2014年1月17，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！
2014.1.17北美
第一篇
TOPIC：Cinema
讲述早期电影的产生及其特点，提到有声电影和无声电影。
解析：本文属艺术类话题，谈到大家比较喜欢的电影话题，尽管谈的是早期电影，但依然会让我们读起来感觉相对轻松愉悦。文章内容与TPO12的一篇文章Transition to Sound in Film很对应，甚至举例都很相似，值得大家精读研究。
Transition to Sound in Film
The shift from silent to sound film at the end of the 1920s marks, so far, the most important transformation in motion picture history. Despite all the highly visible technological developments in theatrical and home delivery of the moving image that have occurred over the decades since then, no single innovation has come close to being regarded as a similar kind of watershed. In nearly every language, however the words are phrased, the most basic division in cinema history lies between films that are mute and films that speak.
Yet this most fundamental standard of historical periodization conceals a host of paradoxes. Nearly every movie theater, however modest, had a piano or organ to provide musical accompaniment to silent pictures. In many instances, spectators in the era before recorded sound experienced elaborate aural presentations alongside movies' visual images, from the Japanese benshi (narrators) crafting multivoiced dialogue narratives to original musical compositions performed by symphony-size orchestras in Europe and the United States. In Berlin, for the premiere performance outside the Soviet Union of The Battleship Potemkin, film director Sergei Eisenstein worked with Austrian composer Edmund Meisel (1874-1930) on a musical score matching sound to image; the Berlin screenings with live music helped to bring the film its wide international fame.
Beyond that, the triumph of recorded sound has overshadowed the rich diversity of technological and aesthetic experiments with the visual image that were going forward simultaneously in the 1920s. New color processes, larger or differently shaped screen sizes, multiple-screen projections, even television, were among the developments invented or tried out during the period, sometimes with startling success. The high costs of converting to sound and the early limitations of sound technology were among the factors that suppressed innovations or retarded advancement in these other areas. The introduction of new screen formats was put off for a quarter century, and color, though utilized over the next two decades for special productions, also did not become a norm until the 1950s.
Though it may be difficult to imagine from a later perspective, a strain of critical opinion in the 1920s predicted that sound film would be a technical novelty that would soon fade from sight, just as had many previous attempts, dating well back before the First World War, to link images with recorded sound. These critics were making a common assumption—that the technological inadequacies of earlier efforts (poor synchronization, weak sound amplification, fragile sound recordings) would invariably occur again. To be sure, their evaluation of the technical flaws in 1920s sound experiments was not so far off the mark, yet they neglected to take into account important new forces in the motion picture field that, in a sense, would not take no for an answer.
These forces were the rapidly expanding electronics and telecommunications companies that were developing and linking telephone and wireless technologies in the 1920s. In the United States, they included such firms as American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, and Westinghouse. They were interested in all forms of sound technology and all potential avenues for commercial exploitation. Their competition and collaboration were creating the broadcasting industry in the United States, beginning with the introduction of commercial radio programming in the early 1920s. With financial assets considerably greater than those in the motion picture industry, and perhaps a wider vision of the relationships among entertainment and communications media, they revitalized research into recording sound for motion pictures.
In 1929 the United States motion picture industry released more than 300 sound films—a rough figure, since a number were silent films with music tracks, or films prepared in dual versions, to take account of the many cinemas not yet wired for sound. At the production level, in the United States the conversion was virtually complete by 1930. In Europe it took a little longer, mainly because there were more small producers for whom the costs of sound were prohibitive, and in other parts of the world problems with rights or access to equipment delayed the shift to sound production for a few more years (though cinemas in major cities may have been wired in order to play foreign sound films). The triumph of sound cinema was swift, complete, and enormously popular.#p#副标题#e#
第二篇
TOPIC：Eocene warming
讨论Eocene warming 产生的原因
解析：本文属地质学话题，谈到Eocene始新世这样一个历史时期，这是在TPO里从未考过的一个历史阶段。文章结构很明显，应该是因果类。
Eocene
The Eocene /ˈiːəsiːn/ (symbol Eo ) epoch, lasting from 56 to 33.9 million years ago, is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the Eocene is marked by a brief period in which the concentration of the carbon isotope 13C in the atmosphere was exceptionally low in comparison with the more common isotope 12C. The end is set at a major extinction event called the Grande Coupure (the "Great Break" in continuity) or the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event, which may be related to the impact of one or more large bolides in Siberia and in what is now Chesapeake Bay. As with other geologic periods, the strata that define the start and end of the epoch are well identified, though their exact dates are slightly uncertain.
