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| 考試日期 | 2012.09.16 |
| Passage 1 | |
| Title: | Native American和歐洲人的Trade |
| 大致內容 | 第一段是綜述，先和美洲人有交流的是一些歐洲人，然后Basque什么的人和美洲人正式開始貿易。 漸漸地，住在水邊的居民開始建造一些storage去放東西，然后有了settlement。 大概有幾個年份，這里有個插入題，我插在了settlement up to from 哪里到哪里之前。 第二段是說歐洲人的科技帶來的變化，改變了美洲人做東西的一些方式。主要提到的是說一些鐵啊鋼啊之類的東西，還有黃銅啊什么的。然后舉例說了梳子，說早期美洲人的梳子都很粗糙，只有2~3個tine, 是用海貍的牙做的。然后和他們有了貿易之后，梳子可以用steel blade來弄，就會比較精細，他們就開始搞裝飾在梳子上了，梳子上有時候還會雕刻歐洲人的形象（有題：關于海貍牙可以推論什么？我選了不是很有效的雕刻工具）。 鋼鐵之類可以給他們帶來安全感和日常操作便利的東西在市場飽和了之后，就開始有其他東西走紅了，更多的是精神上的一些東西，比如原先的紅色的黃色的裝飾珠子開始被一些青銅和類似顏色的鋼鐵制品取代了。然后擁有這些的人就會多出一種地位、財富BLABLA的象征（有題：說這些東西的意義是什么？還有什么貿易變化這類的）。 |
| 相關閱讀 | TPO17-1 Europe's Early Sea Trade with Asia In the fourteenth century, a number of political developments cut Europe's overland trade routes to southern and eastern Asia, with which Europe had had important and highly profitable commercial ties since the twelfth century. This development, coming as it did when the bottom had fallen out of the European economy, provided an impetus to a long-held desire to secure direct relations with the East by establishing a sea trade. Widely reported, if somewhat distrusted, accounts by figures like the famous traveler from Venice, Marco Polo, of the willingness of people in China to trade with Europeans and of the immensity of the wealth to be gained by such contact made the idea irresistible Possibilities for trade seemed promising, but no hope existed for maintaining the traditional routes over land A new way had to be found. The chief problem was technological: How were the Europeans to reach the East? Europe's maritime tradition had developed in the context of easily navigable seas—the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and, to a lesser extent, the North Sea between England and the Continent—not of vast oceans. New types of ships were needed, new methods of finding one's way, new techniques for financing so vast a scheme. The sheer scale of the investment it took to begin commercial expansion at sea reflects the immensity of the profits that such East-West trade could create. Spices were the most sought-after commodities. Spices not only dramatically improved the taste of the European diet but also were used to manufacture perfumes and certain medicines. But even high-priced commodities like spices had to be transported in large bulk in order to justify the expense and trouble of sailing around the African continent all the way to India and China. The principal seagoing ship used throughout the Middle Ages was the galley, a long, low ship fitted with sails but driven primarily by oars. The largest galleys had as many as 50 oarsmen. Since they had relatively shallow hulls, they were unstable when driven by sail or when on rough water: hence they were unsuitable for the voyage to the East. Even if they hugged the African coastline, they had little chance of surviving a crossing of the Indian Ocean Shortly after 1400. Shipbuilders began developing a new type of vessel properly designed to operate in rough, open water: the caravel. It had a wider and deeper hull than the galley and hence could carry more cargo: increased stability made it possible to add multiple masts and sails. In the largest caravels, two main masts held large square sails that provided the bulk of the thrust driving the ship forward, while a smaller forward mast held a triangular-shaped sail, called a lateen sail, which could be moved into a variety of positions to maneuver the ship. The astrolabe had long been the primary instrument for navigation, having been introduced in the eleventh century. It operated by measuring the height of the Sun and the fixed stars: by calculating the angles created by these points, it determined the degree of latitude at which one stood (The problem of determining longitude, though, was not solved until the eighteenth century.) By the early thirteenth century, Western Europeans had also developed and put into use the magnetic compass, which helped when clouds obliterated both the Sun and the stars. Also beginning in the thirteenth century, there were new maps refined by precise calculations and the reports of sailors that made it possible to trace one's path with reasonable accuracy. Certain institutional and practical norms had become established as well. A maritime code known as the Consulate of the Sea, which originated in the western Mediterranean region in the fourteenth century, won acceptance by a majority of sea goers as the normative code for maritime conduct; it defined such matters as the authority of a ship's officers, protocols of command, pay structures, the rights of sailors, and the rules of engagement when ships met one another on the sea-lanes. Thus by about 1400 the key elements were in place to enable Europe to begin its seaward adventure. |
