2014年3月1日大陆
第一篇
TOPIC Motion Picture
第一段提到人视觉的两种现象，第一个是phi phenomenon，黑暗中点一个蜡烛，灭了，在灭的同时点亮附近的第二个蜡烛，人的视觉会觉得发生了移动。第二个是persistence，根据此功能，推进了动态画的产生，即系列图片连续运动形成动作。(有题)第二段说是这个在Ancient Greek就有人观察到，但是直到19世纪才有一个科学家解释，然后还引发出一些玩具，就是用这个原理制造成的。第三段说相机刚出现时，还有些人依然手画，说手画比相机好。然后某M人不信，与画画人打了25000美元的赌，马跑的时候到底几个蹄子着地。他找了24台相机，一字排开，把这个事情解决了。拍出来的照片连起来就是动图。这就是电影最原始雏形。第四段说这上面这个技术开始得到有些人的认可，当时Edison和其助手也有研究，但Edison遇到问题未能解决，后来其助手研究出发明解决了Edison的问题。然后开始竞争，Edison开始发明的只能一个人去看，one penny一次。后来他就想如果能给大量的人同时观看那一定很赚钱，所以开始了电影。早期的电影只是记录很多无意义的东西，很短，比如马跑鸟飞等，但是人们很感兴趣。后来一个导演搞出来一个1分钟左右的视频，但是是有剧情的，又把人们的兴趣推向一个高潮。但是他没有被历史记住。又说一个法国导演，在美国开个公司，拍摄了科幻电影。
解析：本文属艺术类话题，涉及电影的形成。本文与OG文章The Early Cinema有很多相关内容对应，建议大家阅读补充。
Early Cinema
The cinema did not emerge as a form of mass consumption until its technology evolved from the initial "peepshow" format to the point where images were projected on a screen in a darkened theater. In the peepshow format, a film was viewed through a small opening in a machine that was created for that purpose. Thomas Edison's peepshow device, the Kinetoscope, was introduced to the public in 1894. It was designed for use in Kinetoscope parlors, or arcades, which contained only a few individual machines and permitted only one customer to view a short, 50-foot film at any one time. The first Kinetoscope parlors contained five machines. For the price of 25 cents (or 5 cents per machine), customers moved from machine to machine to watch five different films (or, in the case of famous prizefights, successive rounds of a single fight).
These Kinetoscope arcades were modeled on phonograph parlors, which had proven successful for Edison several years earlier. In the phonograph parlors, customers listened to recordings through individual ear tubes, moving from one machine to the next to hear different recorded speeches or pieces of music. The Kinetoscope parlors functioned in a similar way. Edison was more interested in the sale of Kinetoscopes (for roughly $1,000 apiece) to these parlors than in the films that would be run in them (which cost approximately $10 to $15 each). He refused to develop projection technology, reasoning that if he made and sold projectors, then exhibitors would purchase only one machine-a projector-from him instead of several.
Exhibitors, however, wanted to maximize their profits, which they could do more readily by projecting a handful of films to hundreds of customers at a time (rather than one at a time) and by charging 25 to 50 cents admission. About a year after the opening of the first Kinetoscope parlor in 1894, showmen such as Louis and Auguste Lumiere, Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins, and Orville and Woodville Latham (with the assistance of Edison's former assistant, William Dickson) perfected projection devices. These early projection devices were used in vaudeville theaters, legitimate theaters, local town halls, makeshift storefront theaters, fairgrounds, and amusement parks to show films to a mass audience.
With the advent of projection in 1895-1896, motion pictures became the ultimate form of mass consumption. Previously, large audiences had viewed spectacles at the theater, where vaudeville, popular dramas, musical and minstrel shows, classical plays, lectures, and slide-and-lantern shows had been presented to several hundred spectators at a time. But the movies differed significantly from these other forms of entertainment, which depended on either live performance or (in the case of the slide-and-lantern shows) the active involvement of a master of ceremonies who assembled the final program.
Although early exhibitors regularly accompanied movies with live acts, the substance of the movies themselves is mass-produced, prerecorded material that can easily be reproduced by theaters with little or no active participation by the exhibitor. Even though early exhibitors shaped their film programs by mixing films and other entertainments together in whichever way they thought would be most attractive to audiences or by accompanying them with lectures, their creative control remained limited. What audiences came to see was the technological marvel of the movies; the lifelike reproduction of the commonplace motion of trains, of waves striking the shore, and of people walking in the street; and the magic made possible by trick photography and the manipulation of the camera.
With the advent of projection, the viewer's relationship with the image was no longer private, as it had been with earlier peepshow devices such as the Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope, which was a similar machine that reproduced motion by means of successive images on individual photographic cards instead of on strips of celluloid. It suddenly became public—an experience that the viewer shared with dozens, scores, and even hundreds of others. At the same time, the image that the spectator looked at expanded from the minuscule peepshow dimensions of 1 or 2 inches (in height) to the life-size proportions of 6 or 9 feet.
