1、雅思（阅读）模拟试卷 73及答案与解析 0 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. William Henry Perkin The man who invented synthetic dyes William Henry Perkin was born on March 12,1838, in London, England. As a boy, Perkins curiosity prompted early interests in
2、the arts, sciences, photography, and engineering. But it was a chance stumbling upon a run-down, yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfathers home that solidified the young mans enthusiasm for chemistry. As a student at the City of London School, Perkin became immersed in the study of chemist
3、ry. His talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his teacher, Thomas Hall, who encouraged him to attend a series of lectures given by the eminent scientist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution. Those speeches fired the young chemists enthusiasm further, and he later went on to attend
4、 the Royal College of Chemistry, which he succeeded in entering in 1853, at the age of 15. At the time of Perkins enrolment, the Royal College of Chemistry was headed by the noted German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. Perkins scientific gifts soon caught Hofmanns attention and, within two years, he
5、 became Hofmanns youngest assistant. Not long after that, Perkin made the scientific breakthrough that would bring him both fame and fortune. At the time, quinine was the only viable medical treatment for malaria. The drug is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America, and b
6、y 1856 demand for the drug was surpassing the available supply. Thus, when Hofmann made some passing comments about the desirability of a synthetic substitute for quinine, it was unsurprising that his star pupil was moved to take up the challenge. During his vacation in 1856, Perkin spent his time i
7、n the laboratory on the top floor of his familys house. He was attempting to manufacture quinine from aniline, an inexpensive and readily available coal tar waste product. Despite his best efforts, however, he did not end up with quinine. Instead, he produced a mysterious dark sludge. Luckily, Perki
8、ns scientific training and nature prompted him to investigate the substance further. Incorporating potassium dichromate and alcohol into the aniline at various stages of the experimental process, he finally produced a deep purple solution. And, proving the truth of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur
9、s words chance favours only the prepared mind, Perkin saw the potential of his unexpected find. Historically, textile dyes were made from such natural sources as plants and animal excretions. Some of these, such as the glandular mucus of snails, were difficult to obtain and outrageously expensive. I
10、ndeed, the purple colour extracted from a snail was once so costly that in society at the time only the rich could afford it. Further, natural dyes tended to be muddy in hue and fade quickly. It was against this backdrop that Perkins discovery was made. Perkin quickly grasped that his purple solutio
11、n could be used to colour fabric, thus making it the worlds first synthetic dye. Realising the importance of this breakthrough, he lost no time in patenting it. But perhaps the most fascinating of all Perkins reactions to his find was his nearly instant recognition that the new dye had commercial po
12、ssibilities. Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly known as mauve (from the French for the plant used to make the colour violet). He asked advice of Scottish dye works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him that manufacturing the dye would be well worth it if the
13、colour remained fast (i.e. would not fade) and the cost was relatively low. So, over the fierce objections of his mentor Hofmann, he left college to give birth to the modern chemical industry. With the help of his father and brother, Perkin set up a factory not far from London. Utilising the cheap a
14、nd plentiful coal tar that was an almost unlimited byproduct of Londons gas street lighting, the dye works began producing the worlds first synthetically dyed material in 1857. The company received a commercial boost from the Empress Eugenie of France, when she decided the new colour flattered her.
15、Very soon, mauve was the necessary shade for all the fashionable ladies in that country. Not to be outdone, Englands Queen Victoria also appeared in public wearing a mauve gown, thus making it all the rage in England as well. The dye was bold and fast, and the public clamoured for more. Perkin went
16、back to the drawing board. Although Perkins fame was achieved and fortune assured by his first discovery, the chemist continued his research. Among other dyes he developed and introduced were aniline red (1859) and aniline black (1863) and, in the late 1860s, Perkins green. It is important to note t
17、hat Perkins synthetic dye discoveries had outcomes far beyond the merely decorative. The dyes also became vital to medical research in many ways. For instance, they were used to stain previously invisible microbes and bacteria, allowing researchers to identify such bacilli as tuberculosis, cholera,
18、and anthrax. Artificial dyes continue to play a crucial role today. And, in what would have been particularly pleasing to Perkin, their current use is in the search for a vaccine against malaria. Questions 1-7 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxe
19、s 1-7 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this 1 Michael Faraday was the first person to recognise Perkins ability as a student of chemistry. （ A） TRUE （ B） FALSE （ C）
20、 NOT GIVEN 2 Michael Faraday suggested Perkin should enrol in the Royal College of Chemistry. （ A） TRUE （ B） FALSE （ C） NOT GIVEN 3 Perkin employed August Wilhelm Hofmann as his assistant. （ A） TRUE （ B） FALSE （ C） NOT GIVEN 4 Perkin was still young when he made the discovery that made him rich and
21、famous. （ A） TRUE （ B） FALSE （ C） NOT GIVEN 5 The trees from which quinine is derived grow only in South America. （ A） TRUE （ B） FALSE （ C） NOT GIVEN 6 Perkin hoped to manufacture a drug from a coal tar waste product. （ A） TRUE （ B） FALSE （ C） NOT GIVEN 7 Perkin was inspired by the discoveries of th
22、e famous scientist Louis Pasteur. （ A） TRUE （ B） FALSE （ C） NOT GIVEN 7 Questions 8-13 Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet. 8 Before Perkins discovery, with what group in society was the col
23、our purple associated? 9 What potential did Perkin immediately understand that his new dye had? 10 What was the name finally used to refer to the first colour Perkin invented? 11 What was the name of the person Perkin consulted before setting up his own dye works? 12 In what country did Perkins newl
24、y invented colour first become fashionable? 13 According to the passage, which disease is now being targeted by researchers using synthetic dyes? 13 IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence The question of whether we are alone in the Universe has haunted humanity for
25、 centuries, but we may now stand poised on the brink of the answer to that question, as we search for radio signals from other intelligent civilisations. This search, often known by the acronym SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence), is a difficult one. Although groups around the world hav
