1、雅思（阅读）模拟试卷 14 及答案与解析 一、 Reading Module (60 minutes) 1 READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. From Hand to Mouth A Once again, southern Africa is facing a severe food crisis, it is a chronic problem-and shouldnt be. At the Tr
2、inity hospital in Malawis southern Nsanje district, three-year-old Mboyi is lying listless, his face against the wall. His belly is badly bloated and skin is peeling off his legs. His mother explains that the family has not been able to harvest anything this year, due to poor rains. Mothers in the a
3、rea are already bringing malnourished children to hospitals in alarming numbers. Yet it will be another six months before the next harvest. B Aid agencies are sounding the alarm, hoping that help will come before emaciated childrens haunting images, such as those recently seen in Niger, appear on we
4、stern television screens. The UNs World Food Programme (WFP) says that close to 12 million people across southern Africa will need food aid before the next harvest. The agency is short of more than $150 million to feed them over the next six months. Malawi and Zimbabwe are by far the hungriest, but
5、Mozambique, Zambia, Lesotho and Swaziland are also affected. The drought may be southern Africas worst in a decade. The crucial rains of January, when newly planted crops need water, did not come on time. Nor, in some places, did seeds and fertiliser. Maize, the staple food, is scarce in some areas;
6、 prices in markets have shot up beyond the means of the hungriest. C Though the problem is particularly severe this year, it recurs across southern Africa. Food is produced mainly by subsistence farmers on small plots with no irrigation, their fate tied to rain falling in the right amount at the rig
7、ht time. Bad roads and unreliable transport make it expensive to move food and seeds, Without proper marketing channels, small farmers cannot sell whatever surplus they may have outside their neighbourhoods. This leaves southern Mozambicans hungry, even when crops are plentiful up north. Maize is ii
8、i suited to the climate, needing too much water. In Malawi, there are too many people for the land. Partly due to bad farming, yields are low. And the region has the worlds highest rate of AIDS. D Many small farmers struggle to make ends meet even in good years, so one bad season can be disastrous.
9、And in Swaziland and Mozambique they are facing their fourth dry year in a row. Unable to grow enough to feed themselves or borrow their way out of hard times, farmers end up losing the few assets they have. In Malawi, those without anything left often resort to cutting and selling firewood, further
10、 eroding the soil and making their plots still less productive, or else fishing already depleted waters. Others venture into crocodile-infested rivers to dig out water-lily tubas for food. E Bad government policy sometimes makes things worse. In Zimbabwe, once the regions breadbasket, land grabs hav
11、e crippled commercial agriculture and irrigation systems. Hyperinflation and lack of foreign exchange make it hard to buy seeds and fertiliser, while fuel shortages stymie crop transport. A recent operation to “clean up“ cities by bulldozing supposedly illegal dwellings has left another 700000 peopl
12、e destitute, adding to the ranks of the hungry. The government has so far refused to endorse the UNs proposed emergency programme to help those affected. Other governments are less bloody-minded. Malawi. the worst-hit country, with 5 million people (nearly half its population) needing food handouts,
13、 wants help. In July, President Bingu wa Mutharika asked his compatriots to give to a “feed the nation“ fund: so far, $565000 has been collected. In August. the UN appealed for $88 million. The World Bank will give $30 million. F Harnessing what the region already has would go a long way to offsetti
14、ng its chronic hunger. In southern Malawi, rivers regularly flood-and are badly managed. By contrast a big sugar plantation in Nchalo, its sprinklers spitting out arcs of water. is a green oasis. On a smaller but no less hopeful scale, the nearby Chitsukwa irrigation scheme cost only about $20000 an
15、d provided canals and enough low-tech pumps to water 18 hectares (45 acres), which sustain 176 farmers. Along the canal, women with babies on their backs labour on what look like portable stairmasters, pumping water into their fields: the maize is flourishing. Now armed with better knowledge, farmer
16、s are aiming at three crops a year, instead of the precarious single one to which they were accustomed. A few kilometres down the road. the land is hopelessly dry and barren. G Uladi Mussa, Malawis minister for agriculture and food security, insists that expanding small-scale irrigation is a top pri
17、ority. The potential is there, he explains, but Malawi lacks the know-how and money to do it on its own. Zambia and Mozambique have both welcomed exiled white Zimbabwean farmers, whose skills are already boosting local agriculture. Meanwhile, chronic hunger is threatening southern Africas future gen
