2018年1月18日雅思阅读考情回顾

2018年1月18日雅思阅读考情回顾

一、考试时间：2018年1月18日（周四）

二、考试概述：

本次考试三篇文章均为旧题且都编在经典题库中，因此很多做题量大的学生在本次考试中特别有优势。第一篇Saving the Date Palms，介绍的是椰枣的习性，这是2015年11月19日B卷的题目。第二篇Life in West Africa ，是2010年11月20日题目，关于非洲风土人情的文章，剑五第四套第一篇The Impact of Wilderness Tourism和剑六第一套第三篇Climate Change and the Inuit都是不错的参考。第三篇Multitasking，为认知心理类文章，描述了对于多线程任务的讨论，是2015年9月19日的真题。心理类文章总体阅读难度较大，雅思真题中出现次数也较多，剑五第一套第二篇Nature or Nurture，剑八第一套第三篇Telepathy等文章均可作为参考。 是

三、文章简介

Passage 1: Saving the Date Palms，拯救椰枣 Passage 2: Life in West Africa，西非的生活 Passage 3: Multitasking，多线程任务

四、篇章分析： Passage 1： 文章内容 海枣树的原产地在伊拉克，因为生存能力强，引进到了埃及和伊朗，主要因为当地的树有疾病。 题型分布与答案参考 一、 判断 1. Elche was the first place to grow date palms. FALSE 2. Cloned elche produced greater number than other varieties. NOT GIVEN （没提到其他variety，只说了in the wild） 3. TRUE 4. Tools used in Elche were similar to those elsewhere. FALSE 5. It is hard to tell the difference between climbing ropes and ordinary cord. TRUE 6. It was rewarded World Heritage because of beauty of its surrounding regions. FALSE 雅思考试机经

7. Tourists surprised due to the huge number of date palms. TRUE 二、 填空题： 8. The date palm trees were introduced to Peru, where they had never been grown before. （原文第2段） 9. Date palm trees would be brought to Iran and Egypt for its problems of diseases. 10. Date Palm trees in Elche is regarded as a museum.(第7段同义替换) 11. There are about 200,000 in the Elche center. (第7段) 12. Gates control the flow of the river (第8段) 13. 200 millimeters 相关拓展 Date palms are believed to have originated around what is now Iraq, and have been cultivated since ancient times from Mesopotamia to prehistoric Egypt, possibly as early as 4000 BCE. The Ancient Egyptians used the fruits to make date wine, and ate them at harvest. There is archaeological evidence of date cultivation in eastern Arabia in 6000 BCE. (Alvarez-Mon 2006) Date Palms are susceptible to a disease called Bayoud disease, which is caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum. This disease, which kills many of the popular older cultivars like Deglet Noor, has led to a major decline in production where it is present, notably Morocco and western Algeria. However, new cultivars resistant to the disease are being developed.[citation needed] A major palm pest, the red palm beetle (Rhynchophorus ferrugineus) currently poses a significant threat to date production in parts of the Middle East as well as to iconic landscape specimens throughout the Mediterranean world. In the 1920s, eleven healthy Madjool palms were transferred from Morocco to the United States where they were tended by members of the Chemehuevi tribe in a remote region of Nevada. Nine of these survived and in 1935, cultivars were transferred to the US Date Garden in Indio, California. Eventually this stock was reintroduced to Africa and led to the US production of dates in Yuma, Arizona and the Bard Valley in California.

