在2015年2月1日的
托福阅读真题再现：
主要讲解Greek’s sacred groves and parks. 古希腊哲学家研究人与自然的关系，引用了一位哲学家的话，说明natural 和spirit之间的关系，与艺术和人为修饰的东西相反。古希腊很崇尚自然，觉得自然是很神圣的，树是有非常重要的意义，不仅古希腊文化，树木也有spiritual meaning。Grove的地址通常是在一些小地方(比如洞穴之类)，并不是像哲学家所说的是很虚幻的存在。Sacred groves被希腊人认为是神明的住所，他们会把它围起来保护好，擅闯的人会被以神怒威胁，经过grove的动物也会被拿去祭祀。
TPO 21：Ancient Egyptian Sculpture
相关背景：
A sacred grove or sacred woods are any grove of trees of special religious importance to a particular culture. Sacred groves were most prominent in the Ancient Near East and prehistoric Europe, but feature in various cultures throughout the world. They were important features of the mythological landscape and cult practice of Celtic, Baltic, Germanic, ancient Greek, Near Eastern, Roman, and Slavic polytheism, and were also used in India, Japan, and West Africa. Examples of sacred groves include the Greco-Roman temenos, the Norse hörgr, and the Celtic nemeton, which was largely but not exclusively associated with Druidic practice. During the Northern Crusades, there was a common practice of building churches on the sites of sacred groves. Ancient holy trees still exist in the English countryside and are mentioned often in folklore and fairytales.
The most famous sacred groves in mainland Greece was the oak grove at Dodona. Outside the walls of Athens, the site of the Academy was a sacred grove of olive trees, still recalled in the phrase "the groves of Academe."
In central Italy, the town of Nemi recalls the Latin nemus Aricinum, or "grove of Ariccia", a small town a quarter of the way around the lake. In Antiquity the area had no town, but the grove was the site of one of the most famous of Roman cults and temples: that of Diana Nemorensis, a study of which served as the seed for Sir James Frazer's seminal work on the anthropology of religion, The Golden Bough. A sacred grove behind the House of the Vestal Virgins on the edge of the Roman Forum lingered until its last vestiges were burnt in the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE.
In the town of Spoleto, Umbria, two stones from the late third century BCE, inscribed in archaic Latin, established punishments for the profanation of the woods dedicated to Jupiter (Lex Luci Spoletina) have survived; they are preserved in the National Archeological Museum of Spoleto.[3] The Bosco Sacro (literally sacred grove) in the garden of Bomarzo, Italy, lends its associations to the uncanny atmosphere.
The city of Marseilles, a Greek colony, had a sacred grove so close by it that Julius Caesar had it cut down to facilitate his siege. In Pharsalia, the poet Lucan dramatized it as a place where sunlight could not reach through the branches, where no animal or bird lived, where the wind did not blow, but branches moved on their own, where human sacrifice was practiced, in a clear attempt to dramatize the situation and distract from the sacrilege entailed in its destruction.
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(编辑：Sally)