剑桥雅思阅读解析8(test2).docx

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1、剑桥雅思阅读解析8(test2) 学习啦我为大家整理收集了剑桥雅思阅读8真题解析：test2阅读原文解析，希望对各位考生的备考有所帮助,祝每位烤鸭考试顺当，都能取得好成果! 剑桥雅思阅读8原文(test2) READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. Sheet glass manufacture: the float process Glass, which has been made since the t

2、ime of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, is little more than a mixture of sand, soda ash and lime. When heated to about 1500 degrees Celsius () this becomes a molten mass that hardens when slowly cooled. The first successful method for making clear, flat glass involved spinning. This method was very

3、effective as the glass had not touched any surfaces between being soft and becoming hard, so it stayed perfectly unblemished, with a 'fire finish'. However, the process took a long time and was labour intensive. Nevertheless, demand for flat glass was very high and glassmakers across the wor

4、ld were looking for a method of making it continuously. The first continuous ribbon process involved squeezing molten glass through two hot rollers, similar to an old mangle. This allowed glass of virtually any thickness to be made non-stop, but the rollers would leave both sides of the glass marked

5、, and these would then need to be ground and polished. This part of the process rubbed away around 20 per cent of the glass, and the machines were very expensive. The float process for making flat glass was invented by Alistair Pilkington. This process allows the manufacture of clear, tinted and coa

6、ted glass for buildings, and clear and tinted glass for vehicles. Pilkington had been experimenting with improving the melting process, and in 1952 he had the idea of using a bed of molten metal to form the flat glass, eliminating altogether the need for rollers within the float bath. The metal had

7、to melt at a temperature less than the hardening point of glass (about 600), but could not boil at a temperature below the temperature of the molten glass (about 1500). The best metal for the job was tin. The rest of the concept relied on gravity, which guaranteed that the surface of the molten meta

8、l was perfectly flat and horizontal. Consequently, when pouring molten glass onto the molten tin, the underside of the glass would also be perfectly flat. If the glass were kept hot enough, it would flow over the molten tin until the top surface was also flat, horizontal and perfectly parallel to th

9、e bottom surface. Once the glass cooled to 604 or less it was too hard to mark and could be transported out of the cooling zone by rollers. The glass settled to a thickness of six millimetres because of surface tension interactions between the glass and the tin. By fortunate coincidence, 60 per cent

10、 of the flat glass market at that time was for six-millimetre glass. Pilkington built a pilot plant in 1953 and by 1955 he had convinced his company to build a full-scale plant. However, it took 14 months of non-stop production, costing the company 100,000 a month, before the plant produced any usab

11、le glass. Furthermore, once they succeeded in making marketable flat glass, the machine was turned off for a service to prepare it for years of continuous production. When it started up again it took another four months to get the process right again. They finally succeeded in 1959 and there are now

12、 float plants all over the world, with each able to produce around 1000 tons of glass every day, non-stop for around 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

13、furnace. They occur in separate zones in a complex glass flow driven by high temperatures. It adds up to a continuous melting process, lasting as long as 50 hours, that delivers glass smoothly and continuously to the float bath, and from there to a coating zone and finally a heat treatment zone, whe

14、re stresses formed during cooling are relieved. The principle of float glass is unchanged since the 1950s. However, the product has changed dramatically, from a single thickness of 6.8 mm to a range from sub-millimetre to 25 mm, from a ribbon frequently marred by inclusions and bubbles to almost opt

15、ical perfection. To ensure the highest quality, inspection takes place at every stage. Occasionally, a bubble is not removed during refining, a sand grain refuses to melt, a tremor in the tin puts ripples into the glass ribbon. Automated on-line inspection does two things. Firstly, it reveals proces

16、s faults upstream that can be corrected. Inspection technology allows more than 100 million measurements a second to be made across the ribbon, locating flaws the unaided eye would be unable to see. Secondly, it enables computers downstream to steer cutters around flaws. Float glass is sold by the s

17、quare metre, and at the final stage computers translate customer requirements into patterns of cuts designed to minimise waste. Questions 1-8 Complete 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 sheet. Ea

18、rly methods of producing flat glass Method Advantages Disadvantages 1. ? Glass remained 2. ? Slow ? 3. Ribbon ? Could produce glass sheets of varying 4. ? non-stop process ? Glass was 5. ? 20% of glass rubbed away ? Machines were expensive 图片11 Questions 9-13 Do the following statements agree with t

19、he information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this 9 The metal used in the float process had to have specific properties

20、. 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. READING PASSAGE 2 You should spen

21、d about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on the following pages. Question 14-17 Reading passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B and D-F from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 14-17 on your an

22、swer sheet. List of Headings i Predicting climatic changes ii The relevance of the Little Ice Age today iii How cities contribute to climate change. iv Human impact on the climate v How past climatic conditions can be determined vi A growing need for weather records vii A study covering a thousand y

23、ears viii People have always responded to climate change ix Enough food at last Example Answer Paragraph A Viii 14 Paragraph B Example Answer Paragraph C V 15 Paragraph D 16 Paragraph E 17 Paragraph F THE LITTLE ICE AGE A This book will provide a detailed examination of the Little Ice Age and other

