第一篇：主要讲了在寒武纪(Cambrian)时期大量动物的灭绝，包括猛犸象、恐龙等等。很多动物都饿死了。同时，海洋和陆地的食物链发生了变化。一种单细胞核的物质代替了plankton，它们所在的地质层和什么可以区分era。
分析：动物灭绝类的文章是常考话题，比如2014年11月15日就考到过哺乳动物的灭绝;;2014年11月18日考到了megafauna的灭绝，所以一定要重视。
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Official Model Exam Meteorite Impact and Dinosaur Extinction
TPO-8 Extinction of the Dinosaurs
相关背景：
The Cambrian is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, lasting from 541.0 ± 1.0 to 485.4 ± 1.9 million years ago (mya) and is succeeded by the Ordovician. Its subdivisions, and indeed its base, are somewhat in flux. The period was established (as “Cambrian series”) by Adam Sedgwick, who named it after Cambria, the Latin name for Wales, where Britain's Cambrian rocks are best exposed. The Cambrian is unique in its unusually high proportion of lagersttte sedimentary deposits. These are sites of exceptional preservation, where "soft" parts of organisms are preserved as well as their more resistant shells. This means that our understanding of the Cambrian biology surpasses that of some later periods.
The Cambrian marked a profound change in life on Earth; prior to the Cambrian, the majority of living organisms on the whole were small, unicellular and simple; the Precambrian Charnia being exceptional. Complex, multicellular organisms gradually became more common in the millions of years immediately preceding the Cambrian, but it was not until this period that mineralized – hence readily fossilized – organisms became common. The rapid diversification of lifeforms in the Cambrian, known as the Cambrian explosion, produced the first representatives of all modern animal phyla. Phylogenetic analysis has supported the view that during the Cambrian radiation, metazoa (animals) evolved monophyletically from a single common ancestor: flagellated colonial protists similar to modern choanoflagellates.
While diverse life forms prospered in the oceans, the land was comparatively barren – with nothing more complex than a microbial soil crust and a few molluscs that emerged to browse on the microbial biofilm Most of the continents were probably dry and rocky due to a lack of vegetation. Shallow seas flanked the margins of several continents created during the breakup of the supercontinent Pannotia. The seas were relatively warm, and polar ice was absent for much of the period.
第二篇：主要讲了欧洲早期工业化。讲了为什么会工业化的原因：人数暴增，工业化满足了更多需求;供给增加，大量手工艺流动很大，工业化技术生产更多的商品;同时技术的发展也使得生产技术、采矿工业得以发展。
分析：国家工业化是发展史中的重要内容，除了工业化之外，备考过程中也要重视国家贸易、经济、农业发展等方面的内容。
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TPO-18 Industrialization in the Netherlands and Scandinavia
相关背景：
The industrial revolution led to the development of factories for large-scale production, with consequent changes in society. Originally the factories were steam-powered, but later transitioned to electricity once an electrical grid was developed. The mechanized assembly line was introduced to assemble parts in a repeatable fashion, with individual workers performing specific steps during the process. This led to significant increases in efficiency, lowering the cost of the end process. Later automation was increasingly used to replace human operators. This process has accelerated with the development of the computer and the robot.
第三篇： 主要讲了美索不达米亚地区(Mesopotamia)和古埃及城市发展的区别。美索不达米亚人口分布很散，尼罗河地区人口住的很紧密，有一样的语言和经济等等。
分析：相关古文明发展史的话题已不断在考试中出现，因此大家一定要在备考中重视古文明发展史这一方面的内容。
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TPO26 Sumer and the First Cities of the Ancient Near East
相关背景：
苏美尔文明阅读经典加试文本：
Para1:It is an astonishing fact that human civilization should have emerged into the light of history in two separate places at just about the same time. Between 3500 and 3000 B.C. when Egypt was being united under Pharaonic rule other great civilization arose in Mesopotamia the “land between the rivers.” And for close to three thousand years, the two rival centers retained their distinct characters, even though they had contact with each other from their earliest beginnings, and their destinies were interwoven in many ways. The pressure that forced the inhabitants of both regions to abandon the pattern of Neolithic village life may well have been the same. But the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, unlike that of the Nile, is not a narrow fertile strip protected by desert on either side. It resembles a wide, shallow trough with few natural defenses, crisscrossed by two great rivers and their tributaries, and is easily encroached upon from any direction.
Para2:Thus the facts of geography tended to discourage the idea of uniting the entire Mesopotamian area under a single head. Rulers who had this ambition did not appear, so far as we know, until about one thousand years after the beginning of Mesopotamian civilization, and they succeeded in carrying it out only for brief periods and at the cost of almost continuous warfare. As a consequence, the political history of ancient Mesopotamia has no underlying theme of the sort that divine kingship provides for Egypt. Local rivalries foreign incursions, the sudden upsurge and equally sudden collapse of military power–those are its substance. Against such a disturbed background, the continuity of cultural and artistic traditions seems all the more remarkable. This common heritage is very largely the creation of the founders of Mesopotamian Civilization, whom we call Sumerians after the region of Sumer, which they inhabited, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates.
Para3:The origin of the Sumerians remains obscure. Their language is unrelated to any other known tongue. Sometimes before 4,000 B.C. they came to southern Mesopotamia, from Persia, and there, within the next thousand years, they founded a number of city-states and developed their distinctive form of writing in cuneiform (wedge-shaped) characters on clay tablets. Unfortunately, the tangible remains of Sumerian civilization are extremely scanty compared to those of ancient Egypt. Building stone being unavailable in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians used mud brick and wood, so that almost nothing is left of their architecture except the foundation. Nor did they share the Egyptians' concern with the hereafter, although some richly endowed tombs in the shape of vaulted chambers below ground from the early dynastic period have been found in the city of Ur. Our knowledge of Sumerian Civilization thus depends very largely on chance fragments brought to light by excavation, including vast numbers of inscribed clay tablets. Yet we have learned enough to form a general picture of this vigorous, inventive, and disciplined people.
Para4:Each Sumerian city-state had its own local god, who was regarded as its king and owner. It also had a human ruler, the steward of the divine sovereign, who led the people in serving the deity. The local god, in return, was expected to plead the cause of his subjects among his fellow deities who controlled the forces of nature such as wind and weather, water, fertility, and the heavenly bodies. Nor was the idea of divine ownership treated as a mere pious fiction. The god was quite literally believed to own not only the territory of the city-state but also the labor power of the population and its products. All these were subject to his commands, transmitted to the people by his human steward. The result was an economic system that has been dubbed “theocratic socialism”, a planned society whose administrative center was the temple. The temple controlled the pooling of labor and resources for communal enterprises, such as the building of dikes or irrigation ditches, and it collected and distributed a considerable part of the harvest. All this required the keeping of detailed written records. Hence, we need not be surprised to find that the texts of early Sumerian inscriptions deal very largely with economic and administrative rather than religious matters, although writing was a priestly privilege.
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