9月26日雅思阅读考试中包含了传记类、自然类与心理教育类文章，大家可以参考剑桥真题相似文章，以便更好地备考接下来的雅思阅读考试。
Passage 1
题材：人物传记
题目：Thomas Young— The Last True Know-It-All
题型：判断7+填空6
参考文章：
A Thomas Young (1773-1829) contributed 63articles to the Encyclopedia Britannica, including 46 biographical entries (mostly on scientists and classicists) and substantial essays on "Bridge," "Chromatics, ” "Egypt, 11 "Languages" and "Tides". Was someone who could write authoritatively about so many subjects a polymath, a genius or a dilettante? In an ambitious new biography, Andrew Robinson argues that Young is a good contender for the epitaph "the last man who knew everything. " Young has competition, however: The phrase, which Robinson takes for his title, also serves as the subtitle of two other recent biographies: Leonard Warren’s 1998 life of paleontologist Joseph Leidy (1823-1891) and Paula Findlen，s 2004 book on Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), another polymath.
B Young, of course, did more than write encyclopedia entries. He presented his first paper to the Royal Society of London at the age of 20 and was elected a Fellow a week after his 21st birthday. In the paper, Young explained the process of accommodation in the human eye —on how the eye focuses properly on objects at varying distances. Young hypothesized that this was achieved by changes in the shape of the lens. Young also theorized that light traveled in waves and he believed that, to account for the ability to see in color, there must be three receptors in the eye corresponding to the three “principal colors” to which the retina could respond: red, green, violet. All these hypotheses were subsequently proved to be correct.
C Later in his life, when he was in his forties, Young was instrumental in cracking the code that unlocked the unknown script on
the Rosetta Stone, a tablet that was ”found” in Egypt by the Napoleonic army in 1799. The stone contains text in three alphabets: Greek, something unrecognizable and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The unrecognizable script is now known as demotic and, as Young deduced, is related directly to hieroglyphic. His initial work on this appeared in his Britannica entry on Egypt. In another entry, he coined the term Indo-European to describe the family of languages spoken throughout most of Europe and northern India. These are the landmark achievements of a man who was a child prodigy and who, unlike many remarkable children, did not disappear into oblivion as an adult.
D Bom in 1773 in Somerset in England, Young lived from an early age with his maternal grandfather, eventually leaving to attend boarding school. He had devoured books from the age of two, and through his own initiative he excelled at Latin, Greek, mathematics and natural philosophy. After leaving school, he was greatly encouraged by his mother’s uncle, Richard Brocklesby, a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society. Following Brocklesby，s lead, Young decided to pursue a career in medicine. He studied in London, following the medical circuit, and then moved on to more formal education in Edinburgh, G6ttingen and Cambridge. After completing his medical training at the University of Cambridge in 1808, Young set up practice as a physician in London. He soon became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a few years later was appointed physician at St. George’s Hospital.
E Young’s skill as a physician, however, did not equal his skill as a scholar of natural philosophy or linguistics. Earlier, in 1801, he had been appointed to a professorship of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, where he delivered as many as 60 lectures in a year. These were published in two volumes in 1807. In 1804 Young had become secretary to the Royal Society, a post he would hold until his death. His opinions were sought on civic and national matters, such as the introduction of gas lighting to London and methods of ship construction. From 1819 he was superintendent of the Nautical Almanac and secretary to the Board of Longitude. From 1824 to 1829 he was physician to and inspector of calculations for the Palladian Insurance Company. Between 1816 and 1825 he contributed his many and various entries to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and throughout his career he authored numerous books，essays and papers.
F Young is a perfect subject for a biography - perfect, but daunting. Few men contributed so much to so many technical fields. Robinson’s aim is to introduce non-scientists to Young’s work and life. He succeeds, providing clear expositions of the technical material (especially that on optics and Egyptian hieroglyphs). Some readers of this book will, like Robinson, find Young’s accomplishments impressive; others will see him as some historians have - as a dilettante. Yet despite the rich material presented in this book, readers will not end up knowing Young personally. We catch glimpses of a playful Young, doodling Greek and Latin phrases in his notes on medical lectures and translating the verses that a young lady had written on the walls of a summerhouse into Greek elegiaes. Young was introduced into elite society, attended the theatre and learned to dance and play the flute. In
addition, he was an accomplished horseman. However, his personal life looks pale next to his vibrant career and studies.
