Oriental Institute excavation, scholars have contended.“By employing a range of observational and remote sensing techniques across the entire area of the city, we have been able to fill in the blank spaces on an earlier map made by the Oriental Institute,” Branting said. The work, which includes the techniques used at CAMEL to map accurately a site with photographs, provided archaeologists a chance to work with a high degree of precision once digging began. Currently, another season of excavation is underway.“Since so much can be seen on the surface at Kerkenes Dag, this has proved to be a very effective technique,” Branting said.Global Positioning System technology has allowed scholars to record the minute topography of the entire ground surface within the site. “Never before in archaeology has this technique been undertaken on such a grand scale. The terrain model is the basis for ongoing work to produce a virtual reconstruction of the entire city, neighborhood by neighborhood, building by building,” he said.By using the techniques, the team was able to locate the gateway of the palace complex and find the first fragmentary inscriptions and reliefs to be recovered at the site. They have been able to date the site to the mid- to late-seventh century through the mid-sixth century B.C.Scholars believe the city may have been one referred to by Herodotus as Pteria, which was conquered by the Lydian King Croesus in a failed effort to block the advance of the Persian Empire.“If the equation of Kerkenes Dag with Pteria holds true, then we can even more precisely date the massive destruction of the city to around 547 B.C. and begin to underst and something of its international importance,” Branting said雅思阅读真题题源9.4号《九分达人》-----消费DematerializationUntil recently the role of consumption as a driving force for environmental change has not been widely explored. This may be due in part to the difficulty of collecting suitable data. The present chapter approaches the consumption of materials from the perspective of the forces for materialization or dematerialization of industrial products beyond the underlying and obviously very powerful forces of economic and population growth. Examination can occur on both the unit and the aggregate level of materials consumption. Such study may make it possible to assess current streams of materials use and, based on environmental implications, may suggest directions for future materials policy.The word dematerialization is often broadly used to characterize the decline over time in weight of the materials used in industrial end products. One may also speak of dematerialization in terms of the decline in “embedded energy” in industrial products. Colombo (1988) has speculated that dematerialization is the logical outcome of an advanced economy in which material needs are substantially satiated.1Williams et al. (1987) have explored relationships between materials use and affluence in the United States. Perhaps we should first ask the question: Is dematerialization taking place? The answer depends, above all, on how dematerialization is defined. The question is particularly of interest from an environmental point of view, because the use of less material could translate into smaller quantities of waste generated at both the production and the consumption phases of the economic process.But less is not necessarily less from an environmental point of view. If smaller and lighter products are also inferior in quality, then more units would be produced, and the net result could be a greater amount of waste generated in both production and consumption. From an environmental viewpoint, therefore, (de)materialization should perhaps be defined as the change in the amount of waste generated per unit of industrial products. On the basis of such a definition, and taking into account overall production and consumption, we have attempted to examine the question of whether dematerialization is occurring. Our goal is not to answer definitively the question whether society is dematerializing but rather to establish a framework for analysis to address this overall question and to indicate some of the interesting and useful directions for study. We have examined a number of examples even though the data are not complete.Undoubtedly, many industrial products have become lighter and smaller with time. Cars, dwelling units, television sets, clothes pressing irons,and calculators are but a few examples. There is, of course, usually a lower bound regarding how small objects such as appliances can be made and still be compatible with the physical dimensions and limitations of human beings (who are themselves becoming larger), as well as with the tasks to be performed.2 Apart from such boundary conditions on size and possibly weight of many industrial product units, dematerialization of units of products is perceived to be occurring.An important question is how far one could drive dematerialization. For example, for the automobile, how is real world safety related to its mass? In a recent study, Evans (1985) found that, given a single-car crash, the unbelted driver of a car weighing about 2,000 pounds is about 2.6 times as likely to be killed as is the unbelted driver of an approximately 4,000-pound car. The relative disadvantage of the smaller car is essentially the same when the corresponding comparison is made for belted drivers. For two-car crashes it was found that the driver of a 2,000-pound car crashing into another 2,000-pound car is about 2.0 times as likely to be injured seriously or fatally as is the driver of a 4,000-pound car crashing into another 4,000-pound car. These results suggest one of the reasons that dematerialization by itself will not be a sufficient criterion for social choice about product design. If the product cannot be practically or safely reduced beyond a certain point, can the service provided by the product be provided in a way that demands less material? lb return to the case of transportation, substituting telecommunications for transportation might be a dematerializer, but we have no data on the relative materials demand for the communications infrastructure versus the transportation infrastructure to meet a given need. In any case, demands for communication and transportation appear to increase in tandem, as complementary goods rather than as substitutes for one another.It is interesting to inquire into dematerialization in the world of miniaturization, not only the world of large objects. In the computer industry, for example, silicon wafers are increasing in size to reduce