Passage 2(2017届河南豫南九校高三下期质量考评)
体裁 | 话题 | 词数 | 难度 | 正确率 |
应用文 | 狗什么时候第一次成为＂人类最好的朋友＂和＂世界上最喜爱的宠物 | 334 | ★★★☆☆ |
Have you ever wondered when dogs first became ＂man’s best friend＂ and the world’s favourite pet? If you have then you’re not alone. When and where dogs first began living side-side with humans are questions that have stirred hot debate among scientists. There are a few hard facts that all agree on. These include that dogs were once wolves and they were the first animal to be domesticated(驯养) by humans. They came into lives some 15000 years ago, before the dawn of agriculture.
Beyond that, there is little agreement. The earliest bones found that are unquestionable dogs and not wolves date from 14,000 years ago. However, 30,000-year-old skulls have been discovered in France and Belgium that are not pure wolf and some scientists think could be dogs.
With such puzzling evidence, many scientists are now turning to DNA to find out when and where dogs were first domesticated. In one research project, tens of thousands of blood samples have been taken from street dogs around the world. The plan is to compare them with those of wolves. It’s even possible to analyse DNA from ancient bones. Tiny pieces of the 30,000-year-old skulls mentioned earlier are currently being studied, and another DNA study has already shown that ancient dogs preserved in the Alaskan ice-fields evolved from Asian wolves, not American ones.
Indeed, the ancient DNA may turn out to be more informative than the DNA of living dogs. Because dogs have accompanied humans around the world for thousands of years, their current distribution may tell us very little of their origins. This is why different groups of scientists believe that dogs variously originated in eastern Asia, Mongolia, Siberia, Europe or Africa.
But why were the animals domesticated in the first place? The most recent theory is that dogs domesticated themselves, initially living in and around our ancient villages to eat any food thrown out. Today, this is a way of life still shared by three -quarters of a billion unowned dogs worldwide.
1.Which is the only statement generally agreed on by scientists studying dogs?
A. They originally were used as farm animal
B. They evolved from wolves found in Europe
C. They helped the development of agriculture
D. They were the first animal to be kept as pets
2.Why does the writer first mention the 30,000-year-old animals skulls?
A. To show that dogs were much larger in the past
B. To prove that dogs developed from Asian wolves
C. To suggest that dogs may have evolved much earlier
D. To argue that dogs were first kept in France and Belgium
3.How did scientists determine the origins of the ancient dogs found in Alaska?
A. By examine the animals’ DNA
B. By analyzing the age of their bones
C. By studying the shape of their skulls
D. By comparing them with modern dogs
4.Why did dogs start living with humans?
A. Because they were attracted by food
B. Because they were trapped by humans
C. Because they couldn’t survive in the wild
D. Because they were trained to protect villages
Passage 3（2017届江西省上高二中高三考）
体裁 | 话题 | 词数 | 难度 | 正确率 |
说明文 | Jake Beckman呼吁出版商应对读者负责 | 361 | ★★★☆☆ |
The Internet is full of headlines that grab your attention with buzzwords (流行词). But often when we click through, we find the content hardly delivers and it wastes our time. We close the page, feeling we’ve been cheated. These types of headlines are called ＂click bait＂.
A headline on Businesslnsider.com reads: ＂This phrase will make you seem more polite＂. First, when you click through, you find another headline: ＂Four words to seem more polite.＂ Then, on reading the article, you find it’s actually an essay about sympathy. And what are the four words? They’re ＂Wow, that sounds hard.＂ On some video websites, you might encounter headlines such as ＂Here’s what happens when six puppies visited a campus＂. Turns out it’s just some uninteresting dog footage (镜头).
Nowadays, with the popularity of social media, many news outlets tweet (推送) click bait links to their stories. These tweets take advantage of the curiosity gap or attempt to draw the reader into a story using a question in the headline. These click bait headlines are so annoying that someone is attempting to save people time by exposing news outlet click bait through social media. The Twitter account @SavedYouAClick, run by Jake Beckman, is one such example.
