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1、剑桥雅思阅读11原文真题解析 雅思阅读部分的真题资料，同学们须要进行一些细致的总结，比如说雅思阅读解析其实就是很重要的内容，接下来就是我给同学们带来的关于剑桥雅思阅读11原文解析(test2)的内容，一起来具体的分析一下吧，希望对你们的备考有所帮助。 剑桥雅思阅读11原文(test2) READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. Raising the Mary Rose How a sixteenth-cen
2、tury warship was recovered from the seabed On 19 July 1545, English and French fleets were engaged in a sea battle off the coast of southern England in the area of water called the Solent, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Among the English vessels was a warship by the name of Mary Rose. Bui
3、lt in Portsmouth some 35 years earlier, she had had a long and successful fighting career, and was a favourite of King Henry VIII. Accounts of what happened to the ship vary: while witnesses agree that she was not hit by the French, some maintain that she was outdated, overladen and sailing too low
4、in the water, others that she was mishandled by undisciplined crew. What is undisputed, however, is that the Mary Rose sank into the Solent that day, taking at least 500 men with her. After the battle, attempts were made to recover the ship, but these failed. The Mary Rose came to rest on the seabed
5、, lying on her starboard (right) side at an angle of approximately 60 degrees. The hull (the body of the ship) acted as a trap for the sand and mud carried by Solent currents. As a result, the starboard side filled rapidly, leaving the exposed port (left) side to be eroded by marine organisms and me
6、chanical degradation. Because of the way the ship sank, nearly all of the starboard half survived intact. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire site became covered with a layer of hard grey clay, which minimised further erosion. Then, on 16 June 1836, some fishermen in the Sole
7、nt found that their equipment was caught on an underwater obstruction, which turned out to be the Mary Rose. Diver John Deane happened to be exploring another sunken ship nearby, and the fishermen approached him, asking him to free their gear. Deane dived down, and found the equipment caught on a ti
8、mber protruding slightly from the seabed. Exploring further, he uncovered several other timbers and a bronze gun. Deane continued diving on the site intermittently until 1840, recovering several more guns, two bows, various timbers, part of a pump and various other small finds. The Mary Rose then fa
9、ded into obscurity for another hundred years. But in 1965, military historian and amateur diver Alexander McKee, in conjunction with the British Sub-Aqua Club, initiated a project called Solent Ships. While on paper this was a plan to examine a number of known wrecks in the Solent, what McKee really
10、 hoped for was to find the Mary Rose. Ordinary search techniques proved unsatisfactory, so McKee entered into collaboration with Harold E. Edgerton, professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, Edgertons side-scan sonar systems revealed a large, unusuall
11、y shaped object, which McKee believed was the Mary Rose. Further excavations revealed stray pieces of timber and an iron gun. But the climax to the operation came when, on 5 May 1971, part of the ships frame was uncovered. McKee and his team now knew for certain that they had found the wreck, but we
12、re as yet unaware that it also housed a treasure trove of beautifully preserved artefacts. Interest in the project grew, and in 1979, The Mary Rose Trust was formed, with Prince Charles as its President and Dr Margaret Rule its Archaeological Director. The decision whether or not to salvage the wrec
13、k was not an easy one, although an excavation in 1978 had shown that it might be possible to raise the hull. While the original aim was to raise the hull if at all feasible, the operation was not given the go-ahead until January 1982, when all the necessary information was available. An important fa
14、ctor in trying to salvage the Mary Rose was that the remaining hull was an open shell. This led to an important decision being taken: namely to carry out the lifting operation in three very distinct stages. The hull was attached to a lifting frame via a network of bolts and lifting wires. The proble
15、m of the hull being sucked back downwards into the mud was overcome by using 12 hydraulic jacks. These raised it a few centimetres over a period of several days, as the lifting frame rose slowly up its four legs. It was only when the hull was hanging freely from the lifting frame, clear of the seabe
16、d and the suction effect of the surrounding mud, that the salvage operation progressed to the second stage. In this stage, the lifting frame was fixed to a hook attached to a crane, and the hull was lifted completely clear of the seabed and transferred underwater into the lifting cradle. This requir
17、ed precise positioning to locate the legs into the stabbing guides of the lifting cradle. The lifting cradle was designed to fit the hull using archaeological survey drawings, and was fitted with air bags to provide additional cushioning for the hulls delicate timber framework. The third and final s
18、tage was to lift the entire structure into the air, by which time the hull was also supported from below. Finally, on 11 October 1982, millions of people around the world held their breath as the timber skeleton of the Mary Rose was lifted clear of the water, ready to be returned home to Portsmouth.
