詞匯題：
attest to=provide evidence of |
fragments=pieces |
painstaking=taking great effort to |
substantial=considerable |
configuration=arrangement |
precise=accurate |
distinctive=recognizable |
in contrast to=as opposed to |
dispersal=distribution |
imitator=someone who copied his work |
associated with=related to |
第一篇：
題材劃分：社科類文章
主要內(nèi)容：
制造表的發(fā)展。
先說以前一個master一年只能做十幾個表，特別painstaking只有富人才能買得起。后來有個人叫Elf，他簡化了鐘表制造的材料，創(chuàng)新了一些設(shè)備，行了一系列變革，通過專業(yè)化啊水力啊，讓表產(chǎn)量變大，又輕，又便宜。本來特別重，不好運(yùn)輸，他就把弄得更輕了，可以掛住，不用專門做cabinet了。然后使鐘表讓中產(chǎn)階級也買得起，從精細(xì)制造變成mass production。后來他為了peddler就繼續(xù)發(fā)明創(chuàng)造，然后在1816年造出了shelf clock獲得專利，但是還是有很多人抄襲模仿，這些模仿也在一定程度上促進(jìn)了鐘表的精細(xì)化。他有個員工叫Jerome，借鑒了上一個老板的經(jīng)驗，然后和Elf一起將鐘表變得美觀時尚又物廉價美。
解析：整體文章詞匯相對較簡單，沒有生澀難懂的學(xué)術(shù)詞匯，只是第一篇相對而言比較難進(jìn)入狀態(tài)，所以一定要調(diào)整好自己的心態(tài)。
相似TPO練習(xí)推薦：
TPO30- The Invention of the Mechanical Clock
TPO16- Development of the Periodic Table
相關(guān)文章：
The Invention of the Mechanical Clock
In Europe, before the introduction of the mechanical clock, people told time by sun (using, for example, shadow sticks or sun dials) and water clocks. Sun clocks worked, of course, only on clear days; water clocks misbehaved when the temperature fell toward freezing, to say nothing of long-run drift as the result of sedimentation and clogging. Both these devices worked well in sunny climates; but in northern Europe the sun may be hidden by clouds for weeks at a time, while temperatures vary not only seasonally but from day to night.
Medieval Europe gave new importance to reliable time. The Catholic Church had its seven daily prayers, one of which was at night, requiring an alarm arrangement to waken monks before dawn. And then the new cities and towns, squeezed by their walls, had to know and order time in order to organize collective activity and ration space. They set a time to go to sleep. All this was compatible with older devices so long as there was only one authoritative timekeeper; but with urban growth and the multiplication of time signals, discrepancy brought discord and strife. Society needed a more dependable instrument of time measurement and found it in the mechanical clock.
We do not know who invented this machine, or where. It seems to have appeared in Italy and England (perhaps simultaneous invention) between 1275 and 1300. Once known, it spread rapidly, driving out water clocks but not solar dials, which were needed to check the new machines against the timekeeper of last resort. These early versions were rudimentary, inaccurate, and prone to breakdown.
Ironically, the new machine tended to undermine Catholic Church authority. Although church ritual had sustained an interest in timekeeping throughout the centuries of urban collapse that followed the fall of Rome, church time was nature’ s time. Day and night were divided into the same number of parts, so that except at the equinoxes, days and night hours were unequal; and then of course the length of these hours varied with the seasons. But the mechanical clock kept equal hours, and this implied a new time reckoning. The Catholic Church resisted, not coming over to the new hours for about a century. From the start, however, the towns and cities took equal hours as their standard, and the public clocks installed in town halls and market squares became the very symbol of a new, secular municipal authority. Every town wanted one; conquerors seized them as especially precious spoils of war; tourists came to see and hear these machines the way they made pilgrimages to sacred relics.
The clock was the greatest achievement of medieval mechanical ingenuity. Its general accuracy could be checked against easily observed phenomena, like the rising and setting of the sun. The result was relentless pressure to improve technique and design. At every stage, clockmakers led the way to accuracy and precision; they became masters of miniaturization, detectors and correctors of error, searchers for new and better. They were thus the pioneers of mechanical engineering and served as examples and teachers to other branches of engineering.
The clock brought order and control, both collective and personal. Its public display and private possession laid the basis for temporal autonomy: people could now coordinate comings and goings without dictation from above. The clock provided the punctuation marks for group activity, while enabling individuals to order their own work (and that of others) so as to enhance productivity. Indeed, the very notion of productivity is a by-product of the clock: once on can relate performance to uniform time units, work is never the same. One moves from the task-oriented time consciousness of the peasant (working on job after another, as time and light permit) and the time-filling busyness of the domestic servant (who always had something to do) to an effort to maximize product per unit of time.