material losses in cutting. This is understandable if one considers that approximately 400 acres of silicon wafer material are used per year by IBM Corporation at a cost of about $100 million per acre. A processed wafer costs approximately $800, and the increase in total wafer area per year is about 10-15 percent. Although silicon wafers do not present a waste disposal problem from the point of view of volume, they are environmentally important because their manufacture involves the handling of hazardous chemicals. They are also interesting as an example of how the production volume of an aggressive new technology tends to grow because of popularity in the market. Moreover, many rather large plastic and metal boxes are required to enclose and keep cool the microchips madewith the wafers, even as the world's entire annual chip production might compactly fit inside one 747 jumbo jet. Thus, such new industries may tend to be simultaneously both friends and foes of dematerialization.The production of smaller and lighter toasters, irons, television sets, and other devices in some instances may result in lower-quality products and an increased consumer attitude to ”replace rather than repair.” In these instances, the number of units produced may have increased. Although dematerialization may be the case on a per-unit basis, the increasing number of units produced can cause an overall trend toward materialization with time. As an example, the apparent consumption of shoes, which seem increasingly difficult to repair, has risen markedly in the United States since the 1970s, with about 1.1 billion pairs of nonrubber shoes purchased in 1985, compared with 730 million pairs as recently as 1981 (Table 1).In contrast, improvements in quality generally result in dematerialization, as has been the case for tires. The total tire production in the United States has risen over time (Figure 1), following from general increases in both the number of registered vehicles and the total miles of travel. However, the number of tires per million vehicle miles of travel has declined (Figure 2). Such a decline in tire wear can be attributed to improved tire quality, which results directly in a decrease in the quantity of solid waste due to discarded tires. For example, a tire designed to have a service life of 100,000 miles could reduce solid waste from tires by 60-75 percent (Westerman, 1978). Other effective tire waste reduction strategies include tire retreading and recycling, as well as the use of discarded tires as vulcanized rubber particles in roadway asphalt mixes.Dematerialization of unit products affects, and is influenced by, a number of factors besides product quality. These include ease of manufacturing, production cost, size and complexity of the product, whether the product is to be repaired or replaced, and the amount of waste to be generated and processed. These factors influence one another as well (Figure 3). For example, the ease of manufacture of a particular product in smaller and lighter units may result in lower production cost and cheaper products of lower quality, which will be replaced rather than repaired on breaking down. Although a smaller amount of waste will be generated on a per-unit basis, more units will be produced and disposed of, and there may be an overall increase in waste generation at both the production and the consumption ends.Another factor of interest on the production end is scale. One would expect so-called economies of scale in production to lead to a set of facilities that embody less material for a given output. Does having fewer, largerplants in fact involve significantly less use of material (or space) than having more, smaller ones? At the level of the individual product, the shift from mainframe computers to personal computers, driven by desires for local independence and convenience, may also be in the direction of materialization.Among socioeconomic factors influencing society's demand for Mate- are the nature of various activities, composition of the work force, and income levels. For example, as a predominantly agricultural society evolves toward industrialization, demand for materials increases, whereas the transition from an industrial to a service society might bring about a decline in the use of materials. Within a given culture, to what extent are materials use and waste generation increasing functions of income?The spatial dispersion of population is a potential materializer. Migration from urban to suburban areas, often driven by affluence, requires more roads, more single-unit dwellings, and more automobiles with a consequent significant expansion in the use of materials. The movement from large, extended families sharing one dwelling to smaller, nuclear families may be regarded as a materializer if every household unit occupies a separate dwelling. Factors such as photocopying, photography, advertising, poor quality, high cost of repair, and wealth generally force materialization. Technological innovation, especially product innovation, may also tend to force materialization, at least in the short run. For example, microwave ovens, which are smaller than old-fashioned ovens, have now been acquired by most American households. However, they have come largely as an addition to, not a substitute for, previous cooking appliances. In the long term, if microwave ovens truly replace older ovens, this innovation may come to be regarded as a dematerializer. National security and war, styles and fashions, and fads may also function as materializers by accelerating production and consumption. Demand for health and fitness, local mobility, and travel may spur materialization in other ways.The societal driving forces behind dematerialization are, at best, diverse and contradictory. However, the result may indeed be a clear trend in materialization or dematerialization. This could be determined only through collection and analysis of data on the use of basic materials with time, particularly for industry and especially for products with the greatest materials demand. Basic materials such as metals and alloys (e.g., steel, copper, aluminum), cement, sand, gravel, wood, paper, glass, ceramics, and rubber are among the materials that should be considered. The major products and associated industries that would be interesting to study could well include roads, buildings, automobiles, appliances,pipes (metal, clay, plastic), wires, clothing, newsprint and books, packaging materials, pottery, canned food, and bottled or canned drinks.第一篇：1、达尔文进化论被拿来作鸟的研究拓展，动物多样性保护，是表格题，直接在文中找答案就行了2、T/F/NG。
