2015年7月23日雅思阅读机经考题回忆

——来自环球天下教研中心

Passage

One

新旧情况

题材

题目

题型

旧

V100717

农业类

Traditional Farming System in Africa

Completion 4

Matching 4

T/F/NG 4

Multiple choice 1

阅读原文：

Traditional Farming System in Africa

　　A By tradition land in Luapula is not owned by individuals, but as in many other parts of Africa is allocated by the headman or headwoman of a village to people of either sex, according to need. Since land is generally prepared by hand, one ulupwa cannot take on a very large area; in this sense land has not been a limiting resource over large parts of the province. The situation has already changed near the main townships, and there has long been a scarcity of land for cultivation in the Valley. In these areas registered ownership patterns are becoming prevalent.

B Most of the traditional cropping in Luapula, as in the Bemba area to the east, is based on citemene, a system whereby crops are grown on the ashes of tree branches. As a rule, entire trees are not felled, but are pollarded so that they can regenerate. Branches are cut over an area of varying size early in the dry season, and stacked to dry over a rough circle about a fifth to a tenth of the pollarded area. The wood is fired before the rains and in the first year planted with the African cereal finger millet (Eleusine coracana).

C  During the second season, and possibly for a few seasons more the area is planted to variously mixed combinations of annuals such as maize, pumpkins (Telfiria occidentalis) and other cucurbits, sweet potatoes, groundnuts, Phaseolus beans and various leafy vegetables, grown with a certain amount of rotation. The diverse sequence ends with vegetable cassava, which is often planted into the developing last-but-one crop as a relay.

　　D Richards (1969) observed that the practice of citemene entails a definite division of labour between men and women. A man stakes out a plot in an unobtrusive manner, since it is considered provocative towards one’s neighbours to mark boundaries in an explicit way. The dangerous work of felling branches is the men’s province, and involves much pride. Branches are stacke by the women, and fired by the men. Formerly women and men cooperated in the planting work, but the harvesting was always done by the women. At the beginning of the cycle little weeding is necessary, since the firing of the branches effectively destroys weeds. As the cycle progresses weeds increase and nutrients eventually become depleted to a point where further effort with annual crops is judged to be not worthwhile: at this point the cassava is planted, since it can produce a crop on nearly exhausted soil. Thereafter the plot is abandoned, and a new area pollarded for the next citemene cycle.

E  When forest is not available - this is increasingly the case nowadays - various ridging systems (ibala)are built on small areas, to be planted  with  combinations  of maize,  beans,  groundnuts  and sweet potatoes, usually relayed with cassava. These plots are usually tended by women, and provide subsistence. Where their roots have year-round access to water tables mango, guava and oil-palm trees often grow around houses, forming a traditional agroforestry system. In season some of the fruit is sold by the roadside or in local markets.

F  The margins of dambos are sometimes planted to local varieties of rice during the rainy season, and areas adjacent to vegetables irrigated with water from the dambo during the dry season. The extent of cultivation is very limited, no doubt because the growing of crops under dambo conditions calls for a great deal of skill. Near towns some of the vegetable produce is sold in local markets.

　　G  Fishing has long provided a much needed protein supplement to the diet of Luapulans, as well as being the one substantial source of cash. Much fish is dried for sale to areas away from the main waterways. The Mweru and Bangweulu Lake Basins are the main areas of year-round fishing, but the Luapula River is also exploited during the latter part of the dry season. Several previously abundant and desirable species, such as the Luapula salmon or mpumbu (Labeo altivelis) and pale (Sarotherodon machochir) have all but disappeared from Lake Mweru, apparently due to mismanagement.

H  Fishing has always been a far more remunerative activity in Luapula that crop husbandry. A fisherman may earn more in a week than a bean or maize grower in a whole season. I sometimes heard claims that the relatively high earnings to be obtained from fishing induced an ‘easy come, easy go’ outlook among Luapulan men. On the other hand, someone who secures good but erratic earnings may feel that their investment in an economically productive activity is not worthwhile because Luapulans fail to cooperate well in such activities. Besides, a fisherman with spare cash will find little in the way of working equipment to spend his money on. Better spend one’s money in the bars and have a good time!

