托福机经：2015年1月31日托福考试阅读真题解析

　　2014年1月31日！

　　第一篇： 商业革命

　　考生回忆：第一篇讲商业革命，就是说随着美国殖民地的建立，各个地区的工嗯呢该向贸易转化。讲到最近一千年商业革命的大背景，后面讲倒数第三个和第二个一千年，许多殖民地，例如埃及，都是用于军事占领，但是随着贸易加强和王权削弱，国王逐渐变成只能控制贸易商品的种类，在之后就变得只能保护土地。总之就是说权利减弱。之后又说在美国，在贸易革命前，贸易权(大概是金钱)只掌握在少部分人手中，但是贸易革命以后让手工工人和一些专业人士也可以接触贸易。

　　解析：这篇文章属于历史类文章。文章主题明确结构清晰，对背景的描述会比较详尽，不会出现因为背景知识的生疏而严重影响对于文章理解的情况。需要注意的是，必须提前对相关类型的TPO文章的生词熟悉，尽量减少生词恐惧带来的内耗。推荐TPO10的文章TPO 10：Seventeenth-Century European Economic Growth。

　　相关背景：

　　Seventeenth-Century European Economic Growth

　　In the late sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, Europe continued the growth that had lifted it out of the relatively less prosperous medieval period (from the mid 400s to the late 1400s). Among the key factors behind this growth were increased agricultural productivity and an expansion of trade.

　　Populations cannot grow unless the rural economy can produce enough additional food to feed more people. During the sixteenth century, farmers brought more land into cultivation at the expense of forests and fens (low-lying wetlands). Dutch land reclamation in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides the most spectacular example of the expansion of farmland: the Dutch reclaimed more than 36.000 acres from 1590 to 1615 alone.

　　Much of the potential for European economic development lay in what at first glance would seem to have been only sleepy villages. Such villages, however, generally lay in regions of relatively advanced agricultural production, permitting not only the survival of peasants but also the accumulation of an agricultural surplus for investment. They had access to urban merchants, markets, and trade routes.

　　Increased agricultural production in turn facilitated rural industry, an intrinsic part of the expansion of industry. Woolens and textile manufacturers, in particular, utilized rural cottage (in-home) production, which took advantage of cheap and plentiful rural labor. In the German states, the ravages of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) further moved textile production into the countryside. Members of poor peasant families spun or wove cloth and linens at home for scant remuneration in an attempt to supplement meager family income.

　　More extended trading networks also helped develop Europe's economy in this period. English and Dutch ships carrying rye from the Baltic states reached Spain and Portugal. Population growth generated an expansion of small-scale manufacturing, particularly of handicrafts, textiles, and metal production in England, Flanders, parts of northern Italy, the southwestern German states, and parts of Spain. Only iron smelting and mining required marshaling a significant amount of capital (wealth invested to create more wealth).

　　The development of banking and other financial services contributed to the expansion of trade. By the middle of the sixteenth century, financiers and traders commonly accepted bills of exchange in place of gold or silver for other goods. Bills of exchange, which had their origins in medieval Italy, were promissory notes (written promises to pay a specified amount of money by a certain date) that could be sold to third parties. In this way, they provided credit. At mid-century, an Antwerp financier only slightly exaggerated when he claimed, “0ne can no more trade without bills of exchange than sail without water." Merchants no longer had to carry gold and silver over long, dangerous journeys. An Amsterdam merchant purchasing soap from a merchant in Marseille could go to an exchanger and pay the exchanger the equivalent sum in guilders, the Dutch currency. The exchanger would then send a bill of exchange to a colleague in Marseille, authorizing the colleague to pay the Marseille merchant in the merchant's own currency after the actual exchange of goods had taken place.

　　Bills of exchange contributed to the development of banks, as exchangers began to provide loans. Not until the eighteenth century, however, did such banks as the Bank of Amsterdam and the Bank of England begin to provide capital for business investment. Their principal function was to provide funds for the state.

