2014年10月26，希望对各位考生的备考有所帮助，祝每位烤鸭考试顺利，都能取得好成绩！
20141026阅读机经
第一篇：非蓄水层
版本1: 非蓄水层是水从地表往下渗透以后，不直接通到地下水的一个地层。水渗透之后I型按留在非蓄水层并非完全不可往下渗透，具体渗透与否得要看条件。
废墟水层又名作V层，从上向下分三层：soil，subsoil和c层。前两层不同在于soil有很多比细菌小的微生物，来自于分解后的动植物。soil之中有大量植物的根。Subsoil的厚度不同地方不相同。最下面的是可以透水的C层。地下水时而漫过它，时而下降。下降的原因是重力。
版本2：地下层的结构。这个水层也叫overdaze。因为它不仅有水，还有别的矿物质。第一层是装水的，这使得水不一定要渗透到地下。而是由各种去向，包括在大气里，或者到水蒸气里。第二层忘了。第三层很特别，它的构成物质跟前两个没有不同，但是它是漏水的。而且他的能去取决于它的容量，地下水受到一个向上的力，也有向下的力，有的水level保持不变是两个力平衡了
解析：
这篇文章属于地质类文章。从文章段落结构看，十分清晰，主题明确，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TPO3的文章Depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer.
相关背景：
Depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer
The vast grasslands of the High Plains in the central United States were settled by farmers and ranchers in the 1880s. This region has a semiarid climate, and for 50 years after its settlement, it supported a low-intensity agricultural economy of cattle ranching and wheat farming. In the early twentieth century, however, it was discovered that much of the High Plains was underlain by a huge aquifer (a rock layer containing large quantities of groundwater). This aquifer was named the Ogallala aquifer after the Ogallala Sioux Indians, who once inhabited the region.
The Ogallala aquifer is a sandstone formation that underlies some 583,000 square kilometers of land extending from northwestern Texas to southern South Dakota. Water from rains and melting snows has been accumulating in the Ogallala for the past 30,000 years. Estimates indicate that the aquifer contains enough water to fill Lake Huron, but unfortunately, under the semiarid climatic conditions that presently exist in the region, rates of addition to the aquifer are minimal, amounting to about half a centimeter a year.
The first wells were drilled into the Ogallala during the drought years of the early 1930s. The ensuing rapid expansion of irrigation agriculture, especially from the 1950s onward, transformed the economy of the region. More than 100,000 wells now tap the Ogallala. Modern irrigation devices, each capable of spraying 4.5 million liters of water a day, have produced a landscape dominated by geometric patterns of circular green islands of crops. Ogallala water has enabled the High Plains region to supply significant amounts of the cotton, sorghum, wheat, and corn grown in the United States. In addition, 40 percent of American grain-fed beef cattle are fattened here.
This unprecedented development of a finite groundwater resource with an almost negligible natural recharge rate—that is, virtually no natural water source to replenish the water supply—has caused water tables in the region to fall drastically. In the 1930s, wells encountered plentiful water at a depth of about 15 meters; currently, they must be dug to depths of 45 to 60 meters or more. In places, the water table is declining at a rate of a meter a year, necessitating the periodic deepening of wells and the use of ever-more-powerful pumps. It is estimated that at current withdrawal rates, much of the aquifer will run dry within 40 years. The situation is most critical in Texas, where the climate is driest, the greatest amount of water is being pumped, and the aquifer contains the least water. It is projected that the remaining Ogallala water will, by the year 2030, support only 35 to 40 percent of the irrigated acreage in Texas that is supported in 1980.
The reaction of farmers to the inevitable depletion of the Ogallala varies. Many have been attempting to conserve water by irrigating less frequently or by switching to crops that require less water. Others, however, have adopted the philosophy that it is best to use the water while it is still economically profitable to do so and to concentrate on high-value crops such as cotton. The incentive of the farmers who wish to conserve water is reduced by their knowledge that many of their neighbors are profiting by using great amounts of water, and in the process are drawing down the entire region’s water supplies.