I  Only small numbers of cattle or oxen are kept in the province owing to the prevalence of the tsetse fly. For the few herds, the dambos provide subsistence grazing during the dry season. The absence of animal draft power greatly limits peoples’ ability to plough and cultivate land: a married couple can rarely manage to prepare by hand-hoeing. Most people keep freely roaming chickens and goats. These act as a reserve for bartering, but may also be occasionally slaughtered for ceremonies or for entertaining important visitors. These animals are not a regular part of most peoples’ diet.

J  Citemene has been an ingenious system for providing people with seasonal production of high quality cereals and vegetables in regions of acid, heavily leached soils. Nutritionally, the most serious deficiency was that of protein. This could at times be alleviated when fish was available, provided that cultivators lived near the Valley and could find the means of bartering for dried fish. The citemene/fishing system was well adapted to the ecology of the miombo regions and sustainable for long periods, but only as long as human population densities stayed at low levels. Although population densities are still much lower than in several countries of South-East Asia, neither the fisheries nor the forests and woodlands of Luapula are capable, with unmodified traditional practices, of supporting the people in a sustainable manner.

Overall, people must learn to intensify and diversify their productive systems while yet ensuring that these systems will remain productive in the future, when even more people will need food. Increasing overall production of food, though a vast challenge in itself, will not be enough, however. At the same time storage and distribution systems must allow everyone access to at least a moderate share of the total

　　Questions 1-4

　　Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage 1.

　　Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

　　Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

　　1  In Luapula land allocation is in accordance with need  

　　2  The citemene system provides the land with  (the) ashes where crops are planted.

　　3  During the second season, the last planted crop is (vegetable) cassava

　　4  Under suitable conditions, fruit trees are planted near houses

　　Questions 5-8

　　Classify the following items with the correct description.

　　Write your answers in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet.

　　A  fish

　　B  oxen

　　C  goats

　　5   be used in some unusual occasions, such as celebrations.  C

　　6   cannot thrive for being affected by the pests.  B

　　7   be the largest part of creating profit.  A

　　8   be sold beyond the local area.  A

　　Questions 9-12

　　Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

　　In boxes 9-12 on your answer sheet, write

　　TRUE          if the statement agrees with the information

　　FALSE          if the statement contradicts the information

　　NOT GVEN     if there is no information on this

　　9   People rarely use animals to cultivate land.  TRUE

　　10  When it is a busy time, children usually took part in the labor force.  NOT GIVEN

　　11  The local residents eat goats on a regular time.  FALSE

　　12  Though citemene has been a sophisticated system, it could not provide enough protein.  TRUE

　　Questions 13

　　Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

　　Write the correct letter in the box 13 on your answer sheet.

　　What is the writer’s opinion about the traditional ways of practices?   B

　　A  They can supply the nutrition that people need.

　　B  They are not capable of providing adequate support to the population.

　　C  They are productive systems that need no more improving.

　　D  They will be easily modified in the future.

Passage

Two

新旧情况

题材

题目

题型

旧

V100529

人类行为研究类

Finding our way

Matching 5

Multiple choice 3

T/F/NG 5

阅读原文：

Finding Our Way

A “Drive 200 yards, and then turn right, “says the car’s computer voice. You relax in the driver’s seat, follow the directions and reach your destination without error. It’s certainly nice to have the Global Positioning System (GPS) to direct you to within a few yards of your goal. Yet if the satellite service’s digital maps become even slightly outdated, you can become lost. Then you have to rely on the ancient human skill of navigating in three-dimensional space. Luckily, your biological finder has an important advantage over GPS: it does not go awry if only one part of the guidance system goes wrong, because it works in various ways. You can ask questions of people on the sidewalk. Or follow a street that looks familiar. Or rely on a navigational rubric: "If I keep the East River on my left, I will eventually cross 34th Street.” The human positioning system is flexible and capable of learning. Anyone who knows the way from point A to point B—and from A to C—can probably figure out how to get from B to C, too.