　　The rapid expansion in international trade also benefitted from an infusion of capital, stemming largely from gold and silver brought by Spanish vessels from the Americas. This capital financed the production of goods, storage, trade, and even credit across Europe and overseas. Moreover an increased credit supply was generated by investments and loans by bankers and wealthy merchants to states and by joint-stock partnerships—an English innovation (the first major company began in 1600). Unlike short-term financial cooperation between investors for a single commercial undertaking, joint-stock companies provided permanent funding of capital by drawing on the investments of merchants and other investors who purchased shares in the company.
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　　第二篇：地球的能量来源

　　考生回忆：太阳能几乎是全部地球热量的来源，文中提到百分之九十九点几，又说热能的总量是人类每年所用的很多倍(有考题，表明来自太阳能的热量非常多)，然后，说这些热能会储存在风里，水蒸气中，还有光合作用吸收，并且如果植物没有利用的热能可以储存在石头之中。之后就讲事实上有40%的热能云还有其他物，反射回太空，但是不同的云层的厚度反射率是不同的，而且对于其他物质，天气和在夜晚的影响也会影响其反射率。还讲了地球的第二大热量来源是来自地球内部，地心的热量会向地表扩散，并且部分会储存在岩石层中。最后讲热量来自大陆板块的移动和摩擦，但是产生多少以潮汐变化有关。

　　解析：本文围绕地球能量来源有哪些这个主题展开论证。做题时需注意记录笔记，对于结构化阅读及最后一题的解答有很大好处。地理地质类主题是

　　相关背景：

　　Geothermal Energy

　　Earth's internal heat, fueled by radioactivity, provides the energy for plate tectonics and continental drift, mountain building, and earthquakes. It can also be harnessed to drive electric generators and heat homes. Geothermal energy becomes available in a practical form when underground heat is transferred by water that is heated as it passes through a subsurface region of hot rocks (a heat reservoir) that may be hundreds or thousands of feet deep. The water is usually naturally occurring groundwater that seeps down along fractures in the rock; less typically, the water is artificially introduced by being pumped down from the surface. The water is brought to the surface, as a liquid or steam, through holes drilled for the purpose.

　　By far the most abundant form of geothermal energy occurs at the relatively low temperatures of 80°to 180°centigrade. Water circulated through heat reservoirs in this temperature range is able to extract enough heat to warm residential, commercial, and industrial spaces. More than 20,000 apartments in France are now heated by warm underground water drawn from a heat reservoir in a geologic structure near Paris called the Paris Basin. Iceland sits on a volcanic structure known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is entirely heated by geothermal energy derived from volcanic heat.

　　Geothermal reservoirs with temperatures above 180°centigrade are useful for generating electricity. They occur primarily in regions of recent volcanic activity as hot, dry rock; natural hot water; or natural steam. The latter two sources are limited to those few areas where surface water seeps down through underground faults or fractures to reach deep rocks heated by the recent activity of molten rock material. The world's largest supply of natural steam occurs at The Geysers, 120 kilometers north of San Francisco, California. In the 1990s enough electricity to meet about half the needs of San Francisco was being generated there. This facility was then in its third decade of production and was beginning to show signs of decline, perhaps because of over development. By the late 1990s some 70 geothermal electric-generating plants were in operation in California, Utah, Nevada, and Hawaii, generating enough power to supply about a million people. Eighteen countries now generate electricity using geothermal heat.

　　Extracting heat from very hot, dry rocks presents a more difficult problem: the rocks must be fractured to permit the circulation of water, and the water must be provided artificially. The rocks are fractured by water pumped down at very high pressures. Experiments are under way to develop technologies for exploiting this resource.

　　Like most other energy sources, geothermal energy presents some environmental problems. The surface of the ground can sink if hot groundwater is withdrawn without being replaced. In addition, water heated geothermally can contain salts and toxic materials dissolved from the hot rock. These waters present a disposal problem if they are not returned to the ground from which they were removed.

　　The contribution of geothermal energy to the world's energy future is difficult to estimate. Geothermal energy is in a sense not renewable, because in most cases the heat would be drawn out of a reservoir much more rapidly than it would be replaced by the very slow geological processes by which heat flows through solid rock into a heat reservoir. However, in many places (for example, California, Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, the rift valleys of Africa)the resource is potentially so large that its future will depend on the economics of production. At present, we can make efficient use of only naturally occurring hot water or steam deposits. Although the potential is enormous, it is likely that in the near future geothermal energy can make important local contributions only where the resource is close to the user and the economics are favorable, as they are in California, New Zealand, and Iceland. Geothermal energy probably will not make large-scale contributions to the world energy budget until well into the twenty-first century, if ever.
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　　第三篇：16-17世纪欧洲科学的起源

