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08-16
从今天起，小编给大家整理了一些新托福考试经典阅读练习题。要知道阅读一直就是英语考试中的重中之重，所以一定要勤加练习。今天给大家分享一篇名为“THE ORIGINS OF CETACEANS”的文章。
题目：THE ORIGINS OF CETACEANS
It should be obvious that cetaceans-whales, porpoises, and dolphins-are mammals. They breathe through lungs, not through gills, and give birth to live young. Their streamlined bodies, the absence of hind legs, and the presence of a fluke1 and blowhole2 cannot disguise their affinities with land dwelling mammals. However, unlike the cases of sea otters and pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses, whose limbs are functional both on land and at sea),it is not easy to envision what the first whales looked like. Extinct but already fully marine cetaceans are known from the fossil record. How was the gap between a walking mammal and a swimming whale bridged? Missing until recently were fossils clearly intermediate, or transitional, between land mammals and cetaceans.Very exciting discoveries have finally allowed scientists to reconstruct the most likely origins of cetaceans. In 1979, a team looking for fossils in northern Pakistan found what proved to be the oldest fossil whale. The fossil was officially named Pakicefus in honor of the country where the discovery was made. Pakicetus was found embedded in rocks formed from river deposits that were 52 million years old. The river that formed these deposits was actually not far from an ancient ocean known as the Tethys Sea.
The fossil consists of a complete skull of an arc...
08-08
蜜蜂的社会有哪些特殊之处?今天的新托福考试阅读练习资料中我们就要了解这方面的信息。
How male honeybees can be without fathers? The reason lies in what’s called a haploidiploid system of sex determination. Approximately one-fifth of the animal kingdom, including ants and wasps, use this system. What it boils down to is that males are the result of unfertilized eggs whereas females are born from fertilized eggs.
But in bees there is an added complication since there is a gene that determines whether a bee will be male or female. It’s all in the numbers. Here’s how it works.
A scientist isolated a gene called CSD, or Complimentary Sex Determiner. There are 19 different versions of this particular gene. It doesn’t matter which one of these 19 versions a male inherits from his mother; he’s going to be male because of the fact that he has only one of these CSD genes.
Accordingly, a female becomes a female because she has two CSD genes, except for one catch. And that catch is a bee in the bonnet of bee breeders.
Honeybee breeders often inbreed their bees in order to ensure desired traits. However, when bees are inbred it’s possible for fertilized eggs to end up with two copies of the same version of the CSD gene. The result is that the fertilized eggs would normally develop into workers or a new queen, develop into sterilized males.
Worker bees sense these sterile males when they’re still larvae, and...
08-05
常常锻炼身体能让我们的身体保持最佳状态，延缓衰老。这其中有什么内在的原因呢?以下的新托福考试阅读练习资料就会给我们做出解答。
Exercise may hold the key to youth, according to a study published on Monday which showed people who keep fit are up to nine years biologically younger than those who do not.
The findings are the first to show in humans how keeping fit affects the ageing process.
The study of 2,401 twins found that a sedentary lifestyle raises the risk of a range of problems from heart disease to cancer and appears to play a key role in the ageing process.
It all appears to boil down to the length of structures called telomeres -- which protect the DNA on the chromosomes, the researchers from King's College London wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Many studies have shown telomeres get shorter over time, suggesting the cells are ageing or dying. The study, which extracted a DNA sample from their volunteers, found people who exercised more each week had longer telomeres.
Exercise lowers the risk of a range of problems such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, the researchers said.
"It is not just walking around the block. It is really working up a sweat," said Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist who led the study, in a telephone interview.
The study found people who exercised vigorously 3 hours each week had longer telomeres and they were 9 yea...
08-05
社交网络是让当下众多年轻人沉迷的社交平台，而这些平台会对人带来哪些负面影响呢?今天的新托福考试阅读练习资料就来讨论这个话题。
Facebook and Twitter have created a generation obsessed with themselves, who have short attention spans and a childlike desire for constant feedback on their lives, a top scientist believes.
Repeated exposure to social networking sites leaves users with an 'identity crisis', wanting attention in the manner of a toddler saying: 'Look at me, Mummy, I've done this.'
Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, believes the growth of internet 'friendships' – as well as greater use of computer games – could effectively 'rewire' the brain.
This can result in reduced concentration, a need for instant gratification and poor non-verbal skills, such as the ability to make eye contact during conversations.
More than 750million people across the world use Facebook to share photographs and videos and post regular updates of their movements and thoughts. Millions have also signed up to Twitter, the 'micro-blogging' service that lets members circulate short text and picture messages about themselves.
Baroness Greenfield, former director of research body the Royal Institution, said: 'What concerns me is the banality of so much that goes out on Twitter.
'Why should someone be interested in what someone else has had for breakfast? It reminds me of a small child (saying): “Look at me Mummy, I'm doing this...
08-03
眼睛是心灵的窗户，人与人的目光交流有时候胜得过千言万语。下面的新托福考试阅读练习资料就来说说目光交流为什么很重要。
You know how eye contact is a pretty important component of interacting with people,right? So scientists recently tested this by measuring people’s brain activity as they responded to pictures of angry people and pictures of people who look afraid. It turns out that eye contact plays an important role when people are evaluating potential threats.
If we measured your brain activity, we’d see that the part of their brain that regulates emotions and detects potential threats is hard at work. On the other hand, if I've been scowling at something else, like this microphone, this wouldn’t have bothered you nearly as much. And the exact opposite is true for fear. If I was staring at something and looking really frightened, your brain would work harder to figure out if whatever is scaring me may also pose a danger to you.
Eye contact means different things in different situations. If you’re mad and looking at someone, you might be a threat. But if you’re scared and looking at me, it’s unlikely that you’re going to attack. So what the study suggests is that when you’re studying emotions, you have to take eye contact into consideration. It also suggests that in ambiguous situations, your brain has to do more work to process other people’s facial expressions ...
08-03
水是生命之源，如果长期缺水就会造成干旱，下面的新托福考试阅读练习资料中我们就来了解一些关于干旱的知识。
For those of us lucky enough to always have enough food and water, it may be hard to imagine living through a drought. A drought occurs when for a variety of reasons, usually including a lack of rainfall and warm temperatures. Soil moisture severely dwindles. Why and how do these meteorological events occur?
As air swirls around the earth, it rises and sinks over different areas of the globe. When air rises it cools and loses moisture. When air sinks, it grows warmer and absorbs moisture, drying out the land. Sinking air helps to form deserts, such as the Sahara Desert in Africa.
Warm, sinking air can hamper cloud formation, which results in less rain and lower overall humidity. When these conditions occur in an area that normally receives enough rain to allow plants to grow and keep water sources replenished, a drought can ensue. The Dust Bowl that affected the prairie regions of the United States was one infamous drought. An equally severe drought occurred in the United States in the summer of 1988. Rainfall over the mid-west, Northern Plains, and the Rockies was fifty to eighty-five percent below normal.
Sometimes over-farming and soil erosion contribute to drought, but there are also natural disasters that can occur even when soil is carefully preserved. And when a drought hits, there’s ...
08-02
南极对于许多生物来说是荒芜严寒恐怖的死亡大陆，尤其是像苍蝇这样喜欢生活在炎热区域的昆虫。而近来科学家却在南极发现了苍蝇，这是怎么回事呢?下面的新托福考试阅读练习资料里我们会为大家详细介绍。
Sometimes the biggest finds are the smallest finds. Researchers examining a segment of siltstone taken from ground along the Beardmore glacier in Antarctica found something unexpected. They found a fly.
Well, not exactly a fly. They found a fly fossil–it’s a segment of the exoskeleton, the protective shell, of a fly larva. While the larvae are still growing, they are protected by a thin shell. And where there’s larval shell, there are flies. So what are flies doing in Antarctica? It’s much too cold there for flies. And the closest fly-friendly location, South America, is thousands of miles away.
Part of the answer is that the fly fossil is ancient–it was found with a number of other fossilized things that have been dated between three million and seventeen million years old. It’s possible that the fly lived during a period when sea levels were much lower there than they now are. Lower sea levels means wider continents –think of standing on the edge of a beach and having the water pull back. And wider continents means it’s more likely that living things might travel across the gap.
Or maybe not. Maybe flies are much older than anyone thought. We know that what we now call Antarctica was once connected...