G Young married Eliza Maxwell in 1804, and according to Robinson，"their marriage was a happy one and she appreciated his work” Almost all we know about her is that she sustained her husband through some rancorous disputes about optics and that she worried about money when his medical career was slow to take off. Very little evidence survives about the complexities of Young’s relationships with his mother and father. Robinson does not credit them，or anyone else, with shaping Young’s extraordinary mind. Despite the lack of details concerning Young’s relationships, however, anyone interested in what it means to be a genius should read this book.
参考答案：
Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1 ?
In boxes 1 -7 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement is true
FALSE if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
1 'The last man who knew everything’ has also been claimed to other people. True
2 All Young’s articles were published in Encyclopedia Britannica. False
3 Like others, Young wasn’t so brilliant when grew up. False
4 Young，s talents as a doctor are surpassing his other skills. NG
5 Young’s advice was sought by people responsible for local and national issues. True
6 Young was interested in various social pastimes. True
7 Young suffered from a disease in his later years. NG
Questions 8-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
8 How many life stories did Young write for Encyclopedia Britannica? 46
9 What aspect of scientific research did Young do in his first academic paper? Human eye accommodation
10 What name did Young introduce to refer to a group of languages? Indo-European
11 Who inspired Young to start the medical studies? Richard Brocklesby
12 Where did Young get a teaching position? Royal Institution
13 What contribution did Young make to London? Gas lighting
(答案仅供参考)
Passage 2
题材：自然类
题目：Monkeys and Forests
题型：匹配9+填空5
参考文章(与原文有出入)：
Monkeys and Forests
AS AN EAST WIND blasts through a gap in the Cordillera de Tilaran, a rugged mountain range that splits northern Costa Rica in half, a female mantled howler monkey moves through the swaying trees of the forest canopy.
Ken Glander，a primatologist from Duke University, gazes into the canopy, tracking the female's movements. Holding a dart gun, he waits with infinite patience for the right moment to shoot. With great care, Glander aims and fires. Hit in the rump, the monkey wobbles. This howler belongs to a population that has lived for decades at Hacienda La Pacifica, a working cattle ranch in Guanacaste province. Other native primates — white-faced capuchin monkeys and spider monkeys — once were common in this area, too, but vanished after the Pan-American Highway was built nearby in the 1950s. Most of the surrounding land was clear-cut for pasture.
Howlers persist at La Pacifica, Glander explains, because they are leaf-eaters. They eat fruit, when it’s available but, unlike capuchin and spider monkeys, do not depend on large areas of fruiting trees. Howlers can survive anyplace you have half a dozen trees, because their eating habits are so flexible,’，he says. In forests, life is an arms race between trees and the myriad creatures that feed on leaves. Plants have evolved a variety of chemical defenses, ranging from bad-tasting tannins, which bind with plant-produced nutrients, rendering them indigestible, to deadly poisons, such as alkaloids and cyanide.
All primates, including humans, have some ability to handle plant toxins. “We can detoxify a dangerous poison known as caffeine, which is deadly to a lot of animals:" Glander says. For leaf-eaters, long-term exposure to a specific plant toxin can increase their ability to defuse the poison and absorb the leaf nutrients. The leaves that grow in regenerating forests, like those at La Pacifica, are actually more howler friendly than those produced by the undisturbed, centuries-old trees that survive farther south, in the Amazon Basin. In younger forests, trees put most of their limited energy into growing wood, leaves and fruit, so they produce much lower levels of toxin than do well- established, old-growth trees.
The value of maturing forests to primates is a subject of study at Santa Rosa National Park, about 35 miles northwest of Hacienda La Pacifica. The park hosts populations not only of mantled howlers but also of white-faced capuchins and spider monkeys. Yet the forests there are young, most of them less than 50 years old. Capuchins were the first to begin using the reborn forests, when the trees were as young as 14 years. Howlers, larger and heavier than capuchins, need somewhat older trees, with limbs that can support their greater body weight. A working ranch at Hacienda La Pacifica also explain their population boom in Santa Rosa. “Howlers are more resilient than capuchins and spider monkeys for several reasons,” Fedigan explains. “They can live within a small home range, as long as the trees have the right food for them. Spider monkeys, on the other hand, occupy a huge home range, so they can’t make it in fragmented habitat.”
