【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 majestic 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 came 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

hypothesis was accepted for about 100 years, until it was realized that such

zonation did not necessarily occur and that the distribution of seaweeds

depended more on herbivory (the consumption of plant material), competition, varying concentration of the specialized pigments, and the ability

of seaweeds to alter their forms of growth.

32、 First, demand for news increased as Europe’s commercial and political

interests spread around the globe—merchants in London, Liverpool, or

Glasgow, for example, came to depend on early news of Caribbean harvests

and gains and losses in colonial wars.

33、 Industries with high concentrations of employment in urban areas, where a

worker’s change of employer does not necessarily require investing in a

change of residence, appear to have higher rates of job turnover than industries concentrated in nonmetropolitan areas do.

34、 Some researchers, for example, have argued that a particular kind of pottery,

called Ramey incised (which is incised with figures of eyes, fish, arrows, and

abstract objects and was used by the people in the area of present-day Missouri and Illinois at about A.D 900), was primarily used to distribute food

but was also used to communicate the idea that the society’s elite, for whom

the pots were made, were mediators of cosmic forces.

35、 There are several limiting factors, but results from a recent experiment

suggest that in areas of the ocean where other nutrients are plentiful, iron

may be one of the most important and, until recently, unrecognized variables

controlling phytoplankton production.

36、 In 14, C. Lloyd Morgan, an early comparative behaviorist, insisted that

animal behavior be explained as simply as possible without reference to

emotions or motivations since these could not be observed or measured. 37、 Assuming that in the early 1770s at least half of the demand for grain from

farmers with surpluses was satisfied through long-distance channels, the

proportion of grain produced for consumption beyond the local market probably accounted for about a quarter of total grain production consumed by humans.

38、 Sea turtles’ eggs are laid at night to minimize the likelihood of their discovery

by predators, and the offspring, when ready to emerge from their eggshells

and dig their way out of the sand, hatch at night for the same reason. 39、 In short, therefore, the site Memphis offered the rulers of the Early Dynastic

Period an ideal location for controlling internal trade within their realm, an

essential requirement for a state-directed economy that depended on the

movement of goods.

40、 In particular, research has focused on determining why such an apparently

inhospitable place as Chaco, which today is extremely arid and has very short

growing seasons, should have favored the concentration of labor that must

have been required for such massive construction projects over brief periods of time.

41、 In one case, seeds of the arctic lupine, a member of the pea family recovered

from ancient lemming burrows in the Arctic, germinated in three days even

though they were carbon-dated at more than 10,000years old! 42、 In fact, unpredictability is probably a greater problem than is the severity of

the unfavorable period.

43、 Similar reasoning suggested that one could estimate total elapsed geologic

time by dividing the average thickness of sediment transported annually to

the oceans into the total thickness of sedimentary rock that had ever been

deposited in the past.

44、 The process that marine creatures use to create light is like that of the

common firefly and similar to that which creates the luminous green color

seen in plastic glow sticks, often used as children’s toys or for illumination

during nighttime events.

45、 But its appearance under a microscope is even more spectacular, the living

copepod appears as if constructed of delicately handcrafted, multicolored

pieces of stained glass.

46、 Cleared lands would more likely have been worked by hand tilling, with little

direct help from animals, and the vast forests natural to Northern Europe

remained either untouched, or perhaps cleared in small sections by fire, and

the land probably used only so long as the ash-enriched soil yielded good

crops and then abandoned for some other similarly cleared field. 47、 Because nests at the edges of breeding colonies are more vulnerable to

predators than those in the centers, the preference for advantageous central

sites promotes dense centralized packing of nests.

48、 In discussing the growth of cities in the United States in the nineteenth

century, one cannot really use the term “urban planning,” as it suggests

modern concerns for spatial and service organization which, in most instances,

did not exist before the planning revolution called the City Beautiful Movement that began in the 10s.

49、 There the limits that topography imposed on production have been tightened

by climate, with the result that agricultural output has been more modest and

less reliable, making the risk of crop failure and hardship commensurately greater.

50、 Because liquid water was present, self-replicating molecules of carbon,

hydrogen, and oxygen developed life early in Earth’s history and have radically modified its surface, blanketing huge parts of the continents with greenery.