托福阅读理解文档doc.docx

1、托福阅读理解文档docThe ocean bottom，a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth， is even today largely unexplored. Until about a century ago，the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible and hidden beneath waters averaging over 3，600 meters deep. Totally without light and subj

2、ected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earths surface，the deep-ocean bottom is a strange environment to humans，in some ways as forbidding and remote as the outer space.Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks for over acentury，the first detailed global st

3、udy of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968，with the beginning of the National Science Foundations Deep Sea Drilling Project ( DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry，the DSDPs drill ship，the Glomar Challenger，was able to maintain a steady position

4、 on the oceans surface and drill in very deepwaters，taking samples of rock from the ocean floor.The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year-research program that ended in November 1983. During this time，it sailed 600，000 kilometers and took almost20，000samples of rocks around the world.

5、Those samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to make out whatit will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today，largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challengers voyages，nearly all earth

6、 scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics (构造学) and continental drift that explains many of the geological processes.The samples of rocks drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also provided a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years. The information ofpast climatic ch

7、anges can be used to predict future climates.Basic to any understanding of Canada in the 20 years after the Second World War is the countrys impressive population growth. For every three Canadians in 1945, there were over five in 1966. In September 1966 Canadas population passed the 20 million mark.

8、 Most of this surging growth came from natural increase. The depression of the 1930s and the war had held back marriages, and the catching-up process began after 1945. The baby boom continued through the decade of the 1950s, producing a population increase of nearly fifteen percent in the five years

9、 from 1951 to 1956. This rate of increase had been exceeded only once before in Canadas history, in the decade before 1911, when the prairies were being settled. Undoubtedly, the good economic conditions of the 1950s supported a growth in the population, but the expansion also derived from a trend t

10、oward earlier marriages and an increase in the average size of families. In 1957 the Canadian birth rate stood at 28 per thousand, one of the highest in the world.After the peak year of 1957, the birth rate in Canada began to decline. It continued falling until in 1966 it stood at the lowest level i

11、n 25 years. Partly this decline reflected the low level of births during the depression and the war, but it was also caused by changes in Canadian society. Young people were staying at school longer; more women were working; young married couples were buying automobiles or houses before starting fam

12、ilies; rising; living standards were cutting down the size of families. It appeared that Canada was once more falling in step with the trend toward smaller families that had occurred all through the Western world since the time of the Industrial Revolution.Although the growth in Canadas population h

13、ad slowed down by 1966 (the increase in the first half of the 1960s was only nine percent), another large population wave was coming over the horizon. It would be composed of the children who were born during the period of the high birth rate prior to 1957.Are organically grown foods the best food c

14、hoices? The advantages claimed for such foods over conventionally grown and marketed food products are now being debated. Advocates of organic foods frequently proclaim that such products are safer and more nutritious than others.The growing interest of consumers in the safety and nutritional qualit

15、y of the typical North American diet is a welcome development. However, much of this interest has been sparked by sweeping claims that the food supply is unsafe or inadequate in meeting nutritional needs. Although most of these claims are not supported by scientific evidence, the greater number of w

16、ritten material advancing such claims make it difficult for the general public to sep arate fact from fiction. As a result, claims that eating a diet consisting entirely of organically grown foods prevents or cures disease or provides other benefits to health have become widely publicized and form.

17、the basis for folklore.Almost daily the public is surrounded by claims for no-aging diets, new vitamins, and other wonder foods. There are numerous unsubstantiated reports that natural vitamins are superior to synthetic ones, that crops grown with organic fertilizers are nutritionally superior to ch

18、ose with chemical fertilizers, that untreated grains are better than fumigated grains, and the like.One thing that most organically grown food products seem to have in common is that they cost more than conventionally grown foods. But in many cases consumers are misled if they believe organic foods

19、can maintain health and provide better nutritional quality than conventionally grown foods. So there is real cause for concern ff consumers, particularly those with limited incomes, distrust the regular food supply and buy only expensive organic foods instead.There are many theories about the beginn

20、ing of drama in ancient Greece. The one most widely accepted today is based on the assumption that drama evolved from ritual(仪式). The argument for this view goes as follows. In the beginning, human beings viewed the natural forces of the world, even the seasonal changes, as unpredictable, and they s

21、ought through various means, to control these unknown and feared powers. Those measures which appeared to bring the desired results were then retained and repeated until they hardened into fixed rituals. Eventually stories arose which explained or veiled the mysteries of the rites. As time passed so

22、me rituals were abandoned, but the stories, later called myths, persisted and provided material for art and drama.Those who believed that drama evolved out of ritual also argue that those rites contained the seed of theater because music, dance, masks, and costumes were almost always used. Furthermo

23、re, a suitable site had to be provided for performances, and when the entire community did not participate, a clear division was usually made between the acting area and the auditorium. In addition, there were performers, and, since considerable importance was attached to avoiding mistakes in the en

24、actment of rites, religious leaders usually assumed that task. Wearing masks and costumes, they often impersonated (模仿，扮演) other people, animals, or super natural beings, and mimed the desired effect-success in hunt or battle, the coming rain, the revival of the Sun-as an actor might. Eventually suc

25、h dramatic representations were separated from religious activities.Another theory traces the theaters origin from the human interest in storytelling. According to this view, tales (about the hunt, war, or other feats) are gradually elaborated, at first through the use of impersonation, action, and

26、dialogue by a narrator and then through the assumption of each of the roles by a different person. A closely related theory traces theater to those dances that are primarily rhythmical and gymnastic or that are imitations of animal movements and sounds.Staggering tasks confronted the people of the U

27、nited States, North and South, when the Civil War ended. About a million and a half soldiers flora both sides has to be demobilized, readjusted to civilian life, and reabsorbed by the devastated economy. Civil government also had to be put back on a peacetime basis and interference from the military

28、 had to be stopped.The desperate plight of the South has eclipsed the fact that reconstruction had to be undertaken also in the North, though less spectacularly. Industries had to adjust to peacetime conditions: factories had to be retooled for civilian needs.Financial problems loomed large in both

29、the North and the South. The national debt had shot up from a modest 565 million in 1861, the year file war started, to nearly 53 billion in 1865, the year the war ended. This was a colossal sum for those days but one that a prudent government could pay. At the same time, war taxes had to be reduced

30、 to less burdensome levels.Physical devastation caused by invading armies, chiefly in the South and Border States, had to be repaired. This herculean task was ultimately completed, but with discouraging slowness.Other important questions needed answering. What would be the future of the four million

31、 black people who were freed from slavery?. On what basis were the Southern States to be brought back into the Union?What of the southern leaders, all of whom were liable to charge of treason? One of these leaders, Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern Confederacy, was the subject of an insulti

32、ng popular Northern song, Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple Tree and even children sang it. Davis was temporarily chained in his prison cell during the early days of his two-year imprisonment. But he and the other southern leaders were finally released, partly because it was unlikely that a jury from Virginia, a southern confederate state, would convict them. All the leaders were finally pardoned by President Johnson in 1868 in an effort to help reconstruction efforts proceed with as little bitterness as possible.