托福阅读精选阅读真题长难句50句
【托福阅读】精选阅读真题长难句50句
1、 Later experiments in which researchers played recordings of songs to young
birds showed just how precise this influence was, many of them would learn
the exact pattern of the recording they had heard.
2、 The crude song of a bird reared in isolation gives some clues as to what this
rough idea may be the length, the frequency range and the breaking up into
notes are all aspects of chaffinch song shared between normal birds and
those reared in isolation.
3、 Whatever the nature of the learning rules in a particular species, there is no
doubt that they are effective, it is very unusual to hear a wild bird singing a
song which is not typical of its own species despite the many different songs
which often occur in a small patch of woodland.
4、 Chemical analysis of bones enables archaeologists to determine the
proportion of meat to vegetable foods in the diet by measuring the proportion
of calcium to strontium in ancient bone because strontium in place of calcium
in bones comes primarily from ingested plants.
5、 Each dwelling had a different arrangement of the giant bones, which came
from the skeletons of long-dead animals retrieved from the surrounding area
by occupants of the site, not from animals they had recently hunted.
6、 In a precedent-setting decision, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
ordered the dam removed after concluding that the environmental and
economic benefits of a free-flowing river outweighed the electricity generated
by the dam.
7、 Built nearly a century ago to provide power to lumber and paper mills in the
town of Port Angeles, these dams blocked access to upstream spawning beds
for six species of salmon on what once was one of the most productive
salmon rivers in the world.
8、 The Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park might be taken down to
reveal what John Muir, the founder of the prestigious environmental
organization Sierra Club, called a valley “just as beautiful and worthy of
preservation as the maj estic Yosemite.”
9、 A chance collision between two comets, or the gravitational influence of one
of the Jovian planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—may
occasionally alter the orbit of a comet in these regions enough to send it to
the inner solar system and into our view.
10、 These comets appear to be distributed in all directions from the Sun, forming
a spherical shell around the solar system, called the Oort cloud, after the
Dutch astronomer Jan Oort.
11、 After the arrival of hunter-gatherers in the southwestern region of North
America, several alternative types of agriculture emerged, all involving
different solutions to the Southwest’s fundamental problem: how to obtain
enough water to grow crops in an environment in which rainfall is so low and
unpredictable that little or no farming is practiced there today.
12、 That fate actually befell the Mimbres, who started by farming the floodplain
and then began to farm adjacent land above the floodplain as their
population ca me to exceed the floodplain’s capacity to support it.
13、 However, when drought conditions returned, that gamble left them with a
population double what the floodplain could support, and Mimbres society
collapsed suddenly under the stress.
14、 One more strategy was to plant crops at many sites even though rainfall was
locally unpredictable and then to harvest crops at whichever sites did get
enough rain to produce a good harvest and to redistribute some of the
harvest to the people still living at all the sites that did not happen to receive
enough rain that year.
15、 Sanitation problems caused by larger, more sedentary populations would
have helped transmit diseases in human waste, as would the use of animal
dung for fertilizer.
16、 The increase in many of these came not only from the fact that fewer people
were dying from infectious disease and were living longer but also from the
results of modern lifestyles in developed countries and among the upper
classes of developing countries – a more sedentary life leading to less
physical activity, more stress; environmental pollution, and
high-fat diets.
17、 This evolution may have been encouraged by what some authorities consider
our overuse of antibiotics, giving microorganisms a greater chance to evolve
resistance by exposing them to a constant barrage of selective challenges.
18、 Therefore, on many reefs it is the fast-growing, branching corals that
ultimately dominate at the upper, shallower portion of the reef, whereas
more massive forms dominate in deeper areas.
19、 The fact that almost all small invertebrates on reefs are so well hidden or
highly camouflaged is another indicator of how prevalent predation is on
reefs and its importance in determining reef structure.
20、 Finally, they need reliable methods of storage because, where plant foods
cannot provide a dietary safety net, planning has to be precise and detailed
to ensure that there is enough to tide them over in periods of shortage.
21、 Coins also provide a valuable source of written records: they can reveal
information about the location where they are found, which can provide
evidence about trade practices there, and their inscriptions can be
informative about the issuing authority, whether they were
city-states (as in
ancient Greece) or sole rulers (as in Imperial Rome or in the kingdoms of
medieval Europe).
22、 The great risk with historical records is that they can impose their own
perspective so that they begin not only to supply the answers to our
questions but subtly to determine the nature of those questions and even our
concepts and terminology.
23、 Not all botanists agree with an African-South American center for the
evolution and dispersal of the angiosperms, pointing out that many of the
most primitive forms of flowering plants are found in the South Pacific,
including portions of Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea, eastern Australia, and
the Malay Archipelago.
24、 To elaborate, before the eighth century, the elite marriage practice, which
was an important instrument of political alliance making, had encouraged
rulers to maintain multiple palaces: that of their own family and those of their
spouses, who commonly remained at or near their native family headquarters,
at least for some years after marriage.
25、 Nearly five billion years ago, some external influence, such as
a shock wave
traveling from a catastrophic explosion (supernova), may have triggered the
collapse of this huge cloud of gases and minute grains of heavier elements,
causing the cloud to begin to slowly contract due to the gravitational
interactions among its particles.
26、 Nearly five billion years ago, some external influence, such as
a shock wave
traveling from a catastrophic explosion (supernova), may have triggered the
collapse of this huge cloud of gases and minute grains of heavier elements,
causing the cloud to begin to slowly contract due to the gravitational
interactions among its particles.
27、 Steady overseas demand for colonial products created a prosperity that
enabled colonists to consume ever-larger amounts not only of clothing but of
dishware, home furnishings, tea, and a range of other items both produced in
Britain and imported by British and colonial merchants from elsewhere.
28、 Such materials as iron and nickel and the elements of which the rock-forming
minerals are composed—silicon, calcium, sodium, and so forth—formed
metallic and rocky clumps that orbited the Sun.
29、 This act was intended less to raise revenue than to serve as a protective tariff
(tax) that would benefit British West Indian sugar producers at the expense
of their French rivals.
30、 Parliament used British tax money to pay modest incentives to Americans
producing such items as silk, iron, dyes, hemp, and lumber, which Britain
would otherwise have had to import from other countries, and it raised the
price of commercial rivals’ imports by imposing protective tariffs on them.
31、 The concept of chromatic adaptation was proposed in 1883; and the