本文的内容是针对于2016年8月21日
2016年8月21日托福阅读真题答案解析
阅读真题词汇题：
2016年8月21日托福阅读真题答案第一篇
题材划分：历史类
主要内容：
新西兰殖民者的农业发展历史。新西兰土地贫瘠，耕作季节短，所以很难自给自足。后来引进了农作物玉米，还通过类似于把死鱼埋在土里存储的方式终于养活了自己。当时存在一个问题，经营农场也是家族事业，所以每个人都是强制性的上阵。随着时代发展，农业工具也有了进步，比如美式斧头改进于英式斧头。类似的农业工具还可以根据使用者的具体和特定情况进行改进。
相关背景资料：
Agriculture in New Zealand is the largest sector of the tradable economy, contributing about two-thirds of exported goods. The government offered a number of subsidies during the 1970s to assist farmers after the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community and by the early 1980s government support provided some farmers with 40 percent of their income. In 1984 the Labour government ended all farm subsidies, and by 1990 the agricultural industry became the most deregulated sector in New Zealand. To stay competitive in the heavily subsidised European and US markets New Zealand farmers had to increase the efficiency of their operations. Animal farming is pasture based, cows and sheep are rarely housed or fed large quantities of grain, with most farmers using grass based supplements such as hay and silage during feed shortages. Pigs are usually kept indoors, either in gestation crates, farrowing crates, fattening pens, or group housing.
Both the original Māori people and the European colonists made huge changes to New Zealand over a relatively short time. Māori burned forest to flush out game and to encourage the growth of bracken fern, which was used as a food source, and practised agriculture using plants they brought from tropical Polynesia. The Europeans logged and burned off a third of the forest cover to convert land to pastoral farming.
2016年8月21日托福阅读真题答案第二篇
题材划分：社会学类
主要内容：
社会学中的一个现象：关于判断的偏见attribution bias (归因偏差). 当一个人看到另一个人举止行为很粗鲁的时候就会觉得这个人本身就是一个很粗鲁的人，而不是设身处地地考虑当时这个人所在的环境和周围人的影响，这样判断就会对这个人含有一定的偏见，当我们判断一个人的行为的时候应该综合考虑这个人的个性、品德、环境以及其他周边环境的因素，但是这只是一个美好的设想，大多数人都会有先入为主的行为模式，因为其他的内容分析起来很麻烦，而且很耗费时间，当然生活中一些场景并没有那么复杂，比如你遇到一群人，他们很开心快乐，而且他们是刚从电影院出来的，这样你就很容易判断得出他们刚刚看到电影很幽默。
类似阅读文章：Aggression (OG Reading 5)
相关背景资料：
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional bias is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. People constantly make attributions regarding the cause of their own and others' behaviors; however, attributions do not always accurately mirror reality. Rather than operating as objective perceivers, people are prone to perceptual errors that lead to biased interpretations of their social world.
Attribution biases were first discussed in the 1950s and 60s by psychologists such as Fritz Heider, who studied attribution theory. Other psychologists, such as Harold Kelley and Ed Jones expanded Heider's early work by identifying conditions under which people are more or less likely to make different types of attributions.
Attribution biases are present in everyday life, and therefore are an important and relevant topic to study. For example, when a driver cuts us off, we are more likely to attribute blame to the reckless driver (e.g., "What a jerk!"), rather than situational circumstances (e.g., "Maybe they were in a rush and didn’t notice me"). Additionally, there are many different types of attribution biases, such as the ultimate attribution error, fundamental attribution error, actor-observer bias, and hostile attribution bias. Each of these biases describes a specific tendency that people exhibit when reasoning about the cause of different behaviors.
As early researchers explored the way people make causal attributions, they also recognized that attributions do not necessarily reflect reality and can be colored by a person's own perspective. Certain conditions can prompt people to exhibit attribution biases, or draw inaccurate conclusions about the cause of a given behavior or outcome. In his work on attribution theory, Fritz Heider noted that in ambiguous situations, people make attributions based on their own wants and desires, which are therefore often skewed. He also explained that this tendency was rooted in a need to maintain a positive self-concept, later termed the self-serving bias.
2016年8月21日托福阅读真题答案第三篇
题材划分：历史类
主要内容：
欧洲印刷术的发展对欧洲历史发展的影响。印刷术的发展对欧洲发展起到了关键作用。在这之前已经有了一些促进发展的条件，比如纸张，纸张已经从中国传过去了，由于轻薄而且方便制作，纸张快速代替了羊皮纸;但纸张也有不足之处，它不能被长久保存，而且由于欧洲人习惯于用羽毛笔写字，写在纸上很容易散开。为了解决这个问题，欧洲人在纸上加了一些东西来改良。欧洲的印刷术和亚洲的活字印刷术不太一样，主要是因为纸张的区别。印刷术的广泛使用对社会影响很大，它满足了人们对书的极大需求量，使得贫民也能接触到文学，不只是贵族和僧侣。原来纸张上的文字都是拉丁文，但是拉丁文只适用于理论和宗教知识，后来就有很多人用方言来写，语言更加生活化更平实，很多文豪也开始用其它语言写，比如意大利文。
相关背景资料：
Printing is a process for reproducing text and images using a master form or template. Block printing first came to Europe as a method for printing on cloth, where it was common by 1300. Images printed on cloth for religious purposes could be quite large and elaborate. When paper became relatively easily available, around 1400, the medium transferred very quickly to small woodcut religious images and playing cards printed on paper.
Print gave a broader range of readers access to knowledge and enabled later generations to build directly on the intellectual achievements of earlier ones without the changes arising within verbal traditions. Print, according to Acton in his lecture On the Study of History (1895), gave "assurance that the work of theRenaissance would last, that what was written would be accessible to all, that such an occultation of knowledge and ideas as had depressed the Middle Ages would never recur, that not an idea would be lost".
Print was instrumental in changing the nature of reading within society.
Elizabeth Eisenstein identifies two long-term effects of the invention of printing. She claims that print created a sustained and uniform reference for knowledge as well as allowing for comparison between incompatible views. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke identify five kinds of reading that developed in relation to the introduction of print:
(1) Critical reading: due to the fact that texts finally became accessible to the general population, critical reading emerged because people were given the option to form their own opinions on texts.
(2) Dangerous Reading: reading was seen as a dangerous pursuit because it was considered rebellious and unsociable especially in the case of women, because reading could stir up dangerous emotions such as love and that if women could read, they could read love notes.
(3) Creative reading: printing allowed people to read texts and interpret them creatively, often in very different ways than the author intended.
(4) Extensive Reading: print allowed for a wide range of texts to become available, thus, previous methods of intensive reading of texts from start to finish, began to change and with texts being readily available, people began reading on particular topics or chapters, allowing for much more extensive reading on a wider range of topics.
(5) Private reading: became linked to the rise of individualism because before print, reading was often a group event, where one person would read to a group of people and with print, literacy rose as did availability of texts, thus reading became a solitary pursuit.
The invention of printing also changed the occupational structure of European cities. Printers emerged as a new group of artisans for whom literacy was essential, although the much more labour-intensive occupation of the scribe naturally declined. Proof-correcting arose as a new occupation, while a rise in the amount ofbooksellers and librarians naturally followed the explosion in the numbers of books.