Passage 2：

雅思考试机经

文章内容 第一段：虽然西非的文化有很多不同点，但是其实是有很多想通性的 第二段：典型的西非家庭是种地的。家庭成员一般式父母，孩子，可能 会包括爷爷奶奶。 第三段：典型的西非的房子有牛棚马棚。 第四段：职业一般是家庭传续的，如果是神职人员，孩子也会继承父业， 也会做这个职业。 第五段：西非很传统，家庭观念很重，认为死去的祖先也是家庭的一部分， 如果有不好的事情的发生，就会认为是不孝敬祖先惹来的厄运。 第六段：西非的生活习惯和地理环境有很大关系。 第七段：西非的教育 题型分布与答案参考 段落信息配对 8 多选（五选二）2 句子填空 3 部分回忆答案为：段落信息配对 Outline the Africa culture A Introduce the use of building B Children’s education H 多选： 西非的教育： C（education primarily provided by family members） E 填空答案： The occupation of a typical household : farming 什么样的人可以当 leader：贵族（文中的用词是 noble） 相关拓展 The Nok culture appeared in Northern Nigeria around 1000 BC and vanished under unknown circumstances around 300 AD in the region of West Africa. It is thought to have been the product of an ancestral nation that branched to create the Hausa, Gwari, Birom, Kanuri, Nupe and Jukun peoples. The Kwaterkwashi Culture or Sokoto Culture located to the North west of Nok is thought to be the same as or an earlier ancestor of the Nok. Nok's social system is thought to have been highly advanced. The Nok culture was considered to be the earliest sub-Saharan producer of life-sized Terracotta. The refinement of this culture is attested to by the image of a Nok dignitary at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The dignitary is portrayed wearing a \"crooked baton\" ([3], [4]). The dignitary is also portrayed sitting with flared nostrils, and an open mouth suggesting performance. Other 雅思考试机经

images show figures on horseback, indicating that the Nok culture possessed the horse. Iron use, in smelting and forging for tools, appears in Nok culture in Africa at least by 550 BC and possibly earlier. Christopher Ehret has suggested that iron smelting was independently discovered in the region prior to 1000 BC Their function is still unknown, but scientific field work has started in 2005 to systematically investigate the archaeological sites. For the most part, the terracotta is preserved in the form of scattered fragments. That is why Nok art is well known today only for the heads, both male and female, whose hairstyles are particularly detailed and refined. The statues are in fragments because the discoveries are usually made from alluvial mud, in terrain made by the erosion of water. The terracotta statues found there are hidden, rolled, polished, and broken. Rarely are works of great size conserved intact making them highly valued on the international art market. The terracotta figures are hollow, coil built, nearly life sized human heads and bodies that are depicted with highly stylized features, abundant jewellery, and varied postures. Little is known of the original function of the pieces, but theories include ancestor portrayal, grave markers, and charms to prevent crop failure, infertility, and illness. Also, based on the dome-shaped bases found on several figures, they could have been used as finials for the roofs of ancient structures. Margaret Young-Sanchez, Associate Curator of Art of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania in The Cleveland Museum of Art, explains that most Nok ceramics were shaped by hand from coarse-grained clay and subtractively sculpted in a manner that suggests an influence from wood carving. After some drying, the sculptures were covered with slip and burnished to produce a smooth, glossy surface. The figures are hollow, with several openings to facilitate thorough drying and firing. The firing process most likely resembled that used today in Nigeria, in which the pieces are covered with grass, twigs, and leaves and burned for several hours. In 1928, the first find was accidentally unearthed at a level of 24 feet in an alluvial tin mine in the vicinity of the village of Nok near the Jos Plateau region of Nigeria (Folorunso 32). As a result of natural erosion and deposition, Nok terracottas were scattered at various depths throughout 雅思考试机经