| Passage 2 | |
| Title: | 大氣變化 |
| 大致內容 | 說是在最早的時候大氣里有很多輕元素，比如氫和氦這類的，但是輕的東西比較容易達到逃逸速度然后飛走。 最早的時候地球的引力不夠，然后為了理解這個，給了個highlight（有題），題目是說molecule會不斷地push, 然后漸漸地就diffusion, 所以幾乎atmosphere就不剩下什么了，除非BLABLA可以counter掉這個力。 之后就研究了在這個最早的大氣消失之后的一種大氣，是由火山噴發出來的水汽和comet of frozen water什么的帶出來的gases, 然后這里面含有大量的vapor和CO2。 接著就討論了CO2是怎么沒有的，因為現在的大氣里這兩個都不是主要的了，說是有三個原因導致了CO2的消失：1是降雨，2是某種生物的光合作用導致CO2變O2了，3是會變成某種骨骼物質沉降到海底之類的（有個EXCEPT題）。 最后一段是說氮氣，說氮氣消失的速度非常慢（有題，問前面說CO2消失的兩段和這一段能推論出什么）。 |
| 擴展閱讀 | TPO23-1 Urban Climates The city is an extraordinary processor of mass and energy and has its own metabolism. A daily input of water, food, and energy of various kinds is matched by an output of sewage, solid waste, air pollutants, energy, and materials that have been transformed in some way. The quantities involved are enormous. Many aspects of this energy use affect the atmosphere of a city, particularly in the production of heat. In winter the heat produced by a city can equal or surpass the amount of heat available from the Sun. All the heat that warms a building eventually transfers to the surrounding air, a process that is quickest where houses are poorly insulated. But an automobile produces enough heat to warm an average house in winter, and if a house were perfectly insulated, one adult could also produce more than enough heat to warm it. Therefore, even without any industrial production of heat, an urban area tends to be warmer than the countryside that surrounds it. The burning of fuel, such as by cars, is not the only source of this increased heat. Two other factors contribute to the higher overall temperature in cities. The first is the heat capacity of the materials that constitute the city, which is typically dominated by concrete and asphalt. During the day, heat from the Sun can be conducted into these materials and stored—to be released at night. But in the countryside materials have a significantly lower heat capacity because a vegetative blanket prevents heat from easily flowing into and out of the ground. The second factor is that radiant heat coming into the city from the Sun is trapped in two ways: (1) by a continuing series of reflections among the numerous vertical surfaces that buildings present and (2) by the dust dome the cloudlike layer of polluted air that most cities produce. Shortwave radiation from the Sun passes through the pollution dome more easily than outgoing longwave radiation does; the latter is absorbed by the gaseous pollutants of the dome and reradiated back to the urban surface. Cities, then, are warmer than the surrounding rural areas, and together they produce a phenomenon known as the urban heat island. Heat islands develop best under particular conditions associated with light winds, but they can form almost any time. The precise configuration of a heat island depends on several factors. For example, the wind can make a heat island stretch in the direction it blows. When a heat island is well developed, variations can be extreme; in winter, busy streets in cities can be 17℃ warmer than the side streets. Areas near traffic lights can be similarly warmer than the areas between them because of the effect of cars standing in traffic instead of moving. The maximum differences in temperature between neighboring urban and rural environments is called the heat-island intensity for that region. In general, the larger the city, the greater its heat-island intensity. The actual level if intensity depends on such factors as the physical layout population density, and productive activities of a metropolis. The surface-atmosphere relationships inside metropolitan areas produce a number of climatic peculiarities. For one thing, the presence or absence of moisture is affected by the special qualities of the urban surface. With much of the built-up landscape impenetrable by water, even gentle rain runs off almost immediately from rooftops, streets, and parking lots. Thus, city surfaces, as well as the air above them, tend to be drier between episodes of rain; with little water available for the cooling process of evaporation, relative humidities are usually lower. Wind movements are also modified in cities because buildings increase the friction on air flowing around them. This friction tends to slow the speed of winds, making them far less efficient at dispersing on airflow. Rainfall is also increased in cities. The cause appears to be in part greater turbulence in the urban atmosphere as hot air rises from the built-up surface. TPO10-1 Variations in the Climate One of the most difficult aspects of deciding whether current climatic events reveal evidence of the impact of human activities