18、erations, Close to half of Malawis under-five-year-olds are stunted. Schools unable to feed their pupils report drops in attendance, as children are too weak to walk or are forced to help their parents find food. For them, the damage will remain long after the rains have come. 1 Questions 1-4 The te
19、xt has 7paragraphs (A-G). Which paragraph contains each of the following pieces of information? 1 The main reasons why there is a lack of food in southern Africa year after year. 2 How small development schemes can help to solve the problem. 3 The things that some desperate farmers do to feed themse
20、lves and their families. 4 The size and cost of the problem in southern Africa. 5 Questions 5-8 Complete the following sentences using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the text. 5 The January rains are described as crucial because _ need the water. 6 Maize is an unsuitable crop in much of southern Afri
21、ca because it requires _. 7 In Zimbabwe, much agricultural produce cannot be moved because of _. 8 _can be used instead of irrigation canals to water crops. 9 Questions 9-13 Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage 1? TRUE if the information in the text agr
22、ees with the statement FALSE if the information in the text contradicts the statement NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this 9 Some farmers didnt get seeds to plant this season. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 10 Poor infrastructure means that parts of Mozambique are without food while other parts
23、have plenty. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 11 Southern Africa does not have many of the resources it needs to help solve its food problem. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 12 Zimbabwes government policies have actually helped neighbouring countries in one way. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 13 About half of Mala
24、wis children aged under 5 are malnourished. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 14 READING PASSAGE 2 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below. Looking for life on the ocean wave A Put one buccaneering entrepreneur-cum-bioscientist on a luxury yacht. Usi
25、ng some mighty fine nets, let him trawl the worlds oceans for the smallest creatures. Catalogue the genetic diversity of this, the most abundant form of life in the largest habitat on Earth. Then hijack the molecular machinery of these microbes to make clean energy, new drugs or boost the ability of
26、 the Earths lungs to “breathe“ more carbon dioxide, and so limit global warming. B This may sound like the outline for a sci-fi potboiler but it sums up the remarkable efforts of Craig Venter, the maverick American scientist. Seven years ago, Venter announced at the White House that he had identifie
27、d all the genes-the genome-in the DNA of a human being. It was the culmination of a bitter race with an international consortium of government labs, and his bull-in-a-china-shop approach earned him the epithet “bad boy of science“. C It did not deter him, and while many of the critics in the scienti
28、fic establishment who vilified him disappeared from view, Venter went on to become the first person to read his own genome and is also undertaking an extraordinary effort to create a synthetic genome for an artificial organism. Today, however, he is bobbing in the middle of the Sea of Cortez, mixing
29、 business with pleasure in a project to read marine DNA codes as he sails along the west coast of the Americas. His 2g-metre sloop, Sorcerer II, is a floating laboratory. Rather than use the traditional method of studying micro-organisms by growing them in the lab, which only works with one species
30、in every 100, Venter is obtaining the genetic codes of anything and everything present in sea water. The result is a radical new view of life in the oceans, the modern answer to Charles Darwins 19th century voyage on the HMS Beagle. “We are starting to view the world in a gene-centred fashion,“ Vent
31、er says. “Our goal is to try to sort out evolution, working back from the genes to what organisms are there.“ He calls his approach “metagenomics“. D Microbes make up the vast majority of life on the planet and account for up to 90 per cent of the biological mass in the sea. They are the central pro
32、cessors of matter and energy in ecosystems. They are responsible for the creation and maintenance of the air we breathe. They are also, perhaps, our biggest hope of slowing global warming. Our oceans are the biggest “sink“ of carbon, thanks in part to organisms that absorb carbon from the atmosphere
33、 to build their skeletons and shells, like “lungs“. Remarkably, the vast majority of these organisms are unknown. “It is important to understand their role and function to ensure the survival of the planet and human life,“ says Venter, who is founder and chairman of the J Craig Venter Institute in R