Howlers also reproduce faster than do other monkey species in the area. Capuchins don’t bear their first young until about 7 years old, and spider monkeys do so even later, but howlers give birth for the first time at about 3.5 years of age. Also, while a female spider monkey will have a baby about once every four years, well-fed howlers can produce an infant every two years.
The leaves howlers eat hold plenty of water, so the monkeys can survive away from open streams and water holes. This ability gives them a real advantage over capuchin and spider monkeys, which have suffered during the long, ongoing drought in Guanacaste.
Growing human population pressures in Central and South America have led to persistent destruction of forests. During the 1990s, about 1.1 million acres of Central American forest were felled yearly. Alejandro Estrada, an ecologist at Estacion de Biologia Los Tuxtlas in Veracruz, Mexico, has been exploring how monkeys survive in a landscape increasingly shaped by humans. He and his colleagues recently studied the ecology of a group of mantled howler monkeys that thrive in a habitat completely altered by humans: a cacao plantation in Tabasco, Mexico. Like many varieties of coffee, cacao plants need shade to grow, so 40 years ago the
landowners planted fig, monkey pod and other tall trees to form a protective canopy over their crop. The howlers moved in about 25 years ago after nearby forests were cut. This strange habitat, a hodgepodge of cultivated native and exotic plants, seems to support about as many monkeys as would a same-sized patch of wild forest. The howlers eat the leaves and fruit of the shade trees, leaving the valuable cacao pods alone, so the farmers tolerate them.
Estrada believes the monkeys bring underappreciated benefits to such farms, dispersing the seeds of fig and other shade trees and fertilizing the soil with feces. He points out that howler monkeys live in shade coffee and cacao plantations in Nicaragua and Costa Rica as well as in Mexico. Spider monkeys also forage in such plantations, though they need nearby areas of forest to survive in the long term. He hopes that farmers will begin to see the advantages of associating with wild monkeys, which includes potential ecotourism projects.
"Conservation is usually viewed as a conflict between agricultural practices and the need to preserve nature, ” Estrada says. ''We 're moving away from that vision and beginning to consider ways in which agricultural activities may become a tool for the conservation of primates in human-modified landscapes. ”
参考答案：
14-19配对题
14 a reference of reduction in Forest inhabitant G
15 only one species of monkey survived while other two species were vanished A
16 a reason for howler monkey of choosing new leaves C
17 mention to howler monkey’s nutrient and eating habits B
18 a reference of asking farmers’ changing attitude toward wildlife I
19 the advantage for howler monkey’s flexibility living in a segmented habitat D
20-22配对题
List of places
A Hacienda La Pacifica
B Santa Rosa National Park
C A cacao plantation in Tabasco, Mexico
D Estacion de Bio log ia Los Tuxtlas in Veracruz, Mexico
E Amazon Basin
20 howler monkey’s benefit to the local region’s agriculture C
21 original home for all three native monkeys A
22 a place where capuchins monkey comes for a better habitat B
23-27填空题
The reasons for howlers monkey survive better
-Howlers in La Pacifica since they can feed themselves with leaf when 23. fruit is not easily found.
-Howlers have better ability to alleviate the 24. plant toxin, which old and young trees used to protect themselves.
-When compared to that of spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys, the 25. reproduction rate of howlers is relatively faster.
-The monkeys can survive away from open streams and water holes as the leaves howlers eat hold high content of 26. water, which ensure them to resist to continuous 27. drought in Guanacaste.
(答案与真实情况有出入,仅供参考)
Passage 3
题材：心理教育类
题目：Art-based training for engineers
题型：填空6+判断4+单选3
文章大意：CONNECT项目帮助工程师打破与别人的交流障碍,特别是做Presentation时候的沟通困难。造成工程师沟通困难的原因是他们经常只关注他们课题领域上的理论信息，与 别人交流时会产生"audience gap〃这一种交流失败的场景。这个项目主要培训的是表演艺术而非学术专业。
