1、考研英语（阅读）模拟试卷 81 及答案与解析Part ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)0 In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 1 5, choose the most suitable one from the list AG to fit into each of the numb
2、ered blank. There are two extra choices which you do not need to use.Until about two million years ago Africas vegetation had always been controlled by the interactions of climate; geology, soil, and groundwater conditions; and the activities of animals. The addition of humans to the latter group, h
3、owever, has increasingly rendered unreal the concept of a fully developed “natural“ vegetationi. e. , one approximating the ideal of a vegetational climax. 【R1】_. Early attempts at mapping and classifying Africas vegetation stressed this relationship: sometimes the names of plant zones were derived
4、directly from climates. In this discussion the idea of zones is retained only in a broad descriptive sense.【R2 】_. In addition, over time more floral regions of varying shape and size have been recognized. Many schemes have arisen successively, all of which have had to take views on two important as
5、pects; the general scale of treatment to be adopted, and the degree to which human modification is to be comprehended or discounted.【R3 】_. Quite the opposite assumption is now frequently advanced. An intimate combination of many speciesin complex associations and related to localized soils, slopes,
6、 and drainage has been detailed in many studies of the African tropics. In a few square miles there may be a visible succession from swamp with papyrus, the grass of which the ancient Egyptians made paper and from which the word “paper“ originated, through swampy grassland and broad-leaved woodland
7、and grass to a patch of forest on richer hillside soil, and finally to juicy fleshy plants on a nearly naked rock summit.【R4 】_. Correspondingly, classifications have differed greatly in their principles for naming, grouping, and describing formations; some have chosen terms such as forest, woodland
8、, thorn-bush, thicket, and shrub for much of the same broad tracts that others have grouped as wooded savanna(treeless grassy plain)and steppe(grassy plain with few trees). This is best seen in the nomenclature, naming of plants, adopted by two of the most comprehensive and authoritative maps of Afr
9、icas vegetation that have been published; R. W. J. Keays Vegetation Map of Africa South of the Tropic of Cancer and its more widely based successor, The Vegetation Map of Africa , compiled by Frank White. In the Keay map the terms “savanna“ and “steppe“ were adopted as precise definition of formatio
10、ns, based on the herb layer and the coverage of woody vegetation; the White map, however, discarded these two categories as specific classifications. Yet any rapid absence of savanna as in its popular and more general sense is doubtful.【R5 】_. However, some 100 specific types of vegetation identifie
11、d on the source map have been compressed into 14 broader classifications.AAs more has become known of the many thousands of African plant species and their complex e-cology, naming, classification, and mapping have also become more particular, stressing what was actually present rather than predicti
12、ng climatic potential.BIn regions of higher rainfall, such as eastern Africa, savanna vegetation is maintained by periodic fires. Consuming dry grass at the end of the rainy season, the fires burn back the forest vegetation, check the invasion of trees and shrubs, and stimulate new grass growth.COnc
13、e, as with the scientific treatment of African soils, a much greater uniformity was attributed to the vegetation than would have been generally accepted in the same period for treatments of the lands of western Europe or the United States.DThe vegetational map of Africa and general vegetation groupi
14、ngs used here follow the White map and its extensive annotations.EAfrican vegetation zones are closely linked to climatic zones, with the same zones occurring both north and south of the equator in broadly similar patterns. As with climatic zones, differences in the amount and seasonal distribution
15、of rainfall constitute the most important influence on the development of vegetatioaFNevertheless, in broad terms, climate remains the dominant control over vegetation. Zonal belts of rainfall, reflection latitude and contrasting exposure to the Atlantic and Indian oceans and their currents, give so
16、me reality to related belts of vegetation.GThe span of human occupation in Africa is believed to exceed that of any other continent. All the resultant activities have tended, on balance, to reduce tree cover and increase grassland)but there has been considerable dispute among scholars concerning the
17、 natural versus human-caused development of most African grasslands at the regional level.1 【R1 】2 【R2 】3 【R3 】4 【R4 】5 【R5 】5 In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 1 5, choose the most suitable one from the list AG to fit into each of the numbered blank. There ar
