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雅思阅读经典模拟题
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广告招租,e-mail:yesize@hotmail.com Part Ⅲ Reading Taskswww.test99.com True/False/Not Given Exerciseswww.test99.com Unit2www.test99.com Test99When was the last time you saw a frog? Chances are, if you live in a city, you have not seen one for some time. Even in wet areas once teeming with frogs and toads, it is becoming less and less easy to find those slimy, hopping and sometimes poisonous members of the animal kingdom. All over the world, and even in remote parts of Australia, frogs are losing the ecological battle for survival, and biologists are at a loss to explain their demise. Are amphibians simply oversensitive to changes in the ecosystem? Could it be that their rapid decline in numbers is signaling some coming environmental disaster for us all?的This frightening scenario is in part the consequence of a dramatic increase over the last quarter century in the development of once natural areas of wet marshland; home not only to frogs but to all manner of wildlife. However, as yet, there are no obvious reasons why certain frog species are disappearing from rainforests in Australia that have barelywww.test99.com been touched by human hand. The mystery is unsettling to say the least, for it is known that amphibian species are extremely sensitive to environmental variations in temperature and moisture levels. The danger is that planet Earth might not only lose a vital link in the ecological food chain (frogs keep populations of otherwise pestilent insects at manageable levels), but we might be increasing our output of air pollutants to levels that may have already become irreversible. Frogs could be inadvertently warning us of a catastrophe. www.test99.com 的An example of a species of frog that, at far as is known, has become extinct, is the platypus frog. Like the well-known Australian mammal it was named after, it exhibited some very strange behaviour; instead of giving birth to tadpoles in the water, it raised its young within its stomach. The baby frogs were actually born from out of their mothers mouth. Discovered in 1981, less than ten years later the frog had completely vanished from the crystal clear waters of Booloumba Creek near Queenslands Sunshine Coast. Unfortunately, this freak of nature is not the only frog species to have been lost in Australia. Since the 1970s, no less than eight others have suffered the same fate.www.test99.com www.test99.com TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVENwww.test99.com 的www.test99.com Practice 3www.test99.com www.test99.com www.test99.com Test99Anyone can set up a site; promoting your club, your institution, your companys products or simply yourself, is what the Web and the Internet is all about. And what is more, information on the Internet is not owned or controlled by any one organization. It is, perhaps, true to say that no one and therefore everyone owns the `Net. Because of the relative freedom of access to information, the Internet has often been criticised by the media as a potentially hazardous tool in the hands of young computer users. This perception has proved to be largely false however, and the vast majority of users both young and old get connected with the Internet for the dual purposes for which it was intended - discovery and delight.www.test99.com TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVENwww.test99.com 的www.test99.com Practice 4www.test99.com Test99The Australian political scene is dominated by two major parties that have quite different political agendas. However, the policies of the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party have become much more difficult to tell apart in recent years. In fact, it would be true to say that both parties consist of conservative, moderate and radical elements, and therefore the general public is often perplexed about which party to vote for. Nonetheless, it is usual to find that an Australian will lean towards supporting one of these two parties and remain faithful to that party for life. www.test99.com Test99The Labor Party was formed early in the twentieth century to safeguard the interests of the common working man and to give the trade unions political representation in Parliament. The Party has always had strong connections with the unions, and supports the concept of a welfare society in which people who are less fortunate than others are financially, and otherwise, assisted in their quest for a more equitable slice of the economic pie. The problem is that such socialist political agendas are extremely expensive to implement and maintain, especially in a country that, although comparatively wealthy, is vast and with a small working and hence taxpaying population base. Welfare societies tend towards bankruptcy unless government spending is kept in check. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, argues that the best way to ensure awww.test99.com www.test99.com TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVENwww.test99.com 的www.test99.com Practice 5www.test99.com para 2.It is no secret that competition is the driving force behind the need to obtain increasingly higher qualifications. In the majority of cases, the urge to upgrade is no longer the result of an insatiable thirst for knowledge. The pressure is coming from within the workplace to compete with ever more qualified job applicants, and in many occupations one must now battle with colleagues in the reshuffle for the position one already holds. www.test99.com para 3.Striving to become better educated is hardly a new concept. Wealthy parents have always been willing to spend the vast amounts of extra money necessary to send their children to schools with a perceived educational edge. Working adults have long attended night schools and refresher courses. Competition for employment has been around since the curse of working for a living began. Is the present situation so very different to that of the past?www.test99.com para 4. The difference now is that the push is universal and from without as well as within. A student at secondary school receiving low grades is no longer as easily accepted by his or her peers as was once the case. Similarly, in the workplace, unless employees are engaged in part-time study, they may be frowned upon by their employers and peers and have difficulty even standing still. In fact, in these cases, the expectation is for careers to go backwards and earning capacity to take an appreciable nosedive. www.test99.com para 5.At first glance, the situation would seem to be laudable; a positive response to the exhortation by a former Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, for australia to become the `clever country. Yet there are serious ramifications according to at least one educational psychologist. Dr Brendan Gatsby has caused some controversy in academic circles by suggesting that a bias towards what he terms `paperexcellence might cause more problems than it is supposed to solve. Gatsby raises a number of issues that affect the individual as well as society in general. www.test99.com para 6.Firstly, he believes the extra workload involved is resulting in abnormally high stress levels in both students at secondary school and adults studying after working hours. Secondly, skills which might be more relevant to the undertaking of a sought_after job are being overlooked by employers interviewing candidates without qualifications on paper. These two areas of concern for the individual are causing physical and emotional stress respectively. www.test99.com para 7.Gatsby also argues that there are attitudinal changes within society to the exalted role education now plays in determining how the spoils of working life are distributed. Individuals of all ages are being driven by social pressures to achieve academic success solely for monetary considerations instead of for the joy of enlightenment. There is the danger that some universities are becoming degree factories with an attendant drop in standards. Furthermore, our education system may be rewarding doggedness above creativity; the very thing Australians have been encouraged to avoid.But the most undesirable effect of this academic paper chase, Gatsby says,is the disadvantage that `user payshigher education confers on the poor, who invariably lose out to the more financially favoured. www.test99.com para 8.Naturally, although there is agreement that learning can cause stress, Gatsbys comments regarding university standards have been roundly criticised as alarmist by most educationists who point out that, by any standard of measurement, Australias education system overall, at both secondary and tertiary levels, is equal to that of any in the world.www.test99.com TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVENwww.test99.com 1.It is impossible these days to get a good job without a qualification from a respected institution.www.test99.com Reading Passage 1 below.www.test99.com Test99Research has shown that there is genetic or inherited element to handedness. But while left-handedness tends to run in families, neither left nor right handers will automatically produce off-spring with the same handedness; in fact about 6 per cent of children with two right-handed parents will be left-handed. However, among two left-handed parents, perhaps 40 per cent of the children will also be left-handed. With one right and one left-handed parent, 15 to 20 per cent of the offspring will be lefthanded. Even among identical twins who have exactly the same genes, one in six pairs will differ in their handedness. www.test99.com Test99What then makes people left-handed if it is not simply genetic? Other factors must be at work and researchers have turned to the brain for clues. In the 1860s the French surgeon and anthropologist, Dr Paul Broca, made the remarkable finding that patients who had lost their powers of speech as a result of a stroke (a blood clot in the brain) had paralysis of the right half of their body. He noted that since the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right half of the body, and vice versa, the brain damage must have been in the brains left hemisphere, Psychologists now believe that among right handed people, probably 95 per cent have their language centre in the left hemisphere, while 5 per cent have right-sided language, Left-handers, however,do not show the reverse pattern but instead a majority also Some 30 per cent have right hemisphere language. www.test99.com Test99Dr Brinkman, a brain researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra, has suggested that evolution of speech went with right-handed preference. According to Brinkman, as the brain evolved, one side became specialised for fine control of movement (necessary for producing speech) and along with this evolution came righthand preference. According to Brinkman, most left-handers have left hemisphere dominance but also some capacity in the right hemisphere. She has observed that if a left-handed person is brain-damaged in the left hemisphere, the recovery of speech is quite often better and this is explained by the fact that left-handers have a more bilateral speech function.In her studies of macaque monkeys, Brinkman has noticed that primates (monkeys) seem to learn a hand preference from their mother in the first year of life but this could be one hand or the other. In humans, however, the specialisation in function of the two hemispheres results in anatomical differences; areas that are involved with the production of speech are usually larger on the left side than on the right. Since monkeys have not acquired the art of speech, one would not expect to see such a variation but Brinkman claims to have discovered a trend in monkeys towards the asymmetry that is evident in the human brain. www.test99.com Test99Two American researchers, Geschwind and Galaburda, studied the brains of human embryos and discovered that the left-right asymmetry exists before birth. But as the brain develops, a number of things can affect it. Every brain is initially female in its organisation and it only becomes a male brain when the male foetus begins to secrete hormones. Geschwind and Galaburda knew that different parts of the brain mature at different rates; the right hemisphere develops first, then the left. Moreover, a girls brain develops somewhat faster than that of a boy. So, if something happens to the brains development during pregnancy, it is more likely to be affected in a male and the hemisphere more likely to be involved is the left. The brain may become less lateralised and this in turn could result in left-handedness and the development of certain superior skills that have their origins in the left hemisphere such as logic, rationality and abstraction. It should be no surprise then that among mathematicians and architects, left-handers tend to be more common and there are more left-handed males than females.www.test99.com www.test99.com 的www.test99.com www.test99.com www.test99.com Example Answerwww.test99.com 1 Human beings started to show a preference for right-handedness whenwww.test99.com 的www.test99.com Question 8-10www.test99.com Question 11-12www.test99.com 的www.test99.com Answer Keyswww.test99.com
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