　　B  But how does this complex cognitive system really work? Researchers are looking at several strategies people use to orient themselves in space: guidance, path integration and route following. We may use all three or combinations thereof. And as experts learn more about these navigational skills, they are making the case that our abilities may underlie our powers of memory and logical thinking. Grand Central, Please Imagine that you have arrived in a place you have never visited—New York City. You get off the train at Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan. You have a few hours to explore before you must return for your ride home. You head uptown to see popular spots you have been told about: Rockefeller Center, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You meander in and out of shops along the way. Suddenly, it is time to get back to the station. But how?

　　C  If you ask passersby for help, most likely you will receive information in many different forms. A person who orients herself by a prominent landmark would gesture southward: "Look down there. See the tall, broad MetLife Building? Head for that—the station is right below it. “Neurologists call this navigational approach "guidance,” meaning that a landmark visible from a distance serves as the marker for one’s destination.

　　D  Another city dweller might say: "What places do you remember passing? . . . Okay. Go toward the end of Central Park, then walk down to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A few more blocks, and Grand Central will be off to your left. “In this case, you are pointed toward the most recent place you recall, and you aim for it. Once there you head for the next notable place and so on, retracing your path. Your brain is adding together the individual legs of your trek into a cumulative progress report. Researchers call this strategy "path integration.” Many animals rely primarily on path integration to get around, including insects, spiders, crabs and rodents. The desert ants of the genus Cataglyphis employ this method to return from foraging as far as 100 yards away. They note the general direction they came from and retrace their steps, using the polarization of sunlight to orient themselves even under overcast skies. On their way back they are faithful to this inner homing vector. Even when a scientist picks up an ant and puts it in a totally different spot, the insect stubbornly proceeds in the originally determined direction until it has gone "back" all of the distance it wandered from its nest. Only then does the ant realize it has not succeeded, and it begins to walk in successively larger loops to find its way home.

E Whether it is trying to get back to the anthill or the train station, any animal using path integration must keep track of its own movements so it knows, while returning, which segments it has already completed. As you move, your brain gathers data from your environment—sights, sounds, smells, lighting, muscle contractions, a sense of time passing—to determine which way your body has gone. The church spire, the sizzling sausages on that vendor’s grill, the open courtyard, and the train station—all represent snapshots of memorable junctures during your journey.

F In addition to guidance and path integration, we use a third method for finding our way. An office worker you approach for help on a Manhattan street comer might say: "Walk straight down Fifth, turn left on 47th, turn right on Park, go through the walkway under the Helmsley Building, then cross the street to the MetLife Building into Grand Central.” This strategy, called route following, uses landmarks such as buildings and street names, plus directions—straight, turn, go through—for reaching intermediate points. Route following is more precise than guidance or path integration, but if you forget the details and take a wrong turn, the only way to recover is to backtrack until you reach a familiar spot, because you do not know the general direction or have a reference landmark for your goal. The route-following navigation strategy truly challenges the brain. We have to keep all the landmarks and intermediate directions in our head. It is the most detailed and therefore most reliable method, but it can be undone by routine memory lapses. With path integration, our cognitive memory is less burdened; it has to deal with only a few general instructions and the homing vector. Path integration works because it relies most fundamentally on our knowledge of our body’s general direction of movement, and we always have access to these inputs. Nevertheless, people often choose to give route-following directions, in part because saying "Go straight that way!" just does not work in our complex, man-made surroundings.

　　G Road Map or Metaphor? On your next visit to Manhattan you will rely on your memory to get around. Most likely you will use guidance, path integration and route following in various combinations. But how exactly do these constructs deliver concrete directions? Do we humans have, as an image of the real world, a kind of road map in our heads—with symbols for cities, train stations and churches; thick lines for highways; narrow lines for local streets? Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists do call the portion of our memory that controls navigation a "cognitive map.” The map metaphor is obviously seductive: maps are the easiest way to present geographic information for convenient visual inspection. In many cultures, maps were developed before writing, and today they are used in almost every society. It is even possible that maps derive from a universal way in which our spatial-memory networks are wired.

