托福机经：2013年3月17日托福阅读考题解析

　第一篇阅读：古文字：古文字可以解释很多让历史学家困惑的社会间题。能说明古代政府的名称啊什么的。还说文字刻在marble上和clay什么的，还和古埃及的文字作比较，说古埃及文字已经lost了因为刻字的东西没法保存．还讲到了coins，能解释古代的商业贸易方面的间题。

　　解析：本文的重点讲解古文字的作用。故文章的重点应梳理古文字在哪些方面具有哪些作用。将文字和历史作用联系起来可以迅速梳理文章的逻辑结构。下面是关于古代埃及楔形文字的介绍，大家参考阅读。

　　As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing. The Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts - hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek.

　　Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule (intermittent in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE), and after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Macedonian and Roman periods. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part, as a response to the changed political situation. Some believe that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish 'true Egyptians' from some of the foreign conquerors. Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally. Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing, Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical, even magical, system transmitting secret, mystical knowledge.

　　By the 4th century, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the myth of allegorical hieroglyphs was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 CE by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I.[ //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphic]

　　第二篇阅读：青蛙的叫声。大多数是公音蛙叫。目的是吸引母青蛙交配。多在半夜叫，声音传的远，可以穿透obstacles，比视觉信号要好。母青蛙通过音量、音频来判断公青蛙的年龄。音量越大年龄越大，越有能力帮助母杳蛙的后代躲避危险，所以母青蛙倾向选择年龄大的公青蛙（有题）．但是有时也判断不准，因为距离远的老青蛙叫得声音和距离近的小青蛙一样大。老音蛙的声音行frequency更低（还是更高啊忘了二）。但是影响行frequency的还有temperature。的因素．小青蛙的更冷的环境中就能发出跟老青蛙频率差不多的的声音。词汇题还记得俩特简单的：。Appropriate, potential

　　解析：本篇文章讲动物的叫声及其作用，可参照TPO文章Animal Signals in The Rain Forest来对比阅读。关于青蛙叫声的相关信息请各位参照下面这篇文章。

　　The call or croak of a frog is unique to its species. Frogs create this sound by passing air through the larynx in the throat. In most calling frogs, the sound is amplified by one or more vocal sacs, membranes of skin under the throat or on the corner of the mouth, that distend during the amplification of the call.

　　Calling strategy

　　Male-male competition

　　In many frog species only males call. Each species has a distinct call, though even among the same species, different dialects are found in different regions. Although humans cannot detect the differences in dialects, frog distinguish between regional dialects. For example, male bullfrogs can recognize the calls of their direct territorial neighbors. By ignoring the calls of these neighbors, they save energy, and only vocalize aggressively with to an intruder's call. In this way, calls establish territories, but they also attract females.[ ^ a b c d Long (1999)] Males may have a solitary call for times when there is no competition that uses less energy. During other times, when a frog must compete with hundreds or thousands of other frogs to be heard, together they perform a chorus call where each frog calls in turn, successively. The most important feature of the chorus is the shared pattern. Through this pattern, few individuals calls are drowned out. One frog's call may be dominant and trigger the calls of the responding frogs in symphony. Interestingly, calling is linked to physical size and females may be attracted to more vigorous calls.[ ^ a b c d Long (1999)] Frogs in the same region chorus within their species and between different species. Frogs of the same species will retune their frequency so it is distinct from other frogs of the same species. Different species of frogs living in the same region have more dramatically different call frequencies.[ ^ Narins] The frequency and durations of different species' calls vary similarly to the preference of that species' females. The neural circuity of females of different species varies.

　　Male-female interactions

　　Like the males, females can distinguish the minute differences between individual frogs. However, males and females are attuned to different parts of the advertisement call. For example, males of the onomatopoeically named species Coqui are more attuned to the low frequency co part of the call, whereas females are more attuned to the high frequency qui.[4] In fact, the order of the parts does not matter. Similarly, for females of the Tungara species, the female basilar papilla is biased towards a lower-than-average "chuck" portion of a male call.[ ^ Narins and Capranica (1980)] Experiments that measure the vocal responses and approaches shows these attenuations.

　　Mode of sound communication

　　Calls are often sent through the air, but other mediums have been discovered. Some species call while they are under water and the sound travels through the water. This is adaptive in a region with many species competing for air time. Narins has found female frog species that use solid surfaces, such as blades of grass and logs, upon which they tap rhythmically to attract mates. Also, Feng has found that some species of frogs use ultrasound.

　　第三篇是美国西南部种的一种M开头的crop,说那个地方降水npredictable。 有词汇题stable。然后那儿的人口增多之后为了解诀食物问题就开始种植这种crops，尽管它产量不高，但是能很好地适应这种不规律的降水。之后还提到beans，种植beans把被m吸走了的氮，也就是营养，再还给土壤．又说另一种跟m相似的crop,可能是变种？没看懂．说它们有更大的果实和更短的生长期。

　　解析：本篇文章讲解粮食种植与当地气候的适应性。本篇文章的理解重点在于梳理地理气候特点与植物适应性之间的关系。关于maize的介绍请参照下面这篇文章。

　　Latin America, maize is the central foodstuff of the hearth and household. Because of the broad range of climates, soils, and topographic and hydrological conditions under which maize may be cultivated, diverse agricultural methods have evolved to accommodate its cultivation and processing. Maize environments in the Third World have been classified into four major types: tropical, subtropical, temperate, and highlands. As of 1996, tropical environments accounted for 90.6 million acres, or 45 percent of the total area under maize cultivation in developing countries; temperate environments accounted for 55.1 million acres, or 27 percent of the total; subtropical environments accounted for 42 million acres, or 21 percent of the total; and highland environments constituted 15.3 million acres, or 8 percent of the total area under maize cultivation in the developing world (Dowswell, Paliwal, and Cantrell, pp. 386).