The name Eocene comes from the Greek ἠώς (eos, dawn) and καινός (kainos, new) and refers to the "dawn" of modern ('new') fauna that appeared during the epoch.
PETM
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, alternatively "Eocene thermal maximum 1" (ETM1), and formerly known as the "Initial Eocene" or "Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum" refers to a time interval that began at the temporal boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs. The absolute age and duration of the event remain uncertain, but are close to 55.8 million years ago and ~0.2 million years, respectively. The PETM has become a focal point of considerable geoscience research because it probably provides our best past analog in which to understand impacts of global warming and massive carbon input to the ocean and atmosphere, including ocean acidification.
Extreme changes on Earth’s surface characterized the PETM. Global temperatures rose by about 6 °C (11 °F). Fossil records for many organisms (e.g., benthic foraminifera in the ocean and mammals on land) show major turnovers. Sediment deposition changed significantly at many outcrops and in many drill cores that span the time interval. The PETM is marked by a prominent negative excursion in carbon stable isotope (δ13C) records from across the globe, and dissolution of carbonate deposited on all ocean basins. The latter observations strongly suggest that a massive input of 13C-depleted carbon entered the hydrosphere or atmosphere at the start of the PETM. Indeed, the PETM is probably the only example within the Cenozoic Era (approximately the last 65 million years) when a mass of carbon comparable to projected anthropogenic emissions (>2000 Gt or Pg) rapidly entered the ocean and atmosphere.
Although now widely accepted that the PETM represents a “case study” for global warming and massive carbon input to Earth’s surface, the cause, details and overall significance of the event remain perplexing. The crux of the problem: how can massive amounts of carbon rapidly enter the ocean and atmosphere millions of years before the industrial revolution?#p#副标题#e#
第三篇
TOPIC：Abandoning hunting and gathering
First permanent settlement was in Middle East, 文章讨论为何会有permanent settlement
解析：本文属历史话题，谈到一种常考的生产方式捕猎采集业，这一生产方式经常会在文章中与农业进行比对，实际就是静止和移动两类生产生活方式的比较。本文也不例外。文章结构也是因果类。
Hunter-Gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forager society is a nomadic society in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species. Anthropologists have remarked that the term foraging is a more appropriate description of the predominant food source for most non-agricultural groups: Gathering is a far more important source of food than is hunting for the majority of non-agricultural societies, according to Richard Borshay Lee.
Foraging was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo. As The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers says: "Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Until 12,000 years ago, all humans lived this way." Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers have been displaced by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement, sometimes extensively, their foraging activity with farming and/or keeping animals.
Agriculture and Husbandry
Sometime around 10,000 BC, some hunting and gathering clans in the Middle East began to abandon hunting because they had learned to control animals to the point where they could keep them close, work to keep their numbers as great as possible, and kill some when they needed meat. This activity is generally known as "husbandry," and really has nothing to do with married life as one might suspect. These groups also learned how to prepare the soil so that they could take the seeds of the plants that they had been gathering, plant them, water them, keep them free from weeds, and harvest them when they were mature. Agriculture of this sort was a difficult and laborious process, because -- not having the means to preserve most succulent plants such as spinach, cabbage, onion and the like - so that they remained edible throughout the fall and winter seasons -- they had to rely on the seeds of certain grasses -- wheat, rye, barley, millet, and spelt -- because these seeds could be dried and preserved for a considerable length of time.