H Yet the notion of a literal map in our heads may be misleading; a growing body of research implies that the cognitive map is mostly a metaphor. It may be more like a hierarchical structure of relationships.

To get back to Grand Central, you first envision (想象) the large scale—that is, you visualize the general direction of the station. Within that system you then imagine the route to the last place you remember. After that, you observe your nearby surroundings to pick out a recognizable storefront or street comer that will send you toward that place. In this hierarchical, or nested, scheme, positions and distances are relative, in contrast with a road map, where the same information is shown in a geometrically precise scale.

　　Questions 14-18

　　Use the information in the passage to match the category of each navigation method (listed A-C) with correct statement. Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 14-18on your answer sheet.

　　NB you may use any letter more than once

　　A  Guidance

　　B  Path integration.

　　C  Route following

　　14 Using basic direction from starting point and light intensity to move on.   B

　　15 Using combination of place and direction heading for destination.   C

　　16 Using an iconic building near your destination as orientation.   A

　　17 Using a retrace method from a known place if a mistake happens.   C

　　18 Using a passed spot as reference for a new integration.   B

　　Questions 19-21

　　Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

　　Write your answers in boxes 19-21 on your answer sheet.

19 What does the ant of Cataglyphis respond if it has been taken to another location according to the

passage?

　　A  Changes the orientation sensors improvingly

　　B  Releases biological scent for help from others

　　C  Continues to move by the original orientation

　　D  Totally gets lost once disturbed

　　20 Which of the followings is true about "cognitive map" in this passage?

　　A  There is not obvious difference contrast by real map

　　B  It exists in our head and is always correct

　　C  It only exists under some cultures

　　D  It was managed by brain memory

　　21 Which of following description of way findings correctly reflects the function of cognitive map?

　　A  It visualizes a virtual route in a large scope

　　B  It reproduces an exact details of every landmark

　　C  Observation plays a more important role

　　D  Store or supermarket is a must in the map

　　Questions 22-26

　　Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

　　In boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet, write

　　TRUE             if the statement is true

　　FALSE            if the statement is false

　　NOT GIVEN       if the information is not given in the passage

　　22 Biological navigation has a state of flexibility.  TRUE

　　23 You will always receive good reaction when you ask direction.   NOT GIVEN

　　24 When someone follows a route, he or she collects comprehensive perceptional information in mind on the way.   TRUE

　　25 Path integration requires more thought from brain compared with route-following.   FALSE

26 In a familiar surroundings, an exact map of where you are will automatically emerge in your head.  

FALSE

Passage

Three

新旧情况

题材

题目

题型

旧

语言类

Hierarchy and history language

Multiple choice 7

人物观点配对6

TES/NO/NOT GIVEN 3

文章大意：

人类迁徙语言和语言之间的联系Greenberg 的研究，把语言分成三类。理论发展和其他专家的意见。

Questions 27-32 Matching 人名（美国大学教授）和观点配对

27. All the linguistic opposed to his findings because……

  the Green’s data insufficient and the conclusion was limited

28. XX Campbell-Linguistic once who was

  against going thousands of year back to study languages

29. Linguistic, the one who…

  said that language are not related to basic genetics.

30. XX linguistic who--- did not attempt this method

31. XXX--- languages are related to each other based on genetics.

32. The mother tongue and opposed ones, --- had a number of similar words, sound units and segment.

Questions33-34

　　Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

　　In boxes 33-34 on your answer sheet, write

　　TRUE             if the statement is true

　　FALSE            if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN       if the information is not given in the passage

33. Linguistics had used astronomy for grouping language       NOT GIVEN

34. Currently there is not enough interest in language research    FALSE

35-40. 待补充