the Sahel grasslands, causing difficulty in the dating and classification of the mysterious artifacts. Luckily, two archaeological sites, Samun Dukiya and Taruga, were found containing Nok art that had remained unmoved. Radiocarbon and thermo-luminescence tests narrowed the sculptures’ age down to between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago, making them some of the oldest in West Africa. Because of the similarities between the two sites, archaeologist Graham Connah believes that \"Nok artwork represents a style that was adopted by a range of iron-using farming societies of varying cultures, rather than being the diagnostic feature of a particular human group as has often been claimed.\" The Nok culture was discovered in 1928 on the Jos Plateau during tin mining. Lt-Colonel John Dent-Young, an Englishman, was leading mining operations in the Nigerian village of Nok. During these operations, one of the miners found a small terracotta of a monkey head. Other finds included a terracotta human head and a foot. The colonel, at a later date, had these artifacts placed in a museum in Jos. In 1932, a group of 11 statues in perfect condition were discovered near the city of Sokoto. Since that time, statues coming from the city of Katsina were brought to light. Although there are similarities to the classical Nok style, the connection between them is not clear yet. Later still, in 1943, near the village of Nok, in the center of Nigeria, a new series of clay figurines were discovered by accident while mining tin. A worker had found a head and had taken it back to his home for use as a scarecrow, a role that it filled (successfully) for a year in a yam field. It then drew the attention of the director of the mine who bought it. He brought it to the city of Jos and showed it to the trainee civil administrator, Bernard Fagg, an archaeologist who immediately understood its importance. He asked all of the miners to inform him of all of their discoveries and was able to amass more than 150 pieces. Afterwards, Bernard and Angela Fagg ordered systematic excavations that revealed many more profitable lucky finds dispersed over a vast area, much larger than the original site. In 1977, the number of terra cotta objects discovered in the course of the mining excavation amounted to 153 units, mostly from secondary deposits (the statuettes had been carted by floods near the valleys) situated in dried-up riverbeds in savannahs in Northern and Central Nigeria (the Southwestern portion of the Jos Plateau). 雅思考试机经

The archaeologist Bernard Fagg, in his studies on the Nok culture, identified the Nok culture with central Nigerian groups such as the Ham (Jaba) ethnic group of Southern Kaduna State, based on similarities between some of the cultural practices and dressing of those modern central Nigerian groups and the figures depicted in the Nok art.

Passage 3： 文章内容 文章介绍了多线程任务出现的原因和影响，通过具体的例子讲解了其对文化发展的负面影响 题型分布与答案参考 单选题5题+匹配题4题+判断题5题 参 单选题 27. RM（人名）的实验目的是什么？ D 28. DM（人名）的观点是什么？ B 29. 两个人共同同意的是什么？ D 30. A 31. B 匹配题 32. attractional blink C 33. change blindness E 34. bottleneck A 35. adaptive executive B 判断题 36. Not Given 37. No 38. Not Given 39. Yes 40. Yes 相关拓展 Multitasking Debate 雅思考试机经

Talking on the phone while driving isn’t the only situation where we’re worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking are probably just underperforming in all – or at best, all but one –of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time. The problem, according to Rene Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there’s a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Morois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require pressed from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say “ba”; an electronic sound should elicit a “ko”, and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort. The trouble comes when Marios shows the volunteers an image, then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they’re flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one tast is postponed,” he says. In fact, it the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens. There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we’re looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and 雅思考试机经

recognize a second item. This limitation is known as the “attentional blink”: experiments have shown that if you’re watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it. Interestingly, if you don’t expect the first event, you have no trouble responding to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate. A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It’s estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos- say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other – and they will fail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying. A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus – braking when you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she’s thinking of leaving youre dad –also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the “response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952. But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, doesn’t buy the bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers. He has written papers with titles like “Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck”. His experiments have shown that with enough practice – at least 2000 tries- 雅思考试机经

some people can execute two tasks simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other. He suggests that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates all this and, what’s more, he thinks it uses discretion: sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another. Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. He has found that with just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteers show a huge improvement at managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in the chance to find less congested circuits to execute a task – rather like finding trusty back streets to avoid heavy traffic on main roads –effectively making our response to the task subconscious. After all, there are plenty of examples of subconscious multitasking that most of us routinely manage: walking and talking, eating and reading, watching TV and folding the laundry. It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worse at multitasking as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the decline is slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young drivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers. It's not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit from practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, brain scans showed that underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active. While it's clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering. “We have this impression of an almighty complex brain,” says 雅思考试机经

Marois, “and yet we have very humbling and crippling limits.” For most of our history, we probably never needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven’t evolved to be able to. Perhaps we will in future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of true multitaskers.