2015年4月18日
第一篇：UrbanDesign
题材划分：发展史
主要内容：城市设计与civilization相互融合，最后形成了international style。
相似TPO练习推荐：
TPO-23 Urban Climates
TPO-26 Sumer and the First Cities of the Ancient NearEast
相关知识背景：
Urban designis the process of designing and shaping cities, towns and villages. In contrastto architecture, which focuses on the design of individual buildings, urbandesign deals with the larger scale of groups of buildings, streets and publicspaces, whole neighborhoods and districts, and entire cities, with the goal ofmaking urban areas functional, attractive, and sustainable.
Urban designis an inter-disciplinary subject that unites all the built environmentprofessions, including urban planning, landscape architecture, architecture,civil and municipal engineering. It is common for professionals in all thesedisciplines to practice in urban design. In more recent times different sub-strandsof urban design have emerged such as strategic urban design, landscapeurbanism, water-sensitive urban design, and sustainable urbanism.
Urban designdemands a good understanding of a wide range of subjects from physicalgeography, through to social science, and an appreciation for disciplines, suchas real estate development, urban economics, political economy and socialtheory.
Urban designis about making connections between people and places, movement and urban form,nature and the built fabric. Urban design draws together the many strands ofplace-making, environmental stewardship, social equity and economic viabilityinto the creation of places with distinct beauty and identity. Urban design isderived from but transcends planning and transportation policy, architecturaldesign, development economics, engineering and landscape. It draws these andother strands together creating a vision for an area and then deploying theresources and skills needed to bring the vision to life.
第二篇：Tomb
题材划分：考古类
主要内容：应该是说为什么这个site会有坟墓(Mesopotamia这个地方)。显示提出说这是由于一拨人一路explore带来的，后来又反驳说这跟fishing有关;后来又提出可能的原因是为了某种需求，比如commute或者competition。
相似TPO练习推荐：
TPO-5 TheOrigin of the Pacific Island People
TPO-7 Agriculture,Iron, and the Bantu Peoples
相关知识背景：
Mesopotamiais a name for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, corresponding tomodern-day Iraq, Kuwait, the northeastern section of Syria and to a much lesserextent southeastern Turkey and smaller parts of southwestern Iran.
Widelyconsidered to be the cradle of civilization by the Western world, Bronze AgeMesopotamia included Sumer and the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires,all native to the territory of modern-day Iraq. In the Iron Age, it wascontrolled by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. The indigenousSumerians and Akkadians (including Assyrians and Babylonians) dominatedMesopotamia from the beginning of written history (c. 3100 BC) to the fall ofBabylon in 539 BC, when it was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. It fell to Alexanderthe Great in 332 BC, and after his death, it became part of the Greek SeleucidEmpire.
Around 150BC, Mesopotamia was under the control of the Parthians. Mesopotamia became abattleground between the Romans and Parthians, with parts of Mesopotamia comingunder ephemeral Roman control. In AD 226, it fell to the Sassanid Persians andremained under Persian rule until the 7th century Arab Islamic conquest of theSassanid Empire. A number of primarily neo-Assyrian and Christian nativeMesopotamian states existed between the 1st century BCE and 3rd century CE,including Adiabene, Osroene, and Hatra.
第三篇：动物的社会性
题材划分：生物类
主要内容：讲了社会性在invertebrate里比vertebrate里更常见。常见社会性的坏处是：competition和parasite。后面两段讲了社会性的好处：hunting food和avoid predation。
相似TPO练习推荐：
TPO-28 BuckRubs and Buck Scrapes
TPO-30 Roleof Play in Development
相关知识背景：
Socialityis the degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate insocial groups and form cooperative societies.
Socialityis a survival response to evolutionary pressures. For example, when a motherwasp stays near her larvae in the nest, parasites are less likely to eat thelarvae. Biologists suspect that pressures from parasites and other predatorsselected this behavior in wasps of the family Vespidae.
Thiswasp behaviour evidences the most fundamental characteristic of animalsociality: parental investment. Parental investment is any expenditure ofresources (time, energy, social capital) to benefit one offspring. Parentalinvestment detracts from a parent's capacity to invest in future reproductionand aid to kin (including other offspring). An animal that cares for its youngbut shows no other sociality traits is said to be subsocial.
Ananimal that exhibits a high degree of sociality is called a social animal. Thehighest degree of sociality recognized by sociobiologists is eusociality. Aeusocial taxon is one that exhibits overlapping adult generations, reproductivedivision of labor, cooperative care of young, and—in the most refined cases—abiological caste system.
Solitaryanimals, such as the jaguar, don't associate except for courtship and mating.If an animal taxon shows a degree of sociality beyond courtship and mating, butlacks any of the characteristics of eusociality, it is said to be presocial. Presociality is much more common thaneusociality among species. Per E.O. Wilson, however, it should be noted thetotal biomass and impact of eusocial species, including ants, wasps, and Homosapiens sapiens, "which can be loosely characterized as eusocial," isvastly disproportionate to the quantity