P1 Selling model 销售模式

P2 Pollution in the Bay 海湾污染 （20160519旧题重现）

P3 Elephant communication 大象交流（20161109旧题重现）

 

朗阁教师冯昳点评

1. 本次考试整体程度中等偏低。

2. 整体分析：涉及商业（P1）环境（P2）和动物类（P3）

3. 主要题型：这一场考试在题型上仍然延续了今年考试的重点，主流基础题型依然为填空类和判断题。其中，填空类高达17题，且都是考生熟悉的句子填空和Summary题型，总体来说难度偏低。此外，判断题则保持近期一贯两组10题左右出题风格，为 P1—T/F/NG（7道）及P2—T/F/NG（5道）。同时，阅读第二篇文章延续了今年大热的乱序匹配题，在 P2中已经出现了8道，P3中出现了3道，这无疑增加了考试的难度，而幸运的是比较热门的Heading题没有出现，同时由于第二篇和第三篇为旧题重现，且第三篇考察点并不难。综合以上因素，总体来说，这次考试的难度中等偏低。

 

P1 Selling model   （原文待补充）

文章主旨：新销售模式的研究方法以及买卖者之间的关系

判断6 ＋ 填空7

 

参考答案：仅供参考

判断 1-6

1.待补充

2.待补充

3.待补充

4.待补充

5.待补充

6.待补充

 

填空 7-13

7.待补充

8.待补充

9.待补充

10.待补充

11.待补充

12.待补充

13.待补充

 

P2 Going with flow-Florida bay’s ecological problems

文章主旨: 佛罗里达海湾的污染以及对环境原因的研究和应对措施

配对题 8（段落信息匹配＋人名观点匹配）＋判断5 

 

参考答案: 仅供参考

段落信息匹配题 14-17

14.E

15.C

16.H

17.B

 

人名观点匹配题 18-21

18.C

19.B

20.B

21.A

 

判断题 22-26

22.F

23.NG

24.F

25.T

26.T

 

参考原文：

Pouring water into the sea sounds harmless enough. But in Florida Bay, alarge and shallow section of the Gulf of Mexico that lies between the southern end of the Everglades and the Florida Keys, it is proving highly controversial. That is because researchers are divided over whether it will help or hinder the plants and animals that live in the bay.

 

What is at risk is the future of the bay’s extensive beds of sea grasses. These grow on the bay’s muddy floor and act as nurseries for the larvae of shrimps, lobsters and fish—many of them important sport and commercializing species. Also in danger is an impressive range of coral reefs that run the length of the Florida Keys and form the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Since the 1980s, coral cover has dropped by 40%, and a third of the coral species have gone. This has had a damaging effect on the animals that depend on the reef, such as crabs, turtles and nearly 600 species of fish.

 

What is causing such ecological change is a matter of much debate. And the answer is of no small consequence. This is because the American government is planning to devote $8 billion over the next 30 years to revitalizing the Everglades. Seasonal freshwater flows into the Everglades are to be restored in order to improve the region’s health. But they will then run off into the bay.

 

Joseph Zieman, a marine ecologist at the University of Virginia, thinks this is a good idea. He believes that a lack of freshwater in the bay is its main problem. The blame, he says, lies with a century of drainage in the Everglades aimed at turning the marshes into farmland and areas for development. This has caused the flow of freshwater into Florida Bay to dwindle, making the water in the bay, overall, more saline. This, he argues, kills the sea grasses, and as these rot, nutrients are released that feed the microscopic plants and animals that live in the water. This, he says, is why the bay’s once crystal-clear waters often resemble a pea soup. And in a vicious circle, these turbid blooms block out sunlight, causing more sea grasses to die and yet more turbidity.

 

Brian Lapointe, a marine scientist at the Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institution at Fort Pierce in Florida, disagrees. He thinks sea grasses can tolerate much higher levels of salinity than the bay actually displays. Furthermore, he notes that, when freshwater flows through the Everglades were increased experimentally in the 1990s, it led to massive plankton blooms. Freshwater running off from well-fertilised farmlands, he says, caused a fivefold rise in nitrogen levels in the bay. This was like pouring fuel on a fire. The result was mass mortality of sea grasses because of increased turbidity from the plankton. Dr.Lapointe adds that, because corals thrive only in waters where nutrient levels are low, restoring freshwater rich in nitrogen will do more damage to the reef.