24、climatic shifts, but, before I embark on that, let me provide a historical context. We tend to think of climate as opposed to weather as something unchanging, yet humanity has been at the mercy of climate change for its entire existence, with at least eight glacial episodes in the past 730,000 years

25、. Our ancestors adapted to the universal but irregular global warming since the end of the last great Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago, with dazzling opportunism. They developed strategies for surviving harsh drought cycles, decades of heavy rainfall or unaccustomed cold; adopted agriculture and sto

26、ck-raising, which revolutionised human life; and founded the world's first pre-industrial civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas. But the price of sudden climate change, in famine, disease and suffering, was often high. B The Little Ice Age lasted from roughly 1300 until the middle

27、 of the nineteenth century. Only two centuries ago, Europe experienced a cycle of bitterly cold winters; 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 the Little Ice Age did more than help shape th

28、e modern world. They are the deeply important context for the current unprecedented global warming. The Little Ice Age was far from a deep freeze, however; rather an irregular seesaw of rapid climatic shifts, few lasting more than a quarter-century, driven by complex and still little understood inte

29、ractions between the atmosphere and the ocean. The seesaw brought cycles of intensely cold winters and easterly winds, then switched abruptly to years of heavy spring and early summer rains, mild winters, and frequent Atlantic storms, or to periods of droughts, light northeasterly winds, and summer

30、heat waves. C Reconstructing the climate changes of the past is extremely difficult, because systematic weather observations began only a few centuries ago, in Europe and North America. Records from India and tropical Africa are even more recent. For the time before records began, we have only '

31、proxy records' reconstructed largely from tree rings and ice cores, supplemented by a few incomplete written accounts. We now have hundreds of tree-ring records from throughout the northern hemisphere, and many from south of the equator, too, amplified with a growing body of temperature data fro

32、m ice cores drilled in Antarctica, Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, and other locations, we are close to a knowledge of annual summer and winter temperature variations over much of the northern hemisphere going back 600 years. D This book is a narrative history of climatic shifts during the past ten c

33、enturies, and some of the ways in which people in Europe adapted to them. Part One describes the 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 uni

34、form warmth, for then, as always since the Great Ice Age, there were constant shifts in rainfall and temperature. Mean European temperatures were about the same as today, perhaps slightly cooler. E It is known that the Little Ice Age cooling began in Greenland and the Arctic in about 1200. As the Ar

35、ctic ice pack spread southward, Norse voyages to the west were rerouted into the open Atlantic, then ended altogether. Storminess increased in the North Atlantic and North Sea. Colder, much wetter weather descended on Europe between 1315 and 1319, when thousands perished in a continent-wide famine.

36、By 1400, the weather had become decidedly more unpredictable and stormier, with sudden shifts and lower temperatures that culminated in the cold decades of the late sixteenth century. Fish were a vital commodity in growing towns and cities, where food supplies were a constant concern. Dried cod and

37、herring were already the staples of the European fish trade, but changes in water temperatures forced fishing fleets to work further offshore. The Basques, Dutch, and English developed the first offshore fishing boats adapted to a colder and stormier Atlantic. A gradual agricultural revolution in no

38、rthern Europe stemmed from concerns over food supplies at a time of rising populations. The revolution involved intensive commercial farming and the growing of animal fodder on land not previously used for crops. The increased productivity from farmland made some countries self-sufficient in grain a

39、nd livestock and offered effective protection against famine. F Global temperatures began to rise slowly after 1850, with the beginning of the Modern Warm Period. There was a vast migration from Europe by land-hungry farmers and others, to which the famine caused by the Irish potato blight contribut

40、ed, to North America, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. Millions of hectares of forest and woodland fell before the newcomers' axes between 1850 and 1890, as intensive European farming methods expanded across the world. The unprecedented land clearance released vast quantities of carb

41、on dioxide into the atmosphere, triggering for the first time humanly caused global warming. Temperatures climbed more rapidly in the twentieth century as the use of fossil fuels proliferated and greenhouse gas levels continued to soar. The rise has been even steeper since the early 1980s. The Littl

42、e Ice Age has given way to a new climatic regime, marked by prolonged and steady warming. At the same time, extreme weather events like Category 5 hurricanes are becoming more frequent. Questions 18-22 Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below. Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes

43、18-22 on your answer sheet. Weather during the Little Ice Age Documentation of past weather conditions is limited: our main sources of knowledge of conditions in the distant past are 18.and 19. We can deduce that the Little Ice Age was a time of 20. , rather than of consistent freezing. Within it th

44、ere were some periods of very cold winters, other of 21.and heavy rain, and yet others that saw 22.with no rain at all. A climatic shifts B ice cores C tree rings D glaciers E interactions F weather observations G heat waves H storms I written accounts Questions 23-26 Classify the following events a

45、s occurring during the A Medieval Warm Period B Little Ice Age C Modern Warm Period Write the correct letter, A, B or C, 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 Ch

46、anges took place in fishing patterns. READING PASSAGE 3 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 on the following pages. Questions 27-32 Reading 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 sheet. List of Headings i The difficulties of talking about smells ii The role of smell in personal relationships iii Future studies into smell iv The relationship between the brain