In the face of the upcoming water supply crisis, a number of grandiose schemes have been developed to transport vast quantities of water by canal or pipeline from the Mississippi, the Missouri, or the Arkansas rivers. Unfortunately, the cost of water obtained through any of these schemes would increase pumping costs at least tenfold, making the cost of irrigated agricultural products from the region uncompetitive on the national and international markets. Somewhat more promising have been recent experiments for releasing capillary water (water in the soil) above the water table by injecting compressed air into the ground. Even if this process proves successful, however, it would almost triple water costs. Genetic engineering also may provide a partial solution, as new strains of drought-resistant crops continue to be developed. Whatever the final answer to the water crisis may be, it is evident that within the High Plains, irrigation water will never again be the abundant, inexpensive resource it was during the agricultural boom years of the mid-twentieth century.#p#副标题#e#
第二篇：口述诗歌
版本一： long long ago诗歌是口头的，这些诗歌很长，最经典的就是伊利亚特和奥德赛，作者是荷马(Homer)。文章的主旨是探讨伊利亚特和奥德赛的作者到底是不是荷马。有人认为是后期一些无名但是有文学造诣的诗人收集早期诗歌然后整合而成。
然后说伊利亚特和道德赛有很多悠长而重复的句子，不可能是文字稿，同时荷马使用了前任技巧，而这些前任的技巧又是来自前人的前人的。
另外一种可能是荷马使用一些人们熟悉的英雄的故事，加上他收集故事的技巧，每一次的表演都会不同。这对于现在和未来都很有影响。
然后还说前期荷马口头记录之后他又学会了文学的技巧，然后自己记录下来。又有人说是其他人记录下来的。反正不管哪一种。荷马史诗都是很有意义的。
版本二： 讲荷马的两个诗歌。早期的时候人们认为这些诗不是原来认为的诗人写的。因为当时都是口头流传的。后来又证据说即使不用吟游诗人也能重新组织信息唱出来，然后又回去讲诗歌到底什么时候谁写的。很多人有不同的观点。
解析：本文围绕荷马诗歌的作者是谁这个主题展开论证。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。地理地质类主题是托福阅读常见考点，结构不难理解。需注意各例证和主题的支撑关系。由于条理清晰，最后一题尽量考虑从正面选出，排除为辅。
相关背景：
The Authorship of The Epics of Homer
The Greeks of the sixth and early fifth centuries BC understood by "Homer", generally, "the whole body of heroic tradition as embodied in hexameter verse". Thus, in addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, there are "exceptional" epics which organize their respective themes on a "massive scale". Many other works were credited to Homer in antiquity, including the entire Epic Cycle. The genre included further poems on the Trojan War, such as the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Cypria, and the Epigoni, as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons. Other works, such as the corpus of Homeric Hymns, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), and the Margites were also attributed to him, but this is now believed to be unlikely. Two other poems, the Capture of Oechalia and the Phocais were also assigned Homeric authorship, but the question of the identities of the authors of these various texts is even more problematic than that of the authorship of the two major epics.
The idea that Homer was responsible for just the two outstanding epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, did not win consensus until 350 BC. While many, such as Gregory Nagy, find it unlikely that both epics were composed by the same person, others, such as W. B. Stanford, argue that the stylistic similarities are too consistent to support the theory of multiple authorship. One view which attempts to bridge the differences holds that the Iliad was composed by "Homer" in his maturity, while the Odyssey was a work of his old age. The Batrachomyomachia, Homeric Hymnsand cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than the Iliad and the Odyssey.[citation needed]
Most scholars agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardisation and refinement out of older material beginning in the 8th century BC. An important role in this standardisation appears to have been played by the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Many classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text.
Other scholars still support the idea that Homer was a real person. Since nothing is known about the life of this Homer, the common joke—also recycled with regard to Shakespeare—has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name." Samuel Butler argues, based on literary observations, that a young Sicilian woman wrote the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea further pursued byRobert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter and Andrew Dalby in Rediscovering Homer.
Independent of the question of single authorship is the near-universal agreement, after the work of Milman Parry, that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (aoidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad andOdyssey shows that the poems contain many formulaic phrases typical of extempore epic traditions; even entire verses are at times repeated. Parry and his student Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in a predominantly oral cultural milieu, the key words being "oral" and "traditional". Parry started with "traditional": the repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry called these repetitive chunks "formulas".
Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. The Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th century BC, so it is possible that Homer himself was of the first generation of authors who were also literate. The classicist Barry B. Powell suggests that the Greek alphabet was invented c. 800 BC by one man, whom he calls the "adapter," in order to write down oral epic poetry. More radical Homerists like Gregory Nagy contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC).