 

It is a plausible theory. The water flowing off crops that are grown on the750, 000 acres of heavily fertilised farmland on the northern edge of the Everglades is rich in nitrogen, half of which ends up in the bay. But Bill Kruczynski, of America’s Environmental Protection Agency, is convinced that nitrogen from farmlands is not the chief problem. Some coral reefs well away from any nitrogen pollution are dying and, curiously, a few are thriving. Dr. Kruczynski thinks that increased nutrients arriving from local sewage discharges from the thousands of cesspits along the Florida Keys are part of the problem.

 

Suchclaims and counterclaims make the impact of the restoration plan difficult to predict. If increased salinity is the main problem, the bay’s ecology will benefit from the Everglades restoration project. If, however, nitrogen is the problem, increasing the flow of freshwater could mate matters much worse.

 

If this second hypothesis proves correct, the cure is to remove nitrogen from farmland or sewage discharges，or perhaps both. Neither will be easy. Man-made wetlands, at present being built to reduce phosphate run off into the bay—also from fertilisers—would need an algal culture (a sort of contained algal bloom) added to them to deal with discharges from farmlands. That would be costly. So too would be the replacement of cesspits with proper sewerage—one estimate puts the cost at $650m. Either way, it is clear that when, on December 1st, 3,000 square miles of sea around the reef are designated as a “protective zone” by the deputy secretary of commerce, Sam Bodman, this will do nothing to protect the reef from pollution.

 

Some argue, though, that there is a more fundamental flaw in the plans for the bay: the very idea of returning it to a Utopian ideal before man wrought his damage. Nobody knows what Florida Bay was like before the 1950s, when engineers cut the largest canals in the Everglades and took most of the water away. Dr. Kruczynski suspects it was more like an estuary. The bay that many people wish to re-create could have been nothing more than a changing phase in the bay’s history.

 

These arguments do not merely threaten to create ecological problems but economic ones as well. The economy of the Florida Keys depends on tourism—the local tourist industry has an annual turnover of $2.5 billion. People come for fishing-boat trips, for manatee watching, or for scuba diving and snorkeling to view the exotically coloured corals. If the plan to restore the Everglades makes problems in the bay and the reef worse, it could prove a very expensive mistake.

 

P3 Elephant communication

文章主旨: 研究大象相互沟通的方式

图表填空4 ＋ Summary 6 ＋ 段落信息配对3 ＋ 选择2

 

参考答案: 仅供参考

图表填空题 27-30

27.hammer

28.boy

29.pads

30.sinus cavityes

 

Summary 31-35

31.farmers

32.trunks

33.earth

34.insect 

35.acoustic

 

段落信息配对题 36-38

36.H

37.E

38.G

 

选择题 39-40

39.B

40.A

 

参考原文：

A postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, O’Connell-Rodwell has come to Namibia’s premiere wildlife sanctuary to explore the mysterious and complex world of elephant communication. She and her colleagues are part of a scientific revolution that began nearly two decades ago with the stunning revelation that elephants communicate over long distances using low-frequency sounds, also called infrasounds，that are too deep to be heard by most humans.

 

As might be expected, the African elephant’s ability to sense seismic sound may begin in the ears. The hammer bone of the elephant’s inner ear is proportionally very large for a mammal, but typical for animals that use vibrational signals. It may therefore be a sign that elephants can communicate with seismic sounds. Also, the elephant and its relative the manatee are unique among mammals in having reverted to a reptilian-like cochlear structure in the inner ear. The cochlea of reptiles facilitates a keen sensitivity to vibrations and may do the same in elephants.

　　

But other aspects of elephant anatomy also support that ability. First, their enormous bodies, which allow them to generate low-frequency sounds almost as powerful as those of a jet takeoff, provide ideal frames for receiving ground vibrations and conducting them to the inner ear. Second, the elephant’s toe bones rest on a fatty pad that might help focus vibrations from the ground into the bone. Finally, the elephant’s enormous brain lies in the cranial cavity behind the eyes in line with the auditory canal. The front of the skull is riddled with sinus cavities that may function as resonating chambers for vibrations from the ground.

 

How the elephants sense these vibrations is still unknown, but O’Connell- Rodwell who just earned a graduate degree in entomology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, suspects the pachyderms are “listening” with their trunks and feet. The trunk may be the most versatile appendage in nature. Its uses include drinking, bathing, smelling, feeding and scratching. Both trunk and feet contain two kinds of pressure-sensitive nerve endings— one that detects infrasonic vibrations and another that responds to vibrations with slightly higher frequencies. For O’Connell-Rodwell, the future of the research is boundless and unpredictable: “Our work is really at the interface of geophysics, neurophysiology and ecology,” she says. “We’re asking questions that no one has really dealt with before.”