18、e two extra choices which you do not need to use.Between 5,000 million and 4,000 million years ago the Earth was formed. By 3,000 million years ago life had arisen and we have fossils of microscopic bacteria-like creatures to prove it. 【R1】_. Nobody knows what happened, but theorists agree that the
19、key was the spontaneous arising of self-duplicating entities, i. e. something equivalent to “genes“ in the general sense.The atmosphere of the early Earth probably contained gases still abundant today on other planets in the solar system. Chemists have experimentally reconstructed these ancient cond
20、itions in the laboratory. If plausible gases are mixed in a container with water, and energy is added by an electric discharge(simulated lightning), organic substances are spontaneously synthesized. These include the building blocks of RNA and DNA. It seems probable that something like this happened
21、 on the early Earth. Consequently, the sea would have become a “soup“ of prebiological organic compounds. 【R2】 _.Today the most famous self-duplicating molecule is DNA, but it is widely thought that DNA itself could not have been present at the origin of life because its duplication is too dependent
22、 on support from specialized machinery, which could not have been available before evolution itself began. Perhaps the related molecule RNA, which still plays various vital roles in living cells, was the original self-duplicating molecule. Or perhaps the earliest duplicator was a different kind of m
23、olecule altogether. 【R3】_. Variants that were particularly good at duplication would automatically have come to predominate in the ancient organic soup. Varieties that did not duplicate, or that did so inaccurately, would have become relatively less numerous. This led to ever-increasing efficiency a
24、mong duplicating molecules.As the competition between duplicating molecules warmed up, success must have gone to the ones that happened to hit upon special tricks or devices for their own self-preservation and their own rapid replication. The rest of evolution may be regarded as a continuation of th
25、e natural selection of duplicator molecules, now called genes, by virtue of their capacity to build for themselves efficient devices(cells and multicellular bodies)for their own preservation and reproduction. 【 R4】_.Fossils were not laid down on more than a small scale until nearly 600 million years
26、 ago. The first vertebrates may date back 530 million years, according to fossil evidence. Vertebrates appear abundantly in fossil beds between 300 and 400 million years ago. 【R5】 _. Mammals and, later, birds, arose from two different branches of reptiles. The rapid divergence of mammals into the ri
27、ch variety of types that we see today, from anteaters to monkeys, seems to have been released into the vacuum left by the catastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.AAmong vertebrates, the land was first colonized by lobe-finned and lung-bearing fish about 250 million years ago,
28、then by amphibians and, in more thorough fashion, by various kinds of animals that we loosely lump together as “reptiles“.BOnce self-duplicating molecules had been formed by chance, something like Darwinian natural selection could have begun: variation would have come into the population because of
29、random errors in copying.CIt is not enough, of course, that organic molecules appeared in the ancient organic soup. The crucial step, as noted above, was the origin of self-duplicating molecules, molecules capable of copying themselves.DAlthough we naturally emphasize the evolution of our own kindth
30、e vertebrates, the mammals, and the primatesthese constitute only a small branch of the great tree of life.EWhen the environment changes, or when organisms move to a different environment, different variations are selected, leading eventually to different species. Harmful mutations usually die out q
31、uickly, so they dont interfere with the process of beneficial mutations accumulating.FThree thousand million years is a long time, and it seems to have been long enough to have produced such astonishingly complex devices as the vertebrate body and the insect body.GSome time between these two datesin
32、dependent molecular evidence suggests about 4,000 million years agothat mysterious event, the origin of life, must have occurred.6 【R1 】7 【R2 】8 【R3 】9 【R4 】10 【R5 】10 In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 15, choose the most suitable one from the list AF to fit i
33、nto each of the numbered blank. There is one extra choice which you do not need to use.As more and more material from other cultures became available, European scholars came to recognize even greater complexity in mythological traditions. Especially valuable was the evidence provided by ancient Indi