　　考生回忆：首段说的是人们开始认为科学是认知世界的标准，后来由于多次远航让欧洲人认识到这个世界的建构，而最为深刻的影响是欧洲人远航美国(然后具体是怎么影响的想不起来了)之后讲到另一个因素是文艺复兴，不仅文化得到了解放，思想也在变化，主要原因是印刷术的普及让人们可以读到印刷的科学书记，还有一些科学名人的手记。

　　解析：本文是一篇围绕因果展开探讨的历史类文章。从结构上看属于一果多因，果是科学认知的萌芽，因是包括远航与文艺复兴在能的多重因素。考生在阅读文章的时候要注意每段都总结段落大意，在做最后一题文章总结题时要把段落大意都看一遍，以排除细节和错误选项的干扰。相关的一因多果类的文章推荐TPO21的文章The Origins of Agriculture。

　　相关背景：

　　The Origins of Agriculture

　　How did it come about that farming developed independently in a number of world centers (the Southeast Asian mainland, Southwest Asia, Central America, lowland and highland South America, and equatorial Africa) at more or less the same time? Agriculture developed slowly among populations that had an extensive knowledge of plants and animals. Changing from hunting and gathering to agriculture had no immediate advantages. To start with, it forced the population to abandon the nomad's life and become sedentary, to develop methods of storage and, often, systems of irrigation. While hunter-gatherers always had the option of moving elsewhere when the resources were exhausted, this became more difficult with farming. Furthermore, as the archaeological record shows, the state of health of agriculturalists was worse than that of their contemporary hunter-gatherers.

　　Traditionally, it was believed that the transition to agriculture was the result of a worldwide population crisis. It was argued that once hunter-gatherers had occupied the whole world, the population started to grow everywhere and food became scarce; agriculture would have been a solution to this problem. We know, however, that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies control their population in a variety of ways. The idea of a world population crisis is therefore unlikely, although population pressure might have arisen in some areas.

　　Climatic changes at the end of the glacial period 13,000 years ago have been proposed to account for the emergence of farming. The temperature increased dramatically in a short period of time (years rather than centuries), allowing for a growth of the hunting-gathering population due to the abundance of resources. There were, however, fluctuations in the climatic conditions, with the consequences that wet conditions were followed by dry ones, so that the availability of plants and animals oscillated brusquely.

　　It would appear that the instability of the climatic conditions led populations that had originally been nomadic to settle down and develop a sedentary style of life, which led in turn to population growth and to the need to increase the amount of food available. Farming originated in these conditions. Later on, it became very difficult to change because of the significant expansion of these populations. It could be argued, however, that these conditions are not sufficient to explain the origins of agriculture. Earth had experienced previous periods of climatic change, and yet agriculture had not been developed.

　　It is archaeologist Steven Mithen's thesis, brilliantly developed in his book The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), that approximately 40,000 years ago the human mind developed cognitive fluidity, that is, the integration of the specializations of the mind: technical, natural history (geared to understanding the behavior and distribution of natural resources), social intelligence, and the linguistic capacity. Cognitive fluidity explains the appearance of art, religion, and sophisticated speech. Once humans possessed such a mind, they were able to find an imaginative solution to a situation of severe economic crisis such as the farming dilemma described earlier. Mithen proposes the existence of four mental elements to account for the emergence of farming: (1) the ability to develop tools that could be used intensively to harvest and process plant resources; (2) the tendency to use plants and animals as the medium to acquire social prestige and power; (3) the tendency to develop "social relationships" with animals structurally similar to those developed with people—specifically, the ability to think of animals as people (anthropomorphism) and of people as animals (totemism); and (4) the tendency to manipulate plants and animals.

　　The fact that some societies domesticated animals and plants, discovered the use of metal tools, became literate, and developed a state should not make us forget that others developed pastoralism or horticulture (vegetable gardening) but remained illiterate and at low levels of productivity; a few entered the modern period as hunting and gathering societies. It is anthropologically important to inquire into the conditions that made some societies adopt agriculture while others remained hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. However, it should be kept in mind that many societies that knew of agriculture more or less consciously avoided it. Whether Mithen's explanation is satisfactory is open to contention, and some authors have recently emphasized the importance of other factors.

(编辑：Sally)