 

Scientists have long known that seismic communication is common in small animals, including spiders, scorpions，insects and a number of vertebrate species such as white-lipped frogs, blind mole rats， kangaroo rats and golden moles. They also have found evidence of seismic sensitivity in elephant seals— 2-ton marine mammals that are not related to elephants. But O’ Connell-Rod well was the first to suggest that a large land animal also is sending and receiving seismic messages. O’ Connell-Rod well noticed something about the freezing behavior of Etosha’s six-ton bulls that reminded her of the tiny insects back in her lab. “I did my masters thesis on seismic communication in planthoppers,” she says‘. I’d put a male planthopper on a stem and play back a female call, and the male would do the same thing the elephants were doing: He would freeze, then press down on his legs, go forward a little bit, then freeze again. It was just so fascinating to me, and it’s what got me to think, maybe there’s something else going on other than acoustic communication.”

 

Scientists have determined that an elephant’s ability to communicate over long distances is essential for its survival, particularly in a place like Etosha, where more than 2,400 savanna elephants range over an area larger than New Jersey. The difficulty of finding a mate in this vast wilderness is compounded by elephant reproductive biology. Females breed only when in estrus — a period of sexual arousal that occurs every two years and lasts just a few days. “Females in estrus make these very low, long calls that bulls home in on, because it’s such a rare event/’ O’Connell-Rodwell says. These powerful estrus calls carry more than two miles in the air and may be accompanied by long-distance seismic signals, she adds. Breeding herds also use low-frequency vocalizations to warn of predators. Adult bulls and cows have no enemies, except for humans, but young elephants are susceptible to attacks by lions and hyenas. When a predator appears, older members of the herd emit intense warning calls that prompt the rest of the herd to clump togetherfor protection, then flee. In 1994, O’Connell-Rodwell recorded the dramatic cries of a breeding herd threatened by lions at Mushara. “The elephants got really scared, and the matriarch made these very powerful warning calls, and then the herd took off screaming and trumpeting,” she recalls. “Since then, every time we’ve played that particular call at the water hole, we get the same response — the elephants take off.”

　

Reacting to a warning call played in the air is one thing, but could the elephants detect calls transmitted only through the ground? To find out, the research team in 2002 devised an experiment using electronic equipment that allowed them to send signals through the ground at Mushara. The results of our 2002 study showed us that elephants do indeed detect warning calls played through the ground,” O’ Connell-Rodwell observes. “We expected them to clump up into tight groups and leave the area, and that’s in fact what they did. But since we only played back one type of call, we couldn’t really say whether they were interpreting it correctly. Maybe they thought it was a vehicle or something strange instead of a predator warning.

　　

An experiment last year was designed to solve that problem by using three different recordings— the 1994 warning call from Mushara, an anti-predator call recorded by scientist Joyce Poole in Kenya and an artificial warble tone. Although still analyzing data from this experiment, O’Connell-Rodwell is able to make a few preliminary observations: “The data I’ve seen so far suggest that the elephants were responding like I had expected. When the 94 warning call was played back, they tended to clump together and leave the water hole sooner. But what’s really interesting is that the unfamiliar anti-predator call from Kenya also caused them to clump up, get nervous and aggressively rumble— but they didn’t necessarily leave. I didn’t think it was going to be that clear cut.”

 

考试预测

1. 本场考试难度中等偏低，文章选材涉及商业、环境及动物类，考生可在备考时关注相应高频主题词。

2. 此次考试中，三篇文章两旧一新。第二篇和第三篇分别是为20160519，20161109的旧题重现。考生复习备考时可借机经熟悉雅思阅读真题文章行文思路和逻辑，辅助深化理解。

3. 从题型方面来看，P1中为两种顺序型组合填空加判断类，P2中段落信息和人名观点配对搭配顺序型及P3中的判断，P3中是匹配和选择题搭配填空和判断。从整体的题型来看，10月两场考试的题型皆为常规经典。针对次考生利用剑桥真题和机经复习和巩固常规题型。另外就本次考试难易度来看，考生反映有点偏难，主要是对第二篇文章的匹配题用时过长，导致第三篇比较简单的题目没有时间。因此建议考生在平时做题训练时应该加强对套题题型先后顺序的训练，同时加强对每一题型做题方法训练，提升阅读速度，加强对考点的把握，并且平时刷题练习时一定要注意时间的把握控制以适应考试时的紧张感。

4. 下场考试的话题可能有关历史人文和科技类话题。

5.重点浏览14-16年机经。

文中图片素材来源网络，如有侵权请联系删除