雅思托福相关IELTS雅思学术阅读练习.pdf

Test 2Pilkington built a pilot plant in 1953 and by 1955 he had convinced his company to build afull-scale plant However；it took 14 months of non-stop production,costing the company100,000 a month before rhe plant produced any usable glass.Furthermore,once theysucceeded in making marketable flat glass：the machine was turned off for a service to prepareit for years of continuous production.When it started up again it took another four months toget the process right again.They finally succeeded in 1959 and there are now float plants allover the world,with each able to produce around 1000 tons of glass every day,non-stop foraround 15 years.Float plants today make glass of near optical quality.Several processes-melting,refining,homogenising-take place simultaneously in the 2000 tonnes of molten glass in the furnace.They occur in separate zones in a complex glass flow driven by high temperatures.It adds upto a continuous melting process,lasting as long as 50 hours,that delivers glass smoothly andcontinuously to the float bath,and from there to a coating zone and finally a heat treatmentzone,where stresses formed during cooling are relieved.The principle of float glass is unchanged since the 1950s.However,the product has changeddramatically,from a single thickness of 6,8 mm to a range from sub-millimetre to 25 nun,from a ribbon frequently marred by inclusions and bubbles to almost optical perfection.Toensure the highest quality,inspection takes place at every stage.Occasionally,a bubble is notremoved during refining,a sand grain refuses to meltz a tremor in the tin puts ripples intothe glass ribbon.Automated on-line inspection does two things.Firstly,it reveals processfaults upstream that can be corrected.Inspection technology allows more than 100 millionmeasurements a second to be made across the ribbon,locating flaws the unaided eye would beunable to see.Secondly,it enables computers downstream to steer cutters around flaws.Float glass is sold by the square metre,and at the final stage computers translate customerrequirements into patterns of cuts designed to minimise waste.42206ReadingQuestions 1-8Complete the table and diagram below.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheetEarly methods of producing flat glass7E：豆窘；W 事号:淳:?登磐：Wethod AdvqntageL：;：-I：”*也二:.三潞基；1 了：工 1.,Glass remained2.*Slow 3.Ribbon*Could produce glass sheetsof varying 4.:Non-stop process Glass was 5.20%of glass rubbed away Machines were expensivePilkington float process6.20743Test 2Questions 9-73Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet,writeTRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on this9 The metal used in the float process had to have specific properties.10 Pilkington invested some of his own money in his float plant.11 Pilkingtons first full-scale plant was an instant commercial success.12 The process invented by Pilkington has now been improved,13 Computers are better than humans at detecting faults in glass.44208ReadingREADING PASSAGE 2You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26,which are based on ReadingPassage 2 on the following pages.Questions 14-17Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs,AF.Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B and D-F from the list of headings below.Write the correct number,Z x,in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheetList of Headingsi Predicting climatic changesii The relevance of the Little Ice Age todayiii How cities contribute to climate changeiv Human impact on the climatev How past climatic conditions can be determinedvi A growing need for weather recordsvii A study covering a thousand yearsviii People have always responded to climate changeix Enough food at lastExampleAnswerParagraph Aviii14 Paragraph BExampleAnswerParagraph CV15 Paragraph D16 Paragraph E17 Paragraph F45209Test 2T;HE LITTLE ICE AGE.,.,一 .:.s -4-.：.：.：.,.-：f .：.：,.A This book will provide a detailed examination of the Little ice Age and other climaticshifts,but,before I embark on that,let me provide a historical context.We tend tothink of climate-as opposed to weather-as something unchanging：yet humanityhas been at the mercy of dimate change for its entire existence,with at least eightglacial episodes in the past 730,000 years.Our ancestors adapted to the universalbut irregular global warming since the end of the last great Ice Age,around 10,000years ago,with dazzling opportunism.They developed strategies for survivingharsh drought cycles,decades of heavy rainfall or unaccustomed cold;adoptedagriculture and stock-raising,which revolutionised human life;and founded theworlds first pre-industrial civilisations in Egypt,Mesopotamia and the Americas.But the price of sudden climate change,in famine,disease and suffering,was oftenhigh.B The Little Ice Age lasted from roughly 1300 until the middle of the nineteenthcentury.Only two centuries ago,Europe experienced a cycle of bitterly coldwinters;mountain