The process of developing agriculture took a long time. The seeds of these grasses were quite small in their original wild state, and it has taken thousands of years of selective breeding and hybridization to bring them to the size that they now are. Also, the growing of these cereals exhausts the fertility of the soil, and the early agriculturalists knew little or nothing of fertilization, or crop rotation. Some peoples practiced what is called slash and burn cultivation. In this system, the trees and bushes on a piece of land are slashed and, when they are dead and dry, are burned to open up a field for cultivation. When the yield from that land begins to diminish, another tract is slashed and burned, and the people move to the new field.
One might suppose that this pattern of activity also provided the early Neolithic groups with a means of adjusting to a new way of life. The lands that they prepared for future cultivate were, in the meantime, excellent places for hunting small animals and gathering food and textile plants. Thus the traditional activities of Palaeolithic life were not completely abandoned. The groups still wandered, but their movements were now much less frequent and for far shorter distances. One can look at matters a bit differently, though. Since they were more or less fixed in place, these early groups were dependent on inconstant Nature. Drought, floods, plant or animal diseases, changing climate, or any of a number of other things could greatly diminish the potential of entire regions to support slash and burn agriculture. The early Neolithic groups were vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and, in order to survive or flourish, needed some way in which to improve their potential of their resources - to water their crops and flocks when the rains failed, to drain their fields when the rains came in super-abundance, to maintain the capacity of their land to bear the needed supply of food, etc.
Such things were beyond the power of the early Neolithic groups, however. Their semi-nomadic pattern of life made it impossible for them peoples to develop the level of organization and sophistication necessary to modify or control their environment to any significant degree. Until they could do so, human societies could not become completely sedentary and begin to realize the advantages that agricultural life offered. In the meantime, they sought those areas in which natural resources they needed were both great and constant. Consequently, the earliest evidence of of established Neolithic communities are found in river valleys where Spring floods regularly replenish the soil's fertility with a layer of fresh silt.
Even so, Neolithic farmers required much more land to feed themselves than is necessary today. Since their animals had to be fed with the products of the soil, that these animals were in competition with their masters for essentially the same limited supply of food. Early Neolithic agriculture was, in a sense, a rival of early Neolithic husbandry. Their agricultural needs demanded that the early Neolithic farmers clear wild animals from their fields and limited the number of domesticated stock they could keep. This meant that the amount of protein in their diet was less than that of the Paleolithic hunters and gatherers, and that they had to work harder and longer to secure a sufficient amount of food to eat. It also meant that various communities competed for the same limited amount of suitable land, and warfare became a regular fact of human life.
There was progress of a sort, however. Agriculture could support more people, and the world's population of humans grew to fifty million or more. Agriculture also made larger communities possible, and, about 3500 BC, the Neolithic peoples of western Europe were able to build structures out of massive stones called megaliths. This may simply have meant that the mass of the population has become subject to the commands of a warrior or priestly class, however. Whatever the case, the Agricultural Revolution spread slowly throughout the world, and some peoples never have accepted it but have remained, apparently by choice, hunters and gatherers.#p#副标题#e#
第四篇
TOPIC Neolithic revolution
文章主要讲述新石器革命的产生及其对人类生活的影响
解析：本文属于历史学话题，谈到的是远古时期的人类生活情况。文章结构属因果类话题，主要谈及新石器革命对人类生活造成的诸多方面的影响。
The Neolithic Revolution
The Neolithic Revolution or Neolithic Demographic Transition, sometimes called the Agricultural Revolution, was the world's first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture. It was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement which supported an increasingly large population. Archaeological data indicates that the domestication of various types of plants and animals evolved in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene around 12,000 years ago.
However, the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns, which radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and food storage technologies) that allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for high population density settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing). The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities (ca. 5,500 BP), whose emergence also inaugurates the end of the prehistoric Neolithic period.
The relationship of the above-mentioned Neolithic characteristics to the onset of agriculture, their sequence of emergence, and empirical relation to each other at various Neolithic sites remains the subject of academic debate, and seems to vary from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution.
(编辑：suyan)