34、ockville, Maryland. E The Sorcerer II expedition began with a pilot project in 2003 in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda in which more than a million new genes were discovered in what was thought to be the marine equivalent of a desert. For the next two years, Venter flew back and forth to join the crew
35、 as it sampled the waters from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the Eastern Tropical Pacific. “I did all the major ocean passages,“ he said. One in particular, through the Panama Canal, up to Cocos Island and down to the Galapagos, “was a transforming event, phenomenal“ as he combined genomics with writing
36、an autobiography and diving with sharks, all under the gaze of a Discovery Channel TV crow. F Using phenomenal computing power to reconstruct and analyse microbial DNA, with a single stage of the calculations taking more than a million hours of supercomputer time, a flood of discoveries has come fro
37、m the latest phase of the expedition. Venter announced in a trio of papers in PloS Biology a few days ago that his team had returned to port with 400 newly discovered microbes and six million new genes. Each gene contains the instructions used to make the proteins that build and operate living thing
38、s, and Venters bounty doubles the number known to science. His company, Synthetic Genomics, wants to harness this genetic information to use the microbes to turn carbon dioxide into propane and other fuels, short-circuiting the traditional geological process where ancient creatures are compressed in
39、to coal and oil over the aeons. Another target is hydrogen production, the ultimate clean fuel. G When it comes to climate change, the expedition has thrown up another key insight. Some parts of the ocean have more carbon-hungry organisms than others, and it used to be thought that populations refle
40、cted local nutrient levels. Venter has found that this may not be the case. The culprit could be bacterial viruses-phages-which keep microbe levels low in some seas. “If we can understand this relationship more, and find out how to inhibit the viruses, or make the bacteria resistant, we would have a
41、 lot more organisms capturing carbon dioxide,“ says Venter. H The biggest impact of his project has been on basic science, overturning many established ideas about the tree of life. It used to be thought that the protein pigment in our own eyes that enables us to detect light was rare. But Venters g
42、ene trawl reveals that all surface marine organisms make proteorhodopsins that detect coloured light. “They turn out to be one of the most abundant and important gene families on the planet,“ he said. Blue and green variants are found in different environments-blue light preferred in the open ocean
43、such as the indigo Sargasso Sea and green light along coasts. Venter believes these proteins help microbes to use energy from the sun, as plants do, but without photosynthesis. Instead, they use this “light-harvesting“ machinery to pump charged atoms in the equivalent of solar batteries. The team di
44、scovered many new proteins that protect microbes from UV rays and some that are involved in repairing the damage caused by UV, They were also surprised to discover that many kinds of protein that were thought to be specific to one kingdom of life were more widespread. This is only the start. “Its cl
45、ear,“ says Venter, “that weve only begun to scratch the surface of understanding the microbial world.“ 14 Questions 14-17 The text has 9paragraphs (A-I). Which paragraph does each of the following headings best fit? 14 How to save the world? 15 Research contradicts conventional ideas 16 Genome race
46、winner 17 The importance of microbes 18 Questions 18-22 According to the text, FIVE of the following statements are true. Write the corresponding letters in answer boxes 18 to 22 in any order. A Craig Venter is an unconventional scientist. B Venter has no scientific qualifications. C Carbon is used
47、to make shells for sea creatures. D The Sargasso Sea has long been thought of as not rich in life. E The genes Venter has discovered are interesting, but scientifically useless. F Venter wants to make bacteria resistant to viruses. G Microbes may use sunlight as energy but without photosynthesis. H
48、Bacteria can protect microbes from too much sunlight. 18 【 18】 _ 19 【 19】 _ 20 【 20】 _ 21 【 21】 _ 22 【 22】 _ 23 Questions 23-26 According to the information given in Reading Passage 2, choose the correct answer or answers from the choices given. 23 Craig Venter _. （ A） is the only person to have rea
49、d his own genetic code. （ B） owns a floating laboratory. （ C） disagrees with Darwins Theory of Evolution. 24 Craig Venters pilot project _. （ A） took place in the Sargasso Sea. （ B） ended at the Galapagos Islands. （ C） gave him the idea of writing his autobiography. 25 Synthetic Genomics, owned by Venter, hopes to _. （ A） make fuel from carbon dioxide. （ B） produce hydrogen. （ C） discover more species of microbe. 26 Before Venters study, it was thought that _. （ A） nutrient
