Passage 1
【主旨】罐头的发展和铁路的发展
【内容】有罐头技术的普及。刚开始的时候罐头刚发明，很多人不买账，因为价格太贵了而且不好打开，要用工具打开(有题)，后来价格降低了，大家就接受了。后来说到railway,交通运输的发展，当铁路通到某处(Chicago等)的时候，它们代替了原来的一些东西。
参考文章：(1)保鲜技术发展
Aside from perpetuating itself, the sole purpose of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is to "foster, assist and sustain an interest" in literature, music, and art. This it does by enthusiastically handing out money. Annual cash awards are given to deserving artists in various categories of creativity: architecture, musical composition, theater, novels, serious poetry, light verse, painting, sculpture. One award subsidizes a promising American writer's visit to Rome. There is even an award for a very good work of fiction that failed commercially—once won by the young John Updike for The Poorhouse Fairand, more recently, by Alice Walker for In Love and TroubleThe awards and prizes total about $750,000 a year, but most of them range in size from $5,000 to $12,500, a welcome sum to many young practitioners whose work may not bring in that much money in a year. One of the advantages of the awards is that many go to the struggling artists, rather than to those who are already successful.
Members of the Academy and Institute are not eligible for any cash prizes. Another advantage is that, unlike the National Endowment for the Arts or similar institutions throughout the world, there is no government money involved.
Awards are made by committee. Each of the three departments—Literature (120 members), Art (83), Music (47)—has a committee dealing with its own field. Committee membership rotates every year, so that new voices and opinions are constantly heard.
The most financially rewarding of all the Academy-Institute awards are the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings. Harold Strauss, a devoted editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publishing house, and Mildred Strauss, his wife, were wealthy and childless. They left the Academy-Institute a unique bequest: for five consecutive years, two distinguished (and financially needy) writers would receive enough money so they could devote themselves entirely to "prose literature" (no plays, no poetry, and no paying job that might distract). In 1983, the first Strauss Livings of $35,000 a year went to short-story writer Raymond Carver and novelist-essayist Cynthia Ozick. By 1988, the fund had grown enough so that two winners, novelists Diane Johnson and Robert Stone, each got $50,000 a year for five years.
(2)美国铁路发展类似文章
Railroads reshaped the North American environment and reoriented North American behavior. "In a quarter of a century", claimed the Omaha Daily Republican in 1883, "they have made the people of the United States homogeneous, breaking through the peculiarities and provincialisms which marked separate and unmingling sections."
The railroad simultaneously stripped the landscape of the natural resources, made velocity of transport and economy of scale necessary parts of industrial production, and carried consumer goods to households; it dispatched immigrants to unsettled places, drew emigrants away from farms and villages to cities, and sent men and guns to battle. It standardized time and travel, seeking to annihilate distance and space by allowing movement at any time and in any season or type of weather. In its grand and impressive terminals and stations, architects recreated historic Roman temples and public baths, French chateaus and Italian bell towers-edifices that people used as stages for many of everyday life's high emotions: meeting and parting, waiting and worrying, planning new starts or coming home.
Passenger terminals, like the luxury express trains that hurled people over spots, spotlight the romance of railroading. (The twentieth-Century Limited sped between Chicago and New York in twenty hours by 1915). Equally important to everyday life were the slow freight trans chugging through industrial zones, the morning and evening commuter locals shuttling back ions and urban terminals, and the incessant comings and goings that occurred in the classifications, or switching, yards. Moreover, in addition to its being a transportation pathway equipped with a mammoth physical plant of tracks signals, crossings, bridges, and junctions, plus telegraph and telephone lines the railroad nurtured factory complexes, coat piles, warehouses, and generating stations, forming along its right-of-way what has aptly been called "the metropolitan corridor" of the American landscape.
Passage 2
【主旨】非洲人的服饰
【内容】本篇讲非洲人的服饰，比较容易，从服饰起源，意义，对现在的影响几个方面讨论
Passage 3
【主旨】农业起源
【内容】讲农业的起源应该是灌溉。第一段说四大文明都是发源于灌溉，第一段有一个题，跟几个文明有关但是记不真切了。第二段提到一个人写的一本书，目的是引出下文(有题)，下边大半篇都在说这本书。书中说，古时代距离河较近的方便灌溉，就有更多的财富(有题)，因此会有贫富差距;后来人们想办法建河道引水灌溉，后来还促进了army的产生，因为要保护河道不被破坏(有题)。后来说这本书虽然至今都有影响，但是有一些逻辑上的错误(有题，是最后一段还是倒数第二段的开头，改写)，然后阐述它的错误。最后说但是现在因为缺乏具体的事实证据，也不能说它真的就是错误的。
参考文章:TPO21--The Origins of Agriculture