is that it is hard to get a measure of what constitutes the natural variability of the climate. We know that over the past millennia the climate has undergone major changes without any significant human intervention. We also know that the global climate system is immensely complicated and that everything is in some way connected, and so the system is capable of fluctuating in unexpected ways. We need therefore to know how much the climate can vary of its own accord in order to interpret with confidence the extent to which recent changes are natural as opposed to being the result of human activities. Instrumental records do not go back far enough to provide us with reliable measurements of global climatic variability on timescales longer than a century. What we do know is that as we include longer time intervals, the record shows increasing evidence of slow swings in climate between different regimes. To build up a better picture of fluctuations appreciably further back in time requires us to use proxy records. Over long periods of time, substances whose physical and chemical properties change with the ambient climate at the time can be deposited in a systematic way to provide a continuous record of changes in those properties overtime, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years. Generally, the layering occurs on an annual basis, hence the observed changes in the records can be dated. Information on temperature, rainfall, and other aspects of the climate that can be inferred from the systematic changes in properties is usually referred to as proxy data. Proxy temperature records have been reconstructed from ice core drilled out of the central Greenland ice cap, calcite shells embedded in layered lake sediments in Western Europe, ocean floor sediment cores from the tropical Atlantic Ocean, ice cores from Peruvian glaciers, and ice cores from eastern Antarctica. While these records provide broadly consistent indications that temperature variations can occur on a global scale, there are nonetheless some intriguing differences, which suggest that the pattern of temperature variations in regional climates can also differ significantly from each other. What the proxy records make abundantly clear is that there have been significant natural changes in the climate over timescales longer than a few thousand years. Equally striking, however, is the relative stability of the climate in the past 10,000 years (the Holocene period). To the extent that the coverage of the global climate from these records can provide a measure of its true variability, it should at least indicate how all the natural causes of climate change have combined. These include the chaotic fluctuations of the atmosphere, the slower but equally erratic behavior of the oceans, changes in the land surfaces, and the extent of ice and snow. Also included will be any variations that have arisen from volcanic activity, solar activity, and, possibly, human activities. One way to estimate how all the various processes leading to climate variability will combine is by using computer models of the global climate. They can do only so much to represent the full complexity of the global climate and hence may give only limited information about natural variability. Studies suggest that to date the variability in computer simulations is considerably smaller than in data obtained from the proxy records. In addition to the internal variability of the global climate system itself, there is the added factor of external influences, such as volcanoes and solar activity .There is a growing body of opinion that both these physical variations have a measurable impact on the climate. Thus we need to be able to include these in our deliberations. Some current analyses conclude that volcanoes and solar activity explain quite a considerable amount of the observed variability in the period from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century’s, but that they cannot be invoked to explain the rapid warming in recent decades. |
| Passage 3 | |
| Title: | 蝙蝠的覓食習慣 |
| 大致內容 | 蝙蝠吃很多很多東西，熱帶的蝙蝠吃的東西種類比溫帶的多很多，（有題，答案就是這一句的同意改寫）。 第二段開始講各種diet的區別。 主要覓食：insect (or small animals), nectar, pollen, plant 說是insect提供了balanced diet（有題，問哪個提供最complete的營養，我選的insect, 因為其他幾個講到的時候有括弧說less protein than blabla）。 然后說到了echolocation的能力。一種蝙蝠有這種能力，可以捕捉到insect, 有protein攝入。但是另一種沒有這種能力，就只吃plant。 但它也有辦法補充protein, 因為在digestive tract里可以分泌特殊的enzyme來擴大能吸收的protein的量，也就夠它用了。接著說到了這些蝙蝠覓食和自己的體積是很有關系的，小的就吃nectar pollen plant這類，大的會吃魚、鳥、BLABLA。 最后說蝙蝠的常見覓食地和它的diet也有很大的關系，在水邊的就會吃很多水生昆蟲，飛很高的不會吃scorpion, 但是會吃飛在網上的蜘蛛。 |
| 點評： 本次新托?？荚囃耆貜?011.08.20北美考題。 詞匯題：augment, intricate, supplement, profound, tolerate, exceed, compose, constitute, account for, predominantly等。 | |
