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1、READING PASSAGE 1You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on ReadingPassage 1 on pages 3 and 4.Questions 1-6Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F.Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 1-6

2、 on your answer sheet.List of Headingsi The appearance and location of different seaweedsii The nutritional value of seaweedsiii How seaweeds reproduce and growiv How to make agar from seaweedsv The under-use of native seaweedsvi Seaweed species at risk of extinctionvii Recipes for how to cook seawe

3、edsviii The range of seaweed productsix Why seaweeds don t sink or dry outParagraph AParagraph BParagraph CParagraph DParagraph EParagraph F #Seaweeds of New ZealandA Seaweed is a particularly wholesome food, which absorbs and concentrates traces of a wide variety of minerals necessary to the body s

4、 health. Many elements mayoccur in seaweed-aluminum, barium, calcium, chlorine, copper, iodine and iron, to name but a few-traces normally produced by erosion and carried to the seaweed beds by river and sea currents. Seaweeds are also rich in vitamins; indeed, Inuits obtain a high proportion of the

5、ir bodily requirements of vitamin C from the seaweeds they eat. The health benefits of seaweed have long been recognized. For instance, there is a remarkably low incidence of goiter among the Japanese, and also among New Zealand s indigenous Maori people, who have always eaten seaweeds, and this may

6、 well be attributed to the high iodine content of this food. Research into historical Maori eating customs shows that jellies were made using seaweeds, nuts, fuchsia and tutu berries, cape gooseberries, and many other fruits both native to New Zealand and sown there from seeds brought by settlers an

7、d explores. As with any plant life, some seaweeds are more palatable than others, but in a survival situation, most seaweeds could be chewed to provide a certain sustenance.B New Zealand lays claim to approximately 700 species of seaweed, some of which have no representation outside that country. Of

8、 several species grown worldwide, New Zealand also has a particularly large share. For example, itis estimatedthatNewZealand has some 30 species of Gigartina, a close relative of carrageen of Irish moss. These are often referred to as the NewZealand carrageens. The substance called agar which can be

9、 extracted from these species gives them great commercialapplication in the production of seameal, from which seameal custard (a food product) is made, and in the canning, paint and leather industries. Agar is also used in the manufacture of cough mixtures, cosmetics, confectionery and toothpastes.

10、In fact, during World War II, New Zealand Gigartina were sent to Australia to be used in toothpaste.C New Zealand has many of the commercially profitable red seaweeds, severalspecies of which are a source of agar ( Pterocladia, Gelidium, Chondrus, Gigartina). Despite this, these seaweeds were not mu

11、ch utilized until several decades ago.Although distribution of the Gigartina is confined to certain areas according to species. And even then, the east coast, and the area around Hokianga, have a considerable supply of the two species of Pterocladia from which agar is also made. New Zealand used to

12、import the Northern Hemisphere Irish moss ( Chondrus crispus) from England and ready-made agar from Japan.D Seaweeds are divided into three classes determined by colour-red, brown andgreen-and each tends to live in a specific position. However, expect for the unmistakable sea lettuce (Ulva), few are

13、 totally one colour; and especially when dry, some species can change color significantly-a brown one may turn quite black, or a red one appear black, brown, pink or purple. Identification is nevertheless facilitated by the fact that the factors which determine where a seaweed will grow are quite pr

14、ecise, and they tend therefore to occur in very well-defined zones.Although there are exceptions, the green seaweeds are mainly shallow-water algae;the browns belong to the medium depths; and the reds are plants of the deeper water, furthest from the shore. Those shallow-water species able to resist

15、 long periods of exposure to sun and air are usually found on the upper shore, while those less able to withstand such exposure occur nearer to, of below, the low-water mark.Radiation from the sun, the temperature level, and the length of time immersed also play a part in the zoning of seaweeds. Fla

16、t rock surfaces near mid-level tides are the most usual habitat of sea- bombs, Venus necklace, and most brown seaweeds. This is also reddish-purple lettuce. Deep-water rocks on open coasts, exposed only at very low tide, are usually the site of bull-kelp, strapweeds and similar tough specimens. Kelp

17、, or bladder kelp,has stems that rise to the surface from massive bases or holdfasts, the leafy branches and long ribbons of leaves surging with the swells beyond the line of shallow coastal breakers or covering vast areas of calmer coastal water.E Propagation of seaweeds occurs by seed-like spores,

18、 or by fertilizationof eggcells. None have roots in the usual sense; few have leaves; and none have flowers, fruits or seeds. The plants absorb their nourishment through their leafy fronds when they are surrounded by water; the holdfast of seaweeds is purely an attaching organ not an absorbing one.F

19、 Some of the large seaweeds stay on the surface of the water by means of air-filled floats; others, such as bull-kelp, have large cells filledwith air, oftenreduce dehydration either by having swollen stems that contain water, or they may(likeVenus necklace)have swollen nodules, or they may have a d