第二篇
題材劃分：歷史類文章
主要內(nèi)容：
在泰國附近出現(xiàn)的一個D文明，語言和Mon語言有聯(lián)系。信奉佛教，并且有很多的貿(mào)易路線。因為用的都是這個文字講了好多什么雕塑啊亂七八糟的，最后說甚至不清楚有沒有一個capital，不知道正值也不知道ethic，這個文明出現(xiàn)在6世紀(jì)，到了9世紀(jì)的時候，有另一批人到達(dá)了這里。
解析：
就文章題材而言，是TPO和托福考試中經(jīng)常出現(xiàn)的題材類型，關(guān)于某種文明的起源和發(fā)展，文章結(jié)構(gòu)比較簡單，沒有特別難的單詞，難度一般。
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TPO26- Sumer and the First Cities of the Ancient Near East
TPO5- The Origin of the Pacific Island People
相關(guān)文章：
Sumer and the First Cities of the Ancient Near East
The earliest of the city states of the ancient Near East appeared at the southern end of the Mesopotamian plain, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. It was here that the civilization known as Sumer emerged in its earliest form in the fifth millennium. At first sight, the plain did not appear to be a likely home for a civilization. There were few natural resources, no timber, stone, or metals. Rainfall was limited, and what water there was rushed across the plain in the annual flood of melted snow. As the plain fell only 20 meters in 500 kilometers, the beds of the rivers shifted constantly. It was this that made the organization of irrigation, particularly the building of canals to channel and preserve the water, essential. Once this was done and the silt carried down by the rivers was planted, the rewards were rich: four to five times what rain-fed earth would produce. It was these conditions that allowed an elite to emerge, probably as an organizing class, and to sustain itself through the control of surplus crops.
It is difficult to isolate the factors that led to the next development—the emergence of urban settlements. The earliest, that of Eridu, about 4500 B.C.E., and Uruk, a thousand years later, center on impressive temple complexes built of mud brick. In some way, the elite had associated themselves with the power of the gods. Uruk, for instance, had two patron gods—Anu, the god of the sky and sovereign of all other gods, and Inanna, a goddess of love and war—and there were others, patrons of different cities. Human beings were at their mercy. The biblical story of the Flood may originate in Sumer. In the earliest version, the gods destroy the human race because its clamor had been so disturbing to them.
It used to be believed that before 3000 B.C.E. the political and economic life of the cities was centered on their temples, but it now seems probable that the cities had secular rulers from earliest times. Within the city lived administrators, craftspeople, and merchants. (Trading was important, as so many raw materials, the semiprecious stones for the decoration of the temples, timbers for roofs, and all metals, had to be imported.) An increasingly sophisticated system of administration led in about 3300 B.C.E. to the appearance of writing. The earliest script was based on logograms, with a symbol being used to express a whole word. The logograms were incised on damp clay tablets with a stylus with a wedge shape at its end. (The Romans called the shape cuneus and this gives the script its name of cuneiform.) Two thousand logograms have been recorded from these early centuries of writing. A more economical approach was to use a sign to express not a whole word but a single syllable. (To take an example: the Sumerian word for " head” was “sag.” Whenever a word including a syllable in which the sound “sag” was to be written, the sign for “sag" could be used to express that syllable with the remaining syllables of the word expressed by other signs.) By 2300 B.C.E. the number of signs required had been reduced to 600, and the range of words that could be expressed had widened. Texts dealing with economic matters predominated, as they always had done; but at this point works of theology, literature, history, and law also appeared.
Other innovations of the late fourth millennium include the wheel, probably developed first as a more efficient way of making pottery and then transferred to transport. A tablet engraved about 3000 B.C.E. provides the earliest known example from Sumer, a roofed boxlike sledge mounted on four solid wheels. A major development was the discovery, again about 3000 B.C.E., that if copper, which had been known in Mesopotamia since about 3500 B.C.E., was mixed with tin, a much harder metal, bronze, would result. Although copper and stone tools continued to be used, bronze was far more successful in creating sharp edges that could be used as anything from saws and scythes to weapons. The period from 3000 to 1000 B.C.E., when the use of bronze became widespread, is normally referred to as the Bronze Age.