glaciers in the Swiss Alps were the lowest in recorded memory,and pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of the year.The climatic events of theLittle Ice Age did more than help shape the modern world.They are the deeplyimportant context for the current unprecedented global warming.The Little Ice Agewas far from a deep freeze,however；rather an irregular seesaw of rapid climaticshifts,few lasting more than a quarter-century,driven by complex and still littleunderstood interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean.The seesawbrought cycles of intensely cold winters and easterly winds,then switched abruptlyto years of heavy spring and early summer rains,mild winters,and frequent Atlanticstorms,or to periods of droughts,hght northeasterly winds,and summer heatwaves.C Reconstructing the climate changes of the past is extremely difficult,becausesystematic weather observations began only a few centuries ago,in Europe andNorth America.Records from India and tropical Africa are even more recent.For the time beforeecords began,we have only1 proxy records reconstructedlargely from tree rings and ice cores,supplemented by a few incomplete writtenaccounts We now have hundreds of tree-ring records from throughout thenorthern hemisphere,and many from south of the equator,too,amplified with agrowing body of temperature data from ice cores drilled in Antarctica.Greenland,the Peruvian Andes,and other locations.We are close to a knowledge of annualsummer and winter temperature variations over much of the northern hemispheregoing back 600 years.46210ReadingD This book is a narrative history of climatic shifts during the past ten centuries,andsome of the ways in which people in Europe adapted to them.Part One describesthe Medieval Warm Period,roughly 900 to 1200.During these three centuries.Norse voyagers from Northern Europe explored northern seas,settled Greenland,and visited North America.It was not a time of uniform warmth,for then,as alwayssince the Great Ice Age,there were constant shifts in rainfail and temperature.Mean European temperatures were about the same as today,perhaps slightlycooler.E it is known that the Little ice Age cooling began in Greenland and the Arctic inabout 1200.As the Arctic ice pack spread southward,Norse voyages to the westwere rerouted into the open Atlantic,then ended altogether.Storminess increasedin the North Atlantic and North Sea.Colder,much wetter weather descended onEurope between 1315 and 1319,when thousands perished in a continent-widefamine.By 1400,the weather had become decidedly more unpredictable andstormier,with sudden shifts and lower temperatures that culminated in the coiddecades of the late sixteenth century.Fish were a vitai commodity in growingtowns and cities,where food supplies v/ere a constant concern.Dried cod andherring were already the staptes of the European fish trade,but changes in watertemperatures forced fishing fleets to work further offshore.The Basques,Dutch,and English developed the first offshore fishing boats adapted to a colder andstormier Atlantic.A gradual agricultural revolution in northern Europe stemmedfrom concerns over food supplies at a time of Hsing populations.The revolutioninvolved intensive commercial farming and the growing of animal fodder on landnot previously used for crops.The increased productivity from farmland madesome countries self-sufficient in grain and livestock and offered effective protectionagainst famine.F Giobal temperatures began to rise slowly after 1850,with the beginning of theModern Warm Period.There was a vast migration from Europe by land-hungryfarmers and others,to which the famine caused by the Irish potato blightcontributed,to North America,Australia,New Zealand,and southern Africa.Milhons of hectares of forest and woodland fell before the newcomers axesbetween 1850 and 1890,as intensive European farming methods expandedacross the world.The unprecedented land clearance released vast quantities ofcarbon dioxide into the atmosphere,triggering for the first time hurhaniy causedglobal warming.Temperatures climbed more rapidly in the twentieth century asthe use of fossil fuels proliferated and greenhouse gas levels continued to soar.The rise has been even steeper since the early 1980s.The Little Ice Age has givenway to a new climatic regime,marked by prolonged and steady warming.At thesame lime,extreme weather events like Category 5 hurricanes are becoming morefrequent472/1Test 2Questions 18-22Complete the summary using the list of words,A-l,below.Write the correct letter,AM,in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.Weather during the Little Ice AgeDocumentation of past weather conditions is limited:our main sources of knowledgeof conditions in the distant past are 18.and 19.Wecan deduce that the Little Ice Age was a time of 2 0.,rather than ofconsistent freezing.Within it there were some periods of very cold winters,others of21.and heavy rain,and yet others that saw 2 2.with norain at all.A climatic shifts B ice cores C tree ringsD glaciers E interactions F weather observationsG heat waves H storms I written accountsQuestions 23-26Classify the following events as occurring during theA Medieval Warm PeriodB Little Ice AgeC Modem Warn PeriodWrite the correct letter,Af B or CT in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.23 Many Europeans started farming abroad.24 The cutting down of trees began to affect the climate.25 Europeans discovered other lands,26 Changes took place in fishing patterns.48212ReadingREADING PASSAGE 3You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40,which are based on ReadingPassage 3 on the following pages.Questions 27-32Reading Passage 3 has six paragraphs,A-F.Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.Write the correct number,i-viii,in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheetList of HeadingsI The difficulties of talking about smellsii The role of smell in personal relationshipsiii Future studies into smelliv The relationship between the brain and thenosev The interpretation of smells as a factor tndefining groupsvi Why our sense of smell is not appreciatedvli Smell is our superior sensevifi The relationship between smell and feelings27 Paragraph A28 Paragraph B29 Paragraph C30 Paragraph D31 Paragraph E32 Paragraph F49213Test 2The meaning and power of smellThe sense ofsmeli,or olfaction,is powerful.Odours affect us on a physical,psychological and social level.For the most part,however,we breathe in the aromaswhich surround us without being consciously aware of their importance to us.It isonly when the faculty of smell is impaired for some reason that we begin to realise theessential role the sense of smell plays in our sense of well-beingA A survey conducted by Anthony Synott at Montreals Concordia University askedparticipants to comment on how important smell was to them in their iives.Itbecame apparent that smell can evoke strong emotional responses.A scentassociated with a good experience can bring a rush of joy,while a foul odour or oneassociated with a bad memory may make us grimace with disgust.Respondentsto the survey noted that many of their oifactory Sikes and disiikes were based onemotional associations.Such associations can be powerfui enough so that odoursthat we would generally label unpleasant become agreeable,and those that wewould generally consider fragrant become disagreeable for particular individuals.The perception of smell,therefore,consists not only of the sensation of the odoursthemselves,but of the experiences and emotions associated with them.B Odours are also essential cues in social bonding.One respondent to the surveybelieved that there is no true emotional bonding without touching and smelling aloved one.In fact,infants recognise the odours of their mothers soon after birthand adults can often identify their children or spouses by scent.In one weil-knowntest,women and men were abie to distinguish by smell alone clothing worn by theirmarriage partners from similar clothing worn by other people.Most of the subjectswould probably never have given much thought to odour as a cue for identifyingfamily members before being involved in the test,but as the experiment revealed,even when not consciously considered,smells register.C in spite of its importance to our emotional and sensory lives,smell is probablythe most undervalued sense in many cultures.The reason often given for the lowregard in which smell is held is that,in comparison with its importance amonganimals,the human sense of smeil is feeble and undeveloped While it is true thatthe oifactory powers of humans are nothing iike as fine as those possessed bycertain animals,they are stil!remarkably acute.Our noses are ab!e to recognisethousands of smells,and to perceive odours which are present ony in extremelysmall quantities.D Smell,however,is a highly elusive phenomenon.Odours,unlike colours,forinstance,cannot be named in many languages because the specific vocabularysimply doesnt exist.It smeils like.we have to say when describing an odour,struggling to express our olfactory experience.Nor can odours be recorded：there is no effective way to either capture or store them overtime,in the reaimof olfaction,we must make do with descriptions and recollections.This hasimplications for olfactory research.502/4ReadingE Most of the research on smell undertaken to date has been of a physical scientificnature.Significant advances have been made in the understanding of the biologicaland chemical nature of olfaction,but many fundamental questions have yet to beanswered.Researchers have st!I to decide whether smeh is one sense or two oneresponding to odours proper and the other registering odourless chemicals in theair.Other unanswered questions are whether the nose is the only part of the bodyaffected by odours,and how smells can be measured objectively given the nonphysical components.Questions like these mean that interest i