2015年9月13日
托福阅读词汇题：
Inevitable=unavoidable
potential=possible
allow to=make possible
harsh=severe
annihilate=destroy
cumulatively=altogether
intact=not broken into pieces
augment=add to
derive=obtain
托福阅读第一篇 加拿大的两个种族
原文回顾：加拿大的两个种族Dorset and Thule，有很多适宜生活在Arctic区域内的方法，由于全球气候变暖，Dorset已经适应了冷的环境所以收到影响;再者Thule因为他们原来住的地方没有足够的食物，所以发动对Dorset的侵略。这些导致了Dorset的灭亡。
相关背景学习：Dorset culture
The Dorset culture (also called the Dorset Tradition) was a Paleo-Eskimo culture (500 BCE–1500 CE) that preceded the Inuit culture in Arctic North America. It is named after Cape Dorset in Nunavut, Canada where the first evidence of its existence was found. The culture has been defined as having four phases due to the distinct differences in the technologies relating to hunting and tool making. Artifacts include distinctive triangular end-blades, soapstone lamps, and burins.
The Dorset were first identified as a separate culture in 1925. Archaeology has been critical to adding to knowledge about them because the Dorset were essentially extinct by 1500 due to difficulties in adapting to the Medieval Warm Period. The Thule, who began migrating east from Alaska in the 1000s, began the displacement of the Dorset.
Inuit legends recount them driving away people they called the Tuniit (singular Tuniq) or Sivullirmiut (First Inhabitants). According to legend, the First Inhabitants were "giants", people who were taller and stronger than the Inuit, but who were easily scared off. Scholars now believe the Dorset and the later Thule people were the peoples encountered by the Norse who visited the area. The Norse called these indigenous peoples skraling.
相关背景学习：Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi, and other life forms for food, fiber, biofuel, medicinal and other products used to sustain and enhance human life. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the development of civilization. The study of agriculture is known as agricultural science. The history of agriculture dates back thousands of years, and its development has been driven and defined by greatly different climates, cultures, and technologies. However, all farming generally relies on techniques to expand and maintain the lands that are suitable for raising domesticated species. For plants, this usually requires some form of irrigation, although there are methods of dryland farming. Livestock are raised in a combination of grassland-based and landless systems, in an industry that covers almost one-third of the world's ice- and water-free area. In the developed world, industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture has become the dominant system of modern farming, although there is growing support for sustainable agriculture, including permaculture and organic agriculture.
Until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of the human population labored in agriculture. Pre-industrial agriculture was typically subsistence agriculture/self-sufficiency in which farmers raised most of their crops for their own consumption instead of cash crops for trade. A remarkable shift in agricultural practices has occurred over the past century in response to new technologies and the development of world markets. This also has led to technological improvements in agricultural techniques such as the Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonium nitrate which made the traditional practice of recycling nutrients with crop rotation and animal manure less important.
Modern agronomy, plant breeding, agrochemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers, and technological improvements have sharply increased yields from cultivation, but at the same time have caused widespread ecological damage and negative human health effects. Selective breeding and modern practices in animal husbandry have similarly increased the output of meat, but have raised concerns about animal welfare and the health effects of the antibiotics, growth hormones, and other chemicals commonly used in industrial meat production. Genetically modified organisms are an increasing component of agriculture, although they are banned in several countries. Agricultural food production and water management are increasingly becoming global issues that are fostering debate on a number of fronts. Significant degradation of land and water resources, including the depletion of aquifers, has been observed in recent decades, and the effects of global warming on agriculture and of agriculture on global warming are still not fully understood.
The major agricultural products can be broadly grouped into foods, fibers, fuels, and raw materials. Specific foods include cereals (grains), vegetables, fruits, oils, meats and spices. Fibers include cotton, wool, hemp, silk and flax. Raw materials include lumber and bamboo. Other useful materials are produced by plants, such as resins, dyes, drugs, perfumes, biofuels and ornamental products such as cut flowers and nursery plants. Over one third of the world's workers are employed in agriculture, second only to the services' sector, although the percentages of agricultural workers in developed countries has decreased significantly over the past several centuries.
相关背景学习：Mating
In some terrestrial arthropods, including insects representing basal (primitive) phylogenetic clades, the male deposits spermatozoa on the substrate, sometimes stored within a special structure. Courtship involves inducing the female to take up the sperm package into her genital opening without actual copulation. In groups such as dragonflies and many spiders, males extrude sperm into secondary copulatory structures removed from their genital opening, which are then used to inseminate the female (in dragonflies, it is a set of modified sternites on the second abdominal segment; in spiders, it is the male pedipalps). In advanced groups of insects, the male uses its aedeagus, a structure formed from the terminal segments of the abdomen, to deposit sperm directly (though sometimes in a capsule called a "spermatophore") into the female's reproductive tract.
Other animals reproduce sexually with external fertilization, including many basal vertebrates. Vertebrates (such as reptiles, some fish, and most birds) reproduce with internal fertilization through cloacal copulation (see also hemipenis), while mammals copulate vaginally.
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