类别：地质类 真题 140628CN-P3
Title：Earth’s Energy Cycle
参考阅读：
To understand most of the processes at work on Earth, it is useful to envisage interactions within the Earth system as a series of interrelated cycles. One of these is the energy cycle, which encompasses the great ―engines‖—the external and internal energy sources—that drive the Earth system and all its cycles. We can think of Earth’s energy cycle as a ―budget‖: energy may be added to or subtracted from the budget and may be transferred from one storage place to another, but overall the additions and subtractions and transfers must balance each other. If a balance did not exist, Earth would either heat up or cool down until a balance was reached.
The total amount of energy flowing into Earth’s energy budget is more than 174,000 terawatts (or 174,000 ×10¹² watts). This quantity completely dwarfs the 10 terawatts of energy that humans use per year. There are three main sources from which energy flows into the Earth system.
Incoming short-wavelength solar radiation overwhelmingly dominates the flow of energy in Earth’s energy budget, accounting for about 99.986 percent of the total. An estimated 174,000 terawatts of solar radiation is intercepted by Earth. Some of this vast influx powers the winds, rainfall, ocean currents, waves, and other processes in the hydrologic (or water) cycle. Some is used for ...
类别：环境类 真题 140427CN-P2
Title：The Climate of Japan
参考阅读：
At the most general level, two major climatic forces determine Japan’s weather. Prevailing westerly winds move across Eurasia, sweep over the Japanese islands, and continue eastward across the Pacific Ocean. In addition, great cyclonic airflows (masses of rapidly circulating air) that arise over the western equatorial Pacific move in a wheel-like fashion northeastward across Japan and nearby regions. During winter months heavy masses of cold air from Siberia dominate the weather around Japan. Persistent cold winds skim across the Sea of Japan from the northwest, picking up moisture that they deposit as several feet of snow on the western side of the mountain ranges on Honshu Island. As the cold air drops its moisture, it flows over high ridges and down eastern slopes to bring cold, relatively dry weather to valleys and coastal plains and cities.
In spring the Siberian air mass warms and loses density, enabling atmospheric currents over the Pacific to steer warmer air into northeast Asia. This warm, moisture-laden air covers most of southern Japan during June and July. The resulting late spring rains then give way to a drier summer that is sufficiently hot and muggy, despite the island chain’s northerly latitude, to allow widespread rice cultivation.
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类别：科学类 TPO22-P2
Title：The Birth of Photography
参考阅读： Perceptions of the visible world were greatly altered by the invention of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century. In particular, and quite logically, the art of painting was forever changed, though not always in the ways one might have expected. The realistic and naturalistic painters of the mid- and late-nineteenth century were all intently aware of photography—as a thing to use, to learn from, and react to.
Unlike most major inventions, photography had been long and impatiently awaited. The images produced by the camera obscura, a boxlike device that used a pinhole or lens to throw an image onto a ground-glass screen or a piece of white paper, were already familiar—the device had been much employed by topographical artists like the Italian painter Canaletto in his detailed views of the city of Venice. What was lacking was a way of giving such images permanent form. This was finally achieved by Louis Daguerre (1787-1851), who perfected a way of fixing them on a silvered copper plate. His discovery, the "daguerreotype," was announced in 1839.
A second and very different process was patented by the British inventor William Henry Talbot (1800- 1877) in 1841. Talbot's "calotype" was the first negative-to-positive process and the direct ancestor of the modern photograph. The calotype was revolutionary in its use of chemically treated paper in which areas hit by light became dark in tone, producing a negative image. This "negative," as Talbot called it, could then be used to print multiple positive images on another piece of treated paper.
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类别：生物类 真题 140525CN-P2
Title：How Animals in Rain Forests Make Themselves Heard