New methods try also to elucidate the question. Combining information technologies and statistics stylometry analyzes various linguistic units: words, parts of speech, and sounds. Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of Dietmar Najockparticularly shows the internal cohesion of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Taking into account the repartition of the letters, a recent study of Stephan Vonfelt highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod. The thesis of modern analysts being questioned, the debate remains open.#p#副标题#e#
第三篇： 海洋捕食
版本一： 浅海食物很多，好找而且省力，比如说珊瑚聚集的区域，然后浮游生物很多，好多鱼都留在光照好的地方，然后很多都是用鱼鳃来过滤食物的。嘴巴一张一张过滤就完成了。就连像鲸鱼这样巨大的鱼类都是如此。
深爱食物少，用鱼鳃过滤不出来，即使张大嘴吸进很多也没有什么东西，所以鱼类就会长出很多适应环境的特征，比如说长牙。因此他们可以直接吞下去而不需要咀嚼。
版本二：讲海里的filter feeding离海平面近的鱼好像用这个方法获得食物，海底的鱼用别的方法。
解析： 本文讲海洋捕食。主要讨论的是深海鱼和浅海鱼的不是行为，主旨明确，结构清晰，每段首句为topic sentence的可能性较高。大家在阅读文章之前可以先跳到最后一题(文章总结题)的位置看看那句对于文章总结的句子。对于大家从整体上把握文章的结构非常有帮助。推荐大家阅读OG的文章Swimming Machine。
相关背景：
Swimming Machines
Tunas, mackerels, and billfishes (marlins, sailfishes, and swordfish) swim continuously. Feeding, courtship, reproduction, and even "rest" are carried out while in constant motion. As a result, practically every aspect of the body form and function of these swimming "machines" is adapted to enhance their ability to swim.
Many of the adaptations of these fishes serve to reduce water resistance (drag). Interestingly enough, several of these hydrodynamic adaptations resemble features designed to improve the aerodynamics of high-speed aircraft. Though human engineers are new to the game, tunas and their relatives evolved their "high-tech" designs long ago.
Tunas, mackerels, and billfishes have made streamlining into an art form. Their bodies are sleek and compact. The body shapes of tunas, in fact, are nearly ideal from an engineering point of view. Most species lack scales over most of the body, making it smooth and slippery. The eyes lie flush with the body and do not protrude at all. They are also covered with a slick, transparent lid that reduces drag. The fins are stiff, smooth, and narrow, qualities that also help cut drag. When not in use, the fins are tucked into special grooves or depressions so that they lie flush with the body and do not break up its smooth contours. Airplanes retract their landing gear while in flight for the same reason.
Tunas, mackerels, and billfishes have even more sophisticated adaptations than these to improve their hydrodynamics. The long bill of marlins, sailfishes, and swordfish probably helps them slip through the water. Many supersonic aircraft have a similar needle at the nose.
Most tunas and billfishes have a series of keels and finlets near the tail. Although most of their scales have been lost, tunas and mackerels retain a patch of coarse scales near the head called the corselet. The keels, finlets, and corselet help direct the flow of water over the body surface in such as way as to reduce resistance (see the figure). Again, supersonic jets have similar features.
Because they are always swimming, tunas simply have to open their mouths and water is forced in and over their gills. Accordingly, they have lost most of the muscles that other fishes use to suck in water and push it past the gills. In fact, tunas must swim to breathe. They must also keep swimming to keep from sinking, since most have largely or completely lost the swim bladder, the gas-filled sac that helps most other fish remain buoyant.
One potential problem is that opening the mouth to breathe detracts from the streamlining of these fishes and tends to slow them down. Some species of tuna have specialized grooves in their tongue. It is thought that these grooves help to channel water through the mouth and out the gill slits, thereby reducing water resistance.
There are adaptations that increase the amount of forward thrust as well as those that reduce drag. Again, these fishes are the envy of engineers. Their high, narrow tails with swept-back tips are almost perfectly adapted to provide propulsion with the least possible effort. Perhaps most important of all to these and other fast swimmers is their ability to sense and make use of swirls and eddies (circular currents) in the water. They can glide past eddies that would slow them down and then gain extra thrust by "pushing off" the eddies. Scientists and engineers are beginning to study this ability of fishes in the hope of designing more efficient propulsion systems for ships.
The muscles of these fishes and the mechanism that maintains a warm body temperature are also highly efficient. A bluefin tuna in water of 7°C (45°F) can maintain a core temperature of over 25°C (77°F). This warm body temperature may help not only the muscles to work better, but also the brain and the eyes. The billfishes have gone one step further. They have evolved special "heaters" of modified muscle tissue that warm the eyes and brain, maintaining peak performance of these critical organs.