1、雅思（阅读）模拟试卷 8及答案与解析 一、 Reading Module (60 minutes) 1 READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-12 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. THE DEPARTMENT OF ETHNOGRAPHY The Department of Ethnography was created as a separate department within the British Museum in 1946, af
2、ter 140 years of gradual development from the original Department of Antiquities. it is concerned with the people of Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Pacific and parts of Europe. While this includes complex kingdoms, as in Africa, and ancient empires, such as those of the Americas, the primary focus
3、of attention in the twentieth century has been on small-scale societies. Through its collections, the Departments specific interest is to document how objects are created and used, and to understand their importance and significance to those who produce them. Such objects can include both the extrao
4、rdinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the banal. The collections of the Department of Ethnography include approximately 300,000 artefacts, of which about half are the product of the present century. The Department has a vital role to play in pro viding information on non-Western cultures to vis
5、itors and scholars. To this end, the collecting emphasis has often been less on individual objects than on groups of material which allow the display of a broad range of a societys cultural expressions. Much of the more recent collecting was carried out in the field, sometimes by Museum staff workin
6、g on general anthropological projects in collaboration with a wide variety of national governments and other institutions. The material collected includes great technical series - for instance, of textiles from Bolivia, Guatemala, Indonesia and areas of West Africa - or of artefact types such as boa
7、ts. The latter include working examples of coracles from India, reed boats from Lake Titicaca in the Andes, kayaks from the Arctic, and dug-out canoes from several countries. The field assemblages, such as those from the Sudan, Madagascar and Yemen, include a whole range of material culture represen
8、tative of one people. This might cover the necessities of life of an African herdsman or an Arabian farmer, ritual objects, or even on occasion airport art. Again, a series of acquisitions might represent a decades fieldwork documenting social experience as expressed in the varieties of clothing and
9、 jewellery styles, tents and camel trappings from various Middle Eastern countries, or in the developing preferences in personal adornment and dress from Papua New Guinea. Particularly interesting are a series of collections which continue to document the evolution of ceremony and of material forms
10、for which the Department already possesses early (if not the earliest) collections formed after the first contact with Europeans. The importance of these acquisitions extends beyond the objects themselves. They come to the Museum with documentation of the social context, ideally including photograph
11、ic records. Such acquisitions have multiple purposes. Most significantly they document for future change. Most people think of the cultures represented in the collection in terms of the absence of advanced technology. In fact, traditional practices draw on a con tinuing wealth of technological ingen
12、uity. Limited resources and ecological con straints are often overcome by personal skills that would be regarded as exceptional in the West. Of growing interest is the way in which much of what we might see as disposable is, elsewhere, recycled and reused. With the independence of much of Asia and A
13、frica after 1945. it was assumed that economic progress would rapidly lead to the disappearance or assimilation of many small-scale societies. Therefore, it was felt that the Museum should acquire materials representing people whose art or material culture, ritual or political structures were on the
14、 point of irrevocable change. This attitude altered with the realisation that marginal communities can survive and adapt in spite of partial integration into a notoriously fickle world economy. Since the seventeenth century, with the advent of trading companies exporting manufactured textiles to Nor
15、th America and Asia, the importation of cheap goods has often contributed to the destruction of local skills and indigenous markets. On the one hand modern imported goods may be used in an everyday setting, while on the other hand other traditional objects may still be required for ritually signific
16、ant events. Within this context trade and exchange attitudes are inverted. What are utilitarian objects to a Westerner may be prized objects in other cultures - when trans formed by local ingenuity - principally for aesthetic value. In the same way, the West imports goods from other peoples and in c
17、ertain circumstances categorises them as art. Collections act as an ever-expanding database, not merely for scholars and anthropologists, but for people involved in a whole range of educational and artistic purposes. These include schools and universities as well as colleges of art and design. The p
18、rovision of information about non-Western aesthetics and techniques, not just for designers and artists but for all visitors, is a growing responsibility for a Department whose own context is an increasingly multicultural European society. 1 Questions 1-6 Do the following statements agree with the i
19、nformation given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet write TRUE if the statement is true according to the passage FALSE if the statement is false according to the passage NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage 1 The twentieth-century collections come mainly from
20、 mainstream societies such as the US and Europe. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 2 The Department of Ethnography focuses mainly on modern societies. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 3 The Department concentrates on collecting single unrelated objects of great value. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 4 The textile col
21、lection of the Department of Ethnography is the largest in the world. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 5 Traditional societies are highly inventive in terms of technology. （ A）真 （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 6 Many small-scale societies have survived and adapted in spite of predictions to the contrary. （ A）真 （ B）假
22、 （ C） NOT GIVEN 7 Questions 7-12 Some of the exhibits at the Department of Ethnography are listed below (Questions 7-12). The writer gives these exhibits as examples of different collection types. Match each exhibit with the collection type with which it is associated in Reading Passage 1. Write the
23、 appropriate letters in boxes 7-12 on your answer sheet. NB: You may use any collection type more than once. Collection Types AT Artefact Types EC Evolution of Ceremony FA Field Assemblages SE Social Experience TS Technical Series 7 Bolivian textiles 8 Indian coracles 9 airport art 10 Arctic kayaks
24、11 necessities of life of an Arabian farmer 12 tents from the Middle East 13 READING PASSAGE 2 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 13-25 which are based on Reading Passage 2 on the following pages. Section A The role of governments in environmental management is difficult but inescapable