　　In the tropical forests of Mexico and Central America, maize agriculture is predominantly associated with swidden (slash-and-burn or shifting) agricultural systems and the development of milpas (maize fields). Swidden cultivation entails the scoring or felling of trees and the subsequent torching of dry foliage and timber left in the wake of the clearance operation. Once the forest parcel has been cleared, dibble sticks are used to pierce the soil for the sowing of maize kernels in the charred timbers of the milpa. In contrast, in highland Guatemala maize is cultivated on the steepest of mountain slopes and under the most challenging topographical and hydrological conditions. In highland central Mexico, on the other hand, maize cultivation took the form of chinampas (floating gardens)erhaps the most unique agricultural system devoted to maizehat rapidly evolved and proliferated in the Basin of Mexico in pre-Columbian times. In fact, chinampas were a fundamentally important aspect of agricultural development in the highly populated Basin in the precontact period from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries C.E. Earlier forms of agricultural intensification associated with both chinampas and maize cultivation have similarly been identified with the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan, Mexico. This ancient city, which contained a population of some 150,000 people within an area of just under 8.5 square miles, was sustained through such productive systems of agricultural intensification during the period from 100 to 650 C.E. The only remaining Mesoamerican examples of this form of agricultural intensification are found in Xochimilco, Mexico.

　　In essence, chinampas entailed the creation of new agricultural parcels of land built atop floating islands or enclosures created within the shallow margins of Lake Texcoco. Chinampas plantations were framed within long, narrow rectangular enclosures formed from willow branches staked into the depths of the shallow lake bedart of a system of lakes identified with Lake Texcocohat once dominated the Basin of Mexico. Earth and mud gathered from the shallow lake bottom were dumped into these enclosures and used to form the agriculturally viable portion of those chinampas that were eventually anchored to the shallow lake bottom through the growth of those willow shoots and branches used to stake the plots. The recurring introduction of nutrients for maize grown atop chinampa parcels entailed the use of lake bottom mud, silt, vegetation, and excrement in an otherwise effective and ecologically sound practice. In this way, the Mexican Aztecs and their predecessors increased their ability to feed a rapidly growing Basin population by expanding the amount of cultivable lands devoted to maize and related crop systems. The area identified with the lakeside community of Xochimilco in the southern Basin of Mexico continues the practice of chinampa cultivation and floating gardens, and such parcels enable Mexican farmers to excel at the production of maize, beans, squash, flowers, and a variety of other Mesoamerican crops.

　　In the Maya lowlands and along the coastal margins of the Yucatan peninsula, the ancient Maya devoted considerable resources to the production of maize and related crops in raised or ridged field systems. These massive ridged field systems are among the largest and most extensive earthworks ever produced by the Maya or other societies of ancient America. Created within swamps, flooded bajos, or water-filled shallow limestone sinks or coastal estuaries, raised fields (or ridged islands or embankments) were formed into elongated, roughly rectangular agricultural parcels by piling soils or upcast scooped from drained areas immediately adjacent to the embankment or island. The overall appearance of such fields resembles massive waffle-like garden grids. These individual islands, however, were broad enough to accommodate the passage of a tractor-trailer rig. Pollen studies from these large earthen constructions have determined that, while maize was the major product of these systems, a variety of other Mesoamerican foodstuffs were also cultivated. In fact, the quantity of foods produced by such systems far exceeded the amount projected for swidden agricultural systems (once thought to be the predominant means by which food was grown in the tropical landscapes of the Maya heartland).

　　Whether produced by the indigenous systems of milpa or chinampa agriculture, maize cultivation in much of the Third World, and in more traditional contexts, has been dominated by the use of the "dibble stick" since pre-Columbian times. Consisting of a shaft of wood with a pointed tip used to pierce the soil for the sowing of maize kernels, the dibble stick has persisted for thousands of years and has been adopted by subsistence farmers throughout developing countries that have adopted maize agriculture. Nineteenth-century American maize farmers adopted both the cylindrical silo or "corn crib" and the "dibble stick" from American Indian prototypes (Fussell, p. 152). Improvements on the dibble stick developed in the 1850s ranged from the Randall and Jones Double Hand Planter to the long-lived "Stabber" or "Jobber." Both of these variations "stab" the soil and simultaneously dispense maize kernels into the holes (Fussell, pp. 14446). Such early efforts ultimately led to the evolution of the automated maize planters of today. Unlike commercial systems of mass production identified with the technology of maize planting and cultivation, the dibble stick has weathered the introduction of new techniques and continues to dominate more traditional, nontechnological farming practices around the world.