34、an and Iranian texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Zend-Avesta. From these sources it became apparent that the character of myths varied widely, not only by geographical region but also by historical period. 【R1 】_. He argued that the relatively simple Greek myth of Persephone reflects the conce
35、rns of a basic agricultural community, whereas the more involved and complex myths found later in Homer are the product of a more developed society.Scholars also attempted to tie various myths of the world together in some way. From the late 18th century through the early 19th century, the comparati
36、ve study of languages had led to the reconstruction of a hypothetical parent language to account for striking similarities among the various languages of Europe and the Near East. These languages, scholars concluded, belonged to an Indo-European language family. Experts on mythology likewise searche
37、d for a parent mythology that presumably stood behind the mythologies of all the European peoples. 【R2】_. For example, an expression like “maiden dawn“ for “sunrise“ resulted first in personification of the dawn, and then in myths about her.Later in the 19th century the theory of evolution put forwa
38、rd by English naturalist Charles Darwin heavily influenced the study of mythology. Scholars researched on the history of mythology, much as they would dig fossil-bearing geological formations, for remains from the distant past. 【R3】_. Similarly, British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer propose
39、d a three-stage evolutionary scheme in The Golden Bough. According to Frazers scheme, human beings first attributed natural phenomena to arbitrary supernatural forces(magic), later explaining them as the will of the gods(religion), and finally subjecting them to rational investigation(science).The r
40、esearch of British scholar William Robertson Smith, published in Lectures on the Religion of the Semites(1889), also influenced Frazer. Through Smiths work, Frazer came to believe that many myths had their origin in the ritual practices of ancient agricultural peoples, for whom the annual cycles of
41、vegetation were of central importance. 【 R4】_. This approach reached its most extreme form in the so-called functionalism of British anthropologist A R. Radcliffe-Brown, who held that every myth implies a ritual, and every ritual implies a myth.Most analyses of myths in the 18th and 19th centuries s
42、howed a tendency to reduce myths to some essential corewhether the seasonal cycles of nature, historical circumstances, or ritual. That core supposedly remained once the imagined elements of the narratives had been stripped away. In the 20th century, investigators began to pay closer attention to th
43、e content of the narratives themselves. 【R5】_.AGerman-born British scholar Max Mueller concluded that the Rig-Veda of ancient Indiathe oldest preserved body of literature written in an Indo-European languagereflected the earliest stages of an Indo-European mythology. Muller attributed all later myth
44、s to misunderstandings that arose from the picturesque terms in which early peoples described natural phenomena.BThe myth and ritual theory, as this approach came to be called, was developed most fully by British scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. Using insight gained from the work of French sociologist m
45、ile Durkheim, Harrison argued that all myths have their origin in collective rituals of a society.CAustrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud held that myths like dreamscondense the material of experience and represent it in symbols.DThis approach can be seen in the work of British anthropologist Edward B
46、urnett Tylor. In Primitive Culture(1871), Tylor organized the religious and philosophical development of humanity into separate and distinct evolutionary stages.EThe studies made in this period were consolidated in the work of German scholar Christian Gott-olob Heyne, who was the first scholar to us
47、e the Latin term myths(instead of fibula, meaning “fable“)to refer to the tales of heroes and gods.FGerman scholar Karl Otfried Muller followed this line of inquiry in his Prolegomena to a Scientific Mythology, 1825).11 【R1 】12 【R2 】13 【R3 】14 【R4 】15 【R5 】15 In the following text, some sentences ha
48、ve been removed. For Questions 1-5, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the numbered blanks. There are two extra choices which you do not need to use.Archaeological study covers an extremely long span of time and a great variety of subjects. The earliest subjects of ar
49、chaeological study date from the origins of humanity. These include fossil remains believed to be of human ancestors who lived 3. 5 million to 4. 5 million years ago. The earliest archaeological sites include those at Hadar, Ethiopia)Laetoli, Tanzania; East Turkana, Kenya; and elsewhere in East Africa. These sites contain evidence of the first appearance of bipedal(upright-walking, apelike early humans). 【R1】_The first physically modern humans, Homo