25、Sometimes, the state tries to manage the resources it owns, and does so badly. Often however, governments act in an even more harmful way. They actually subsidise the exploitation and consumption of natural resources A whole range of policies, from farm- price support to protection for coal-mining d
26、o, environmental damage and (often) make no economic sense. Scrapping them offers a two-fold bonus: a cleaner environment and a more efficient economy. Growth and environmentalism can actually go hand in hand, if politicians have the courage to confront the vested interest that subsidies create. Sec
27、tion B No activity affects more of the earths surface than farming. It shapes a third of the plants land area, not counting Antarctica, and the proportion is rising. World food output per head has risen by 4 percent between the 1970s and 1980s mainly as a result of increases increases in yields from
28、 land already in cultivation, but also because more land has been brought under the plough. Higher yields have been achieved by increased Irrigation , better crop breeding, and a doubling in the use of pesticides and chemical fertillsers in the 1970s and 1980s. Section C All these activities may hav
29、e damaging environmental impacts, For example, land clearing for agriculture is the largest single cause of deforestation; chemical fertillsers and pesticides may contaminate water supplies; more intensive farming and the abandonment of fallow periods tend to exacerbate soil erosion; and the spread
30、of mono- culture and use of high-yielding varieties of crops have been accompanied by the disappearance of old varieties of food plants which might have provided, some insurance against pests or diseases in future. Soil erosion threatens the productivity of land in both rich and poor countries. The
31、United States, where the most careful measurements have been done, discovered in 1982 that about one-fifth of its farmland was losing topsoil at a rate likely to diminish the soils productivity. The countrys subsequently embarked upon a program to convert 11 per cent of its cropped land to meadow or
32、 forest. Topsoil in India and China is vanishing much faster than in America Section D Government policies have frequently compounded the environmental damage that farming can cause. In the rich countries, subsidies for growing crops and price supports for farm output drive up the price of land. The
33、 annual value of these subsidies is immense; about 250 billion, or more than all World Bank lending in the 1980s. To increase the output of crops per acre, a farmers easiest option is to use more of the most readily available Inputs: fertilisers and pesticides. Fertiliser use doubled in Denmark in t
34、he period 1960-1985 and increased in The Netherlands by 150 per cent. The quantity, of pesticides applied. has risen too: by 69 per centin 1975-1984 in Denmark, for example, with a rise of 115 per cent in the frequency of application in the three years from 1981. In the late 1980s and early 1990s so
35、me efforts were made to reduce farm subsidies The most dramatic example was that of New Zealand, which scrapped most farm support in 1984 A study of the environmental effects, conducted in 1993, found that the end of fertiliser subsidies had been followed by a fall in fertiliser use (a fall compound
36、ed by the decline in world commodity prices, which cut farm incomes), The removal of subsidies also stopped land-clearing and over-stocking, which in the past had been the principal causes of erosion, Farms began to diversify, The one kind of subsidy whose removal appeared to have been bad for the e
37、nvironment was the subsidy to manage soil erosion, In less enlightened countries, and in the European Union, the trend has been to reduce rather than eliminate subsidies, and to introduce new payments to encourage farmers to treat their land in environmentally friendlier ways, or to leave it fallow,
38、 It may sound strange but such payments need to be higher than the existing incentives for farmers to grow food crops, Farmers, however, dislike being paid to do nothing. In several countries they have become interested in the possibility of using fuel produced from crop residues either as a replace
39、ment for petrol (as ethanol) or as fuel for power stations (as biomass), Such fuels produce far less carbon dioxide than coal or oil, and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. They are therefore less likely to contribute to the greenhouse effect. But they are rarely competitive with fossil fuels unles
40、s subsidised - and growing them does no environmental harm than other crops Section E In poor countries, governments aggravate other sorts of damage. Subsidies for pesticides and artificial fertilisers encourage farmers to use greater quantities than are needed to get the highest economic crop yield
41、. A study by the International Rice Research Institute of pesticide use by farmers in South East Asia found that, with pest-resistant varieties of rice, even moderate applications of pesticide frequently cost farmers more than they saved. Such waste puts farmers on a chemical treadmill: bugs and wee
42、ds become resistant to poisons, so next years poisons must be more lethal. One cost is to human health, Every year some 10,000 people die from pesticide poisoning, almost all of them in the developing countries, and another 400,000 become seriously ill. As for artificial fertilisers, their use world
43、-wide increased by 40 per cent per unit of farmed land between the mid 1970s and late 1980s, mostly in the developing countries. Overuse of fertilisers may cause farmers to stop rotating crops or leaving their land fallow, That, in turn, may make soil erosion worse. Section F A result of the Uruguay
44、 Round of world trade negotiations is likely to be a reduction of 36 per cent in the average levels of farm subsidies paid by the rich countries in 1986-1990, Some of the worlds food production will move from Western Europe to regions where subsidies are lower or non-existent, such as the former com
45、munist countries and parts of the developing world. Some environmentalists worry about this outcome. It will undoubtedly mean more pressure to convert natural habitat into farmland. But it will also have many desirable environmental effects. The intensity of farming in the rich world should decline,
46、 and the use of chemical inputs will diminish, Crops are more likely to be grown In the environments to which they are naturally suited. And more farmers in poor countries will have the money and the incentive to manage their land in ways that are sustainable in the long run. That is important, To f
47、eed an increasingly hungry world, farmers need every incentive to use their soil and water effectively and efficiently. 13 Questions 13-15 Reading Passage 2 has six sections A-F. Choose the most suitable headings for sections A, B and D from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers
48、- in boxes 13-15 on your answer sheet. List of Headings The probable effects of the new international trade agreement The environmental impact of modern farming Farming and soil erosion The effects of government policy in rich countries Governments and management of the environment The effects of go
49、vernment policy in poor countries Farming and food output output The new prospects for world trade 13 Section A 14 Section B 15 Section D 16 Questions 16-21 Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 16-21 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 about this 16 The reason for the simplicity of the Indian way of life is