20、istinctive shapelike a sea-bomb. Others, like the sea cactus,are filled with a slimy fluidor havea coating of mucilage on the surface. In some of the larger kelps, this coating is not only to keep the plant moist, but also to protect it from the violent action of waves. Questions 7-10Complete the fl

21、ow-chart below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes7-10 on your answer sheet.Gigartina seaweed(other name : 7)ProducesIsto make-medicines,suchAs 10Is used to makecosmeticsA type of custardsweets6toothpastesQuestions 11-13Classify the following

22、characteristics as belong toA brown seaweedB green seaweedC red seaweedWrite the correct letter, A, B or C, in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.11 can survive the heat and dryness at the high-water mark12 grow far out in the open sea13 share their site with karengo seaweedREADING PASSAGE 2You should

23、 spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on pages 6 and 7.TWO WINGS AND A TOOLKITA research team at Oxford University discover the remarkable toolmaking skills of New Caledonian crownsBetty and her mate Abel are captive crows in the care of Alex Kacelnik, an e

24、xpertin animal behavior at Oxford University. They belong to a forest-dwelling species of bird ( Corvus moneduloides) confined to two islands in the South Pacific. New Caledonian crows are tenacious predators, and the only birds that habitually use a wide selection of self-made tools to find food.On

25、e of the wild crows cleverest tools in the crochet hook, made by detaching a side twig from a larger one, leaving enough of the larger twig to shape into a hook.Equally cunning is a tool crafted from the barbed vine-leaf, which consists of acentral rib with paired leaflets each with a rose-like thor

26、n at the top, which remains as a ready-made hook to prise out insects from awkward cracks.The crows also makean ingenious tool called a padanus probe from padanus tree leaves.The tool has a broad base, sharp tip, a row of tiny hooks along one edge, and a tapered shape created by the crow nipping and

27、 tearing to form a progression of three or four steps along the other edge of the leaf. What makes this tool special is that they manufacture it to a standard design, as if following a set of instructions.Although it is rare to catch a crow in the act of clipping out a padanus probe,we do have ample

28、 proof of their workmanship: the discarded leaves from which thetools are cut. The remarkable thing that these counterpart leaves tell us isthat crows consistently produce the same design every time. With no in-between or trail versions. It s left the researchers wondering whether, like people, they

29、 envisage the tool before they start and perform the actions they know are neededto make it. Research has revealed that genetics plays a part in the lesssophisticated toolmaking skills of finches in the Galapagos islands. No one knows if that s also the case for New Caledonian crows, but it s highly

30、 unlikely that their toolmaking skills are hardwired into the brain. “ The picture so far points to a combination of cultural transmission-from parent birds to their young-and individual resourcefulness ” , says Kacelnik.In a test at Oxford, Kacelnik s team offered Betty and Abel an originalchalleng

31、e- food in a bucket at the bottom of a well . The only way to get thefood was to hook the bucket out by its handle. Given a choice of tools-a straightlength of wire and one with a hooked end- the birds immediately picked the hook, showing that they did indeed understand the functional properties of

32、the tool. #But do they also have the foresight and creativity to plan the construction of their toolsIt appears they do. In one bucket-in-the-well test. Abel carried off the hook, leaving Betty with nothing but the straight wire. What happened next was absolutely amazing , says Kacelnik. She wedged

33、the tip of the wire into a crackin a plastic dish and pulled the other end to fashion her own hook. Wild crows don t have access to pliable, bendable material that retains its shape, and Betty s only similar experience was a brief encounter with some pipe cleaners a year earlier.In nine out of ten f

34、urther tests, she again made hooks and retrieved the bucket.The question of what s going on in a crow s mind will take time and a lot more experiments to answer, but there could be a lesson in it for understanding our own evolution.Maybe our ancestors, who suddenly began to create symmetrical tools

35、withcarefully worked edges some million years ago, didn t actually have the sophisticated mental abilities with which we credit them. Close scrutiny of the brains of New Caledonian crows might provide a few pointersto the specialattributes they would have needed. Ifwe re lucky we may find specificde

36、velopments in the brain that set these animals apart, says Kacelnik.One of these might be a very strong degree of laterality-the specialization of one side of the brain to perform specific tasks. In people, the left side of the brain controls the processing of complex sequential tasks, and also lang

37、uage and speech. One of the consequences of this is thought to be right-handedness. Interestingly, biologists have noticed that most padanus proves are cut from the left side of the leaf, meaning that the handedness. The team thinks this reflects the fact that theleft side of the crow s brain is spe

38、cialized to handle the sequential pro cessing required to make complex tools.Under what conditions might this extraordinary talent have emerged in these two species They are both social creatures, and wide-ranging in their feeding habits. These factors were probably important but, ironically, it may

39、 have been their shortcomings that triggered the evolution of toolmaking. Maybe the ancestors of crows and humans found themselves in a position of where they couldn t make thephysical adaptations required for survival - so they had to change their behavior instead. The stage was then set for the ev