26、e been searching intermittently for three decades, it is only now that we have reached the level of technology where we can make a determined attempt to search all nearby stars for any sign of life.AThe primary reason for the search is basic curiosity - the same curiosity about the natural world tha
27、t drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are alone in the Universe. We want to know whether life evolves naturally if given the right conditions, or whether there is something very special about the Earth to have fostered the variety of life forms that we see around us on the planet. Th
28、e simple detection of a radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic of all questions. In this sense, SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure science which is continually pushing out the horizon of our knowledge. However, there are other reasons for being interested in whether life
29、 exists elsewhere. For example, we have had civilisation on Earth for perhaps only a few thousand years, and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over the last few decades have told us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last another two thousand years or will we wipe ourselves out? Since
30、the lifetime of a planet like ours is several billion years, we can expect that, if other civilisations do survive in our galaxy, their ages will range from zero to several billion years. Thus any other civilisation that we hear from is likely to be far older, on average, than ourselves. The mere ex
31、istence of such a civilisation will tell us that long-term survival is possible, and gives us some cause for optimism. It is even possible that the older civilisation may pass on the benefits of their experience in dealing with threats to survival such as nuclear war and global pollution, and other
32、threats that we havent yet discovered.BIn discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground rules. First, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are generally ignored since most scientists dont consider the evidence for them to be strong enough to bear serious consideration (althoug
33、h it is also important to keep an open mind in case any really convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we make a very conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us, since if it differs radically from us we may well not recognise it as a life form
34、, quite apart from whether we are able to communicate with it. In other words, the life form we are looking for may well have two green heads and seven fingers, but it will nevertheless resemble us in that it should communicate with its fellows, be interested in the Universe, live on a planet orbiti
35、ng a star like our Sun, and perhaps most restrictively, have a chemistry, like us, based on carbon and water.CEven when we make these assumptions, our understanding of other life forms is still severely limited. We do not even know, for example, how many stars have planets, and we certainly do not k
36、now how likely it is that life will arise naturally, given the right conditions. However, when we look at the 100 billion stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way, and 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, it seems inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life form on it
37、; in fact, the best educated guess we can make, using the little that we do know about the conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that perhaps one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That means that our nearest neighbours are perhaps 100 light years away, w
38、hich is almost next door in astronomical terms.DAn alien civilisation could choose many different ways of sending information across the galaxy, but many of these either require too much energy, or else are severely attenuated while traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It turns out that,
39、 for a given amount of transmitted power, radio waves in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance, and so all searches to date have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency range. So far there have been a number of searches by various groups around the world
40、, including Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Until now there have not been any detections from the few hundred stars which have been searched. The scale of the searches has been increased dramatically since 1992, when the US Congress voted NASA $10 million pe
41、r year for ten years to conduct a thorough search for extra-terrestrial life. Much of the money in this project is being spent on developing the special hardware needed to search many frequencies at once. The project has two parts. One part is a targeted search using the worlds largest radio telesco
42、pes, the American-operated telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and the French telescope in Nancy in France. This part of the project is searching the nearest 1000 likely stars with high sensitivity for signals in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz. The other part of the project is an undirected sear
43、ch which is monitoring all of space with a lower sensitivity, using the smaller antennas of NASAs Deep Space Network.EThere is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal from an alien civilisation. Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately. Quite apart from the im
44、practicality of sending a reply over such large distances at short notice, it raises a host of ethical questions that would have to be addressed by the global community before any reply could be sent. Would the human race face the culture shock if faced with a superior and much older civilisation? L
45、uckily, there is no urgency about this. The stars being searched are hundreds of light years away, so it takes hundreds of years for their signal to reach us, and a further few hundred years for our reply to reach them. Its not important, then, if theres a delay of a few years, or decades, while the
46、 human race debates the question of whether to reply, and perhaps carefully drafts a reply.Questions 14-17Reading Passage 2 has five paragraphs, A-E.Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-E from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, i-vii, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet. Lis
47、t of Headingsi Seeking the transmission of radio signals from planetsii Appropriate responses to signals from other civilisationsiii Vast distances to Earths closest neighboursiv Assumptions underlying the search for extra-terrestrial intelligencev Reasons for the search for extra-terrestrial intell
48、igencevi Knowledge of extra-terrestrial life formsvii Likelihood of life on other planetsExample AnswerParagraph A v 14 Paragraph B 15 Paragraph C 16 Paragraph D 17 Paragraph E 17 Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your
49、 answers in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet. 18 What is the life expectancy of Earth? 19 What kind of signals from other intelligent civilisations are SETI scientists searching for? 20 How many stars are the worlds most powerful radio telescopes searching? 20 Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet, write YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks abou