第三篇
題材劃分： 生物類文章
主要內(nèi)容：
考古學(xué)家如何區(qū)分家養(yǎng)的和野生的動植物，先說有好多方法可以區(qū)分，但有的時候很難分，他們的特征可能一樣又列舉了一堆區(qū)分方法，每個都有點(diǎn)問題，后來說一般都運(yùn)用floated的技術(shù)使有機(jī)物和別的分離，這樣就可以分析植物家養(yǎng)與否。但是動物沒有這么好區(qū)分，因為很多特征在家養(yǎng)的和野生的動物身上都可以提現(xiàn)，所以有另外的辦法，就是看人類的捕殺數(shù)量和對象，在某個時間，人類殺成年的動物數(shù)量很多，證明人類那時就有選擇性的捕獵，但是這個辦法需要好好考慮，因為有很多因素，比如雌雄和動物數(shù)量波動很大等三個原因。還有一個發(fā)現(xiàn)就是一些屬于XX時代的磨光的石頭，然后又說農(nóng)業(yè)的發(fā)展讓他們建了一堆谷倉啊，容器的來儲藏糧食，所以不太可能游牧。這些都證明了在向馴養(yǎng)的轉(zhuǎn)變，最后一段說不能只根據(jù)clay pot來證明馴養(yǎng)的舉日本的例子。
解析：
就整體的文章結(jié)構(gòu)來看，考生可通過閱讀對應(yīng)的TS句來了解段落的大意，相對比較容易把握，題目難度也不高，基本上都可以從原文中找到對應(yīng)的信息點(diǎn)。
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TPO5—Minerals and Plants
TPO28-Buck Rubs and Buck Scrapes
相關(guān)文章：
Minerals and Plants
Research has shown that certain minerals are required by plants for normal growth and development. The soil is the source of these minerals, which are absorbed by the plant with the water from the soil. Even nitrogen, which is a gas in its elemental state, is normally absorbed from the soil as nitrate ions. Some soils are notoriously deficient in micro nutrients and are therefore unable to support most plant life. So-called serpentine soils, for example, are deficient in calcium, and only plants able to tolerate low levels of this mineral can survive. In modern agriculture, mineral depletion of soils is a major concern, since harvesting crops interrupts the recycling of nutrients back to the soil.
Mineral deficiencies can often be detected by specific symptoms such as chlorosis (loss of chlorophyll resulting in yellow or white leaf tissue), necrosis (isolated dead patches), anthocyanin formation (development of deep red pigmentation of leaves or stem), stunted growth, and development of woody tissue in an herbaceous plant. Soils are most commonly deficient in nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen-deficient plants exhibit many of the symptoms just described. Leaves develop chlorosis; stems are short and slender, and anthocyanin discoloration occurs on stems, petioles, and lower leaf surfaces. Phosphorus-deficient plants are often stunted, with leaves turning a characteristic dark green, often with the accumulation of anthocyanin. Typically, older leaves are affected first as the phosphorus is mobilized to young growing tissue. Iron deficiency is characterized by chlorosis between veins in young leaves.
Much of the research on nutrient deficiencies is based on growing plants hydroponically, that is, in soilless liquid nutrient solutions. This technique allows researchers to create solutions that selectively omit certain nutrients and then observe the resulting effects on the plants. Hydroponics has applications beyond basic research, since it facilitates the growing of greenhouse vegetables during winter. Aeroponics, a technique in which plants are suspended and the roots misted with a nutrient solution, is another method for growing plants without soil.
While mineral deficiencies can limit the growth of plants, an overabundance of certain minerals can be toxic and can also limit growth. Saline soils, which have high concentrations of sodium chloride and other salts, limit plant growth, and research continues to focus on developing salt-tolerant varieties of agricultural crops. Research has focused on the toxic effects of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury, and aluminum; however, even copper and zinc, which are essential elements, can become toxic in high concentrations. Although most plants cannot survive in these soils, certain plants have the ability to tolerate high levels of these minerals.
Scientists have known for some time that certain plants, called hyperaccumulators, can concentrate minerals at levels a hundredfold or greater than normal. A survey of known hyperaccumulators identified that 75 percent of them amassed nickel, cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese, lead, and cadmium are other minerals of choice. Hyperaccumulators run the entire range of the plant world. They may be herbs, shrubs, or trees. Many members of the mustard family, spurge family, legume family, and grass family are top hyperaccumulators. Many are found in tropical and subtropical areas of the world, where accumulation of high concentrations of metals may afford some protection against plant-eating insects and microbial pathogens.
Only recently have investigators considered using these plants to clean up soil and waste sites that have been contaminated by toxic levels of heavy metals–an environmentally friendly approach known as phytoremediation. This scenario begins with the planting of hyperaccumulating species in the target area, such as an abandoned mine or an irrigation pond contaminated by runoff. Toxic minerals would first be absorbed by roots but later relocated to the stem and leaves. A harvest of the shoots would remove the toxic compounds off site to be burned or composted to recover the metal for industrial uses. After several years of cultivation and harvest, the site would be restored at a cost much lower than the price of excavation and reburial, the standard practice for remediation of contaminated soils. For examples, in field trials, the plant alpine pennycress removed zinc and cadmium from soils near a zinc smelter, and Indian mustard, native to Pakistan and India, has been effective in reducing levels of selenium salts by 50 percent in contaminated soils.