Beckman’s method is to grab tweets linking to a story and retweet them with a click-saving comment. For example, CNET tweeted ＂So iOS 8 appears to be jailbreakable but...＂, with a link to its coverage of Apple’s product announcements. Beckman retweeted it with this comment attached: ＂... it hasn’t been jailbroken yet.＂
Since founding the account, Beckman’s Twitter experiment has brought him more than 131,000 followers. Beckman said that @SavedYouAClick is…＂just my way of trying to help the Internet be less terrible.＂ Asked about his goal, he said, ＂I’d love to see publishers think about the experience of their readers first. I think there’s an enormous opportunity for publishers to provide readers with informative updates that include links so you can click through and read more.
1.The article on Businesslnsider.com turns out to be___________.
A. useful suggestions on politeness
B.an essay about another topic
C.an article hard to understand
D. a link to a video website
2.Why are readers often cheated by tricky headlines?
A. Social media has become more popular.
B. Readers have questions to be solved.
C. Such headlines are fairly attractive.
D. There’re always stories behind them.
3.Beckman attached his comment to CNET’s tweet to __________.
A. criticize CNET B. save readers’ time
C. advertise apple’s new product D. tell readers something about iOS 8
4.In the last paragraph, Beckman appeals that _________.
A. publishers be more responsible for the link
B. readers think about their needs before reading
C. publishers provide more information for readers
D. people work together to make the Internet less terrible
Passage 4（2016届江西省九校高三下学期联考）
体裁 | 话题 | 词数 | 难度 | 建议时间 |
说明文 | 狗的祖先 | 325 | ★★★☆☆ | 8分钟 |
Where do dogs come from?
Gray wolves are their ancestors. Scientists are pretty consistent about that. And researchers have suggested that dogs’ origins can date back to Europe, the Near East, Siberia and South China. Central Asia is the newest and best candidate, according to a large study of dogs from around the world.
Laura M. Shannon and Adam R. Boyko at Cornell University, and an international group of other scientists, studied not only purebred(纯种的) dogs, but also street or village dogs.
Dr. Shannon analyzed three different kinds of DNA, Dr. Boyko said, the first time this has been done for such a large and diverse group of dogs from 38 countries. And that led them to Central Asia as the place of origin for dogs in much the same way that genetic studies have located the origin of modern humans in East Africa.
The analysis, Dr. Boyko said, pointed to Central Asia, as the place where ＂all the dogs alive today＂ come from. The data did not allow precise dating of the origin, he said, but showed it occurred at least 15,000 years ago.
Greger Larson of Oxford University, who is leading a large international effort to analyze ancient DNA from fossilized bones, said he was impressed by the study. ＂It’s really great to see not just the number of street dogs, but also the geographic breadth and the number of remote locations where the dogs were sampled,＂ he said in an email. He also praised the sampling of different kinds of DNA and the analytic methods.
Dr. Larson, who was not involved with the study, said he thought the Central Asia finding required further testing. He said he suspected that the origins of modern dogs were ＂extremely messy＂ and that no amount of sampling of living populations will be definitive. He said a combination of studies of modern and ancient DNA is necessary.
1.According to the research on a large number of dogs, we can know____________.
A. dogs mainly lived in Europe and the Far East
B. dogs would like to live in Central Asia
C. dogs’ ancestors come from gray wolves
D. the Near East has many gray wolves
2.What can we infer from what Dr. Boyko said?
A. There are three different kinds of DNA in dogs.
B. This is the second time they have done so many dogs.
C. They only do research on village dogs from many countries.
D. Modern humans are from East Africa while dogs come from Central Asia.
3.Greger Larson got a very deep impression of his study because he____________.
A. found the study based on many different dogs and the sample dogs’ remote locations
B. saw the number of street dogs from fossilized bones
C. watched the geographic breadth of the sampled dogs
D. praised his teammates for their hard work on the dogs
4.Who wasn’t engaged in the study of dogs’ origins?
A. Laura M. Shannon B. Adam R. Boyko
C. Shannon and Boyko D. Greger Larson