40、olution of those rare cognitive skills that produce sophisticated tools. New Caledonian crows may tell us what those crucial skills are. # Questions 14-17Label the diagrams below.Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.THR

41、EE TOOLS MADE BY CROWSQuestions 18-23Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage2In boxes 18-23 on your answer sheet, writeTRUE if the statements agree with the informationFALSE if the statements contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on t

42、his18 there appears to be a fixed patter for the padanusprobe s construction.19 there is plenty of evidence to indicatehow the crows manufacture the padanusprove20 crowsseem to practice a number of times before making a usable padanus probe21 theresearchers suspect the crows have a mental images of

43、the padanus probebefore they create it.research into how the padanus probe is made as helped to explain thetoolmaking skills of many other bird species.the researchers believe the ability to make the padanus probe is passed down to the crows in their genesQuestions 24-26Choose THREE letters, A-GWrit

44、e the correct letters in boxes 24-26 on you answer sheet.According to the information in the passage, which THREEof the following features are probably common to both New Caledonian crows and human beingsA keeping the same mate for lifeB having few natural predatorsC having a bias to the right when

45、workingD being able to process sequential tasksE living in extended family groupsF eating a variety of foodstuffsG being able to diverse habitats READING PASSAGE 3You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 on pages 10 and 11.How did writing beginMany t

46、heories, few answersThe Sumerians, an ancient people of the Middle East, had a story explaining the invention of writing more than 5000 years ago. It seems a messenger of the king of Uruk arrived at the court of a distant ruler so exhausted that he was unable to deliver the oral message. So the king

47、 set downthe words of his next messages on a clay tablet.A charming story, whose retelling at a recent symposium at the university of Pennsylvania amused scholars. They smiled at the absurdity of a letter which the recipient would not have been able to read. They also doubted that the earliest writi

48、ng was a direct rendering of speech. Writing more likely began as a separate, symbolic system of communication and only later merger with spoken language.Yet in the story the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia, in what is now southernIraq, seemed to understand writing s transforming function. As Dr

49、 Holly Pittman, director of the University s Center for Ancient Studies, observed, writing arose out of the need to stor e and transmit information over time and space .In exchanging interpretations and information, the scholars acknowledged that they still had no fully satisfying answers to the que

50、stions of how and why writingdeveloped.Many favouratedan explanation of writing s origins in the visual arts,pictures becoming increasinglyabstract and eventually representing spoken words.Their views clashed with a widely held theory amongarchaeologists writing developed from the pieces of clay tha

51、t Sumerian accountants used as tokens to keep track of goods.Archaeologists generally concede that they have no definitive answer to the question of whether writing was invented only once, or arose independently in several places, such as Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mexico and Central America. T

52、he preponderance of archaeological data shows that the urbanizing Sumerians were the first to develop writing, in 3200 or 3300 BC. These are the dates for many clay tablets in an early form of cuneiform, a script written by pressing the end of a sharpened stick into wet clay, found at the site of th

53、e ancient city of Uruk. the baked clay tablets bore such images as pictorial symbols of the names of people, place and things connected with government and commerce. The Sumerian script gradually evolved from the pictorial to the abstract, but did not at first represent recorded spoken language. #Dr

54、 Peter Damerow, a specialist in Sumerian cuneiform at the Mac Planck Institutefor the History of Science in Berlin, said,“ It is likely that there were mutualinfluences of writing systems around the world. However, their great variety nowshows that the development of writing, once initiated, attains

55、 a considerable degree of independence and flexibility to adapt to specific characteristics of the sounds of the language to be representation of words by pictures. New studies of early Sumerian writing, he said, challenge this interpretation. The structures of this earliest writing did not, for exa

56、mple, match the structure of spoken language, dealing mainly in lists and categories rather than in sentences and narrative.For at least two decades, Dr Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a University of Texas archaeologist, has argued that the first writing grew directly out of a system practiced by Sumeria

57、n accountants. They used clay tokens, each one shaped to represent a jar of oil, a container of grain of a particular kind of livestock.Thesetokens were sealed inside clay spheres, and then then number and type of tokens inside was recorded on the outside using impressions resembling the tokens. Eve

58、ntually, the token impressions were replaced with inscribed signs, and writing had been invented.Though Dr Schmandt-Besserat has won much support, some linguists question her thesis, and others, like Dr Pittman, think it too narrow. They emphasise that pictorial representation and writing evolved to

59、gether. There s no question that the token system is a forerunner of writing, Dr Pittman said, but I have an argument with her evidence for a link between tokens and sign s, and she doesn t open up the process to include picture making.Dr Schmandt- Besserat vigorously defended her ideas. My colleagu

60、es say that pictures were the beginning of writing, she said, but show me a single picturethat becomes a sign in writing. They say that designs on pottery were the beginning of writing, but show me a single sign of writing you can trace back to a pot- itdoesn t exist. In its first 500 years, she ass