第二篇
TOPIC 测量地球年龄
人们对实际地球年龄很好奇，进行了大量探索，主要集中在19世纪，主要是三种途径。第一，一个叫L的人用化石记录测定，比如说动物遗骸，但是不准，因为地球远在生命出现之前就形成，同时化石断片也不连续。第二，用sedimentary的地层厚度也不行，因为有erosion，有山峦形成地壳运动的干扰。第三，计算海洋中的盐含量的增加情况。人们能够了解海水量、海水盐分以及计算流入海里的盐分，但是不知道循环的量。另外，海水底层成分也会变成盐，造成干扰。所以，他的测定还是有错误。尽管如此，他的发现还是很重要，因为这说明地球年龄特别大，绝对不止几百万年。还有几个地质学家也支持这一观点。
解析：本文属地质学话题，研究地球年龄，是
Age of the Earth
In 1862, the physicist William Thomson published calculations that fixed the age of Earth at between 20 million and 400 million years. He assumed that Earth had formed as a completely molten object, and determined the amount of time it would take for the near-surface to cool to its present temperature. His calculations did not account for heat produced via radioactive decay (a process then unknown to science) or convection inside the Earth, which allows more heat to escape from the interior to warm rocks near the surface.
Geologists had trouble accepting such a short age for Earth. Biologists could accept that Earth might have a finite age, but even 100 million years seemed much too short to be plausible. Charles Darwin, who had studied Lyell's work, had proposed his theory of the evolution of organisms by natural selection, a process whose combination of random heritable variation and cumulative selection implies great expanses of time. (Geneticists have subsequently measured the rate of genetic divergence of species, using the molecular clock, to date the last universal ancestor of all living organisms no later than 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago).
In a lecture in 1869, Darwin's great advocate, Thomas H. Huxley, attacked Thomson's calculations, suggesting they appeared precise in themselves but were based on faulty assumptions. The physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (in 1856) and astronomer Simon Newcomb (in 1892) contributed their own calculations of 22 and 18 million years respectively to the debate: they independently calculated the amount of time it would take for the Sun to condense down to its current diameter and brightness from the nebula of gas and dust from which it was born. Their values were consistent with Thomson's calculations. However, they assumed that the Sun was only glowing from the heat of its gravitational contraction. The process of solar nuclear fusion was not yet known to science.
Other scientists backed up Thomson's figures as well. Charles Darwin's son, the astronomer George H. Darwin, proposed that Earth and Moon had broken apart in their early days when they were both molten. He calculated the amount of time it would have taken for tidal friction to give Earth its current 24-hour day. His value of 56 million years added additional evidence that Thomson was on the right track.
The last estimate Thomson gave, in 1897, was: "that it was more than 20 and less than 40 million year old, and probably much nearer 20 than 40". In 1899 and 1900, John Joly calculated the rate at which the oceans should have accumulated salt from erosion processes, and determined that the oceans were about 80 to 100 million years old.
第三篇
TOPIC 威尼斯水供应
首先引用一个法语的说法：威尼斯人都张着嘴要喝水。在14世纪初，政府政策禁止污染运河canal，让染坊别向canal里面倒。一开始人们不听resistent，后来才把染坊迁到了城市外围periphery。接着讲人口增长，所以建了一个C，用来收集雨水。有钱人自己有自己的C，其他人喝集中在几个街区公用的C。大约50个新的C被建成。威尼斯人口在14世纪停止增长，因为黑死病，C也中断。在旱季，政府去附近的河里用船拉淡水，同时也想把parallel河流引过来，建一个A管道。但是成本太高，搁浅了。
解析：本文属于城市发展和环境话题，涉及威尼斯这一托福高频考察城市。威尼斯不仅是当今的旅游胜地，在历史上也扮演中非常重要的角色，托福阅读曾在多方面有所考察，比如威尼斯盐业发展、威尼斯船业发展等。
Venice
Venice is a city in northeastern Italy sited on a group of 118 small islands separated by canals and linked by bridges. It is located in the marshy Venetian Lagoon which stretches along the shoreline, between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers. Venice is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. The city in its entirety is listed as a World Heritage Site, along with its lagoon.
Venice is the capital of the Veneto region. In 2009, there were 270,098 people residing in Venice's comune (the population estimate of 272,000 inhabitants includes the population of the whole Comune of Venezia; around 60,000 in the historic city of Venice (Centro storico); 176,000 in Terraferma (the Mainland), mostly in the large frazioni of Mestre and Marghera; 31,000 live on other islands in the lagoon). Together with Padua and Treviso, the city is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), with a total population of 1,600,000. PATREVE is only a statistical metropolitan area without any degree of autonomy.
The name is derived from the ancient Veneti people who inhabited the region by the 10th century BC. The city historically was the capital of the Republic of Venice. Venice has been known as the "La Dominante", "Serenissima", "Queen of the Adriatic", "City of Water", "City of Masks", "City of Bridges", "The Floating City", and "City of Canals". Luigi Barzini described it in The New York Times as "undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man". Venice has also been described by the Times Online as being one of Europe's most romantic cities.
The Republic of Venice was a major maritime power during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and a staging area for the Crusades and the Battle of Lepanto, as well as a very important center of commerce (especially silk, grain, and spice) and art in the 13th century up to the end of the 17th century. This made Venice a wealthy city throughout most of its history. It is also known for its several important artistic movements, especially the Renaissance period. Venice has played an important role in the history of symphonic and operatic music, and it is the birthplace of Antonio Vivaldi.
Venezia is a city of small islands, enhanced during the Middle Ages by the dredging of soils to raise the marshy ground above the tides. The resulting canals encouraged the flourishing of a nautical culture which proved central to the economy of the city. Today those canals still provide the means for transport of goods and people within the city.
The maze of canals threaded through the city requires the use of more than 400 bridges to permit the flow of foot traffic. In 2011, the city opened Ponte della Costituzione, the fourth bridge across the Grand Canal, connecting the Piazzale Roma bus terminal area with the Stazione Ferroviaria (train station), the others being the original Ponte di Rialto, the Ponte dell'Accademia, and the Ponte degli Scalzi.