08-02
学习乐器是很多孩子的必修课，而研究证明学乐器确实对人大有益处。比如说记忆力方面。以下的新托福考试阅读练习资料就要讨论这个话题。
Even if you haven’t touched a piano in years, if you suffered through music lessons as a kid you may have benefited from those lessons in ways you wouldn’t expect. When you train on a musical instrument your brain is stimulated and changes and develops as a result. Because the parts of the brain are interconnected this stimulation doesn’t affect musical ability only.
Psychologists have discovered that the stimulation musical training enacts on the left temporal region of your brain enhances verbal memory. People with musical training are significantly better at recalling words from a list and learning new words. What’s more, the longer the duration of musical training, the better the verbal memory.
So while children who study music for two years demonstrate better verbal memory than children who have not studied music, children who continue to study music
continue to improve their verbal memory. The good news for those of us who trained on musical instruments but quit at some point is that we don’t seem to lose the verbal benefits we gain from this training.
Scientists are particularly interested in what this suggests about the interconnectedness of the brain and thus the predictability of the effects of stimulation to a brain area on cog...
07-29
在每个人的生活中，挫折和压力是不可避免的。但如何自己帮自己改变消极心态，做个乐天派呢?我们的新托福考试阅读练习材料或许能有好的建议。
"The road to positivity is strewn with the abandoned vehicles of the faint-hearted.”——by Peter McWilliams
Each of us experience setbacks in life, all of which provide us with valuable lessons about the human condition. It is not the setback itself that influences your future, but rather how to react to the negative situation. You’ve heard the adage many times about turning lemons into lemonade, right? Well, this sentiment is absolutely true and can tremendously improve your quality of life.
Turning a negative experience into something more positive isn’t always easy. In fact, some of the most tragic moments in our life seem never-ending when we are experiencing them. However, there is always a way to take a bad situation and extract something positive from it. Below are five ways to do just that.
1. “This too shall pass.” That is what you should initially tell yourself when something bad happens. Repeat those words in your head and even aloud if it helps. The important thing is that you do not panic, as this will only exasperate the negative experience. Every bad moment in your life will end, which can be a comfort during the worst of times.
2. Find purpose in the experience. Some people believe that everything happens for a reason. While you may not buy into that philosophy, you can at least give each experience a purpose. Try to think of a lesson ...
07-29
正在备考新托福考试的朋友们都希望能有过目不忘的好记忆力，那么怎样做到记住所有复习过的知识呢?下面的新托福考试阅读练习材料说，多睡觉自然记得牢。
It is surprising news bound to bring joy to students studying for exams everywhere. The best way to memorise newly-acquired knowledge is to go to sleep, scientists believe. Researchers in Germany found that the brain is better during sleep than during wakefulness at resisting attempts to scramble or corrupt a recent memory. Their study, published in Nature Neuroscience, provides new insights into the hugely complex process by which we store and retrieve deliberately acquired information -- learning, in short.
莘莘学子们听到下面这则出乎意料的新闻后一定是喜上眉梢。据科学家研究显示，要记住刚学到的知识，最好的方法莫过于睡觉。德国研究人员发现，大脑在清醒状态下，试图抵制刚学到的知识等;而大脑在睡眠状态下，更易接收新信息。该研究发表于《自然神经科学》杂志，这一研究结果提供了我们记忆接收信息，简而言之，学习这一错综复杂过程新视点。
Fresh memories, stored temporarily in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, do not gel immediately, earlier research showed. It was also known that reactivation of those memories soon after learning plays a crucial role in their transfer to more permanent storage in the brain's 'hard drive', the neocortex. During wakefulness, however, this period of reactivation renders the memories more fragile. Learning a second poem at this juncture, for example, will likely make it harder to commit the first one to deep memory.
此前，有研究表明，大脑将新记忆暂时储存在海马体中，而海马体不能马上“吸收”。而想要长期储存，就需要在接收知识后不断地刺激，通过这一重要过程，来转化短期记忆为长期记忆，并储存在新皮质。而海马体在处理短期记忆时，不能做到“及时”处理，特别在大脑清醒状态时，海马体对于激活短期记忆会有“迟钝”的本能反应，在清...
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