19、 Questions 1-4 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-4 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 There is some
20、 doubt about what caused the Mary Rose to sink. 2 The Mary Rose was the only ship to sink in the battle of 19 July 1545. 3 Most of one side of the Mary Rose lay undamaged under the sea. 4 Alexander McKee knew that the wreck would contain many valuable historical objects. Questions 5-8 Look at the fo
21、llowing statements (Questions 5-8) and the list of dates below. Match each statement with the correct date, A-G. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet. 5 A search for the Mary Rose was launched. 6 One persons exploration of the Mary Rose site stopped. 7 It was agreed that
22、the hull of the Mary Rose should be raised. 8 The site of the Mary Rose was found by chance. List of Dates A 1836 E 1971 B 1840 F 1979 C 1965 G 1982 D 1967 Questions 9-13 Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your
23、 answer sheet. Raising the hull of the Mary Rose: Stages one and two READING PASSAGE 2 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on the following pages. Questions 14-20 Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each p
24、aragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet. List of Headings i Evidence of innovative environment management practices ii An undisputed answer to a question about the moai iii The future of the moai statues iv A theory which supports
25、 a local belief v The future of Easter Island vi Two opposing views about the Rapanui people vii Destruction outside the inhabitants control viii How the statues made a situation worse ix Diminishing food resources 14 Paragraph A 15 Paragraph B 16 Paragraph C 17 Paragraph D 18 Paragraph E 19 Paragra
26、ph F 20 Paragraph G What destroyed the civilisation of Easter Island? A Easter Island, or Rapu Nui as it is known locally, is home to several hundred ancient human statues ? the moai. After this remote Pacific island was settled by the Polynesians, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy
27、and resources that went into the moai some of which are ten metres tall and weigh over 7,000 kilos came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, then transported for many kilometres, without the use of anima
28、ls or wheels, to massive stone platforms. The identity of the moai builders was in doubt until well into the twentieth century. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer, thought the statues had been created by pre-lnca peoples from Peru. Bestselling Swiss author Erich von Daniken be
29、lieved they were built by stranded extraterrestrials. Modern science linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence has definitively proved the moai builders were Polynesians, but not how they moved their creations. Local folklore maintains that the statues walked, while researchers have tended to
30、assume the ancestors dragged the statues somehow, using ropes and logs. B When the Europeans arrived, Rapa Nui was grassland, with only a few scrawny trees. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, researchers found pollen preserved in lake sediments, which proved the island had been covered in lush palm for
31、ests for thousands of years. Only after the Polynesians arrived did those forests disappear. US scientist Jared Diamond believes that the Rapanui people descendants of Polynesian settlers wrecked their own environment. They had unfortunately settled on an extremely fragile island dry, cool, and too
32、remote to be properly fertilised by windblown volcanic ash. When the islanders cleared the forests for firewood and farming, the forests didnt grow back. As trees became scarce and they could no longer construct wooden canoes for fishing, they ate birds. Soil erosion decreased their crop yields. Bef
33、ore Europeans arrived, the Rapanui had descended into civil war and cannibalism, he maintains. The collapse of their isolated civilisation, Diamond writes, is a worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future. C The moai, he thinks, accelerated the self-destruction. Diamond interp
34、rets them as power displays by rival chieftains who, trapped on a remote little island, lacked other ways of asserting their dominance. They competed by building ever bigger figures. Diamond thinks they laid the moai on wooden sledges, hauled over log rails, but that required both a lot of wood and
35、a lot of people. To feed the people, even more land had to be cleared. When the wood was gone and civil war began, the islanders began toppling the moai. By the nineteenth century none were standing. D Archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State University
36、 agree that Easter Island lost its lush forests and that it was an ecological catastrophe but they believe the islanders themselves werent to blame. And the moai certainly werent. Archaeological excavations indicate that the Rapanui went to heroic efforts to protect the resources of their wind-lashe
37、d, infertile fields. They built thousands of circular stone windbreaks and gardened inside them, and used broken volcanic rocks to keep the soil moist. In short, Hunt and Lipo argue, the prehistoric Rapanui were pioneers of sustainable farming. E Hunt and Lipo contend that moai-building was an activ
38、ity that helped keep the peace between islanders. They also believe that moving the moai required few people and no wood, because they were walked upright. On that issue, Hunt and Lipo say, archaeological evidence backs up Rapanui folklore. Recent experiments indicate that as few as 18 people could,
39、 with three strong ropes and a bit of practice, easily manoeuvre a 1,000 kg moai replica a few hundred metres. The figures fat bellies tilted them forward, and a D-shaped base allowed handlers to roll and rock them side to side. F Moreover, Hunt and Lipo are convinced that the settlers were not whol
40、ly responsible for the loss of the islands trees. Archaeological finds of nuts from the extinct Easter Island palm show tiny grooves, made by the teeth of Polynesian rats. The rats arrived along with the settlers, and in just a few years, Hunt and Lipo calculate, they would have overrun the island.
41、They would have prevented the reseeding of the slow-growing palm trees and thereby doomed Rapa Nuis forest, even without the settlers campaign of deforestation. No doubt the rats ate birds eggs too. Hunt and Lipo also see no evidence that Rapanui civilisation collapsed when the palm forest did. They
42、 think its population grew rapidly and then remained more or less stable until the arrival of the Europeans, who introduced deadly diseases to which islanders had no immunity. Then in the nineteenth century slave traders decimated the population, which shrivelled to 111 people by 1877. G Hunt and Li
43、pos vision, therefore, is one of an island populated by peaceful and ingenious moai builders and careful stewards of the land, rather than by reckless destroyers ruining their own environment and society. Rather than a case of abject failure, Rapu Nui is an unlikely story of success, they claim. Whi
44、chever is the case, there are surely some valuable lessons which the world at large can learn from the story of Rapa Nui. Questions 21-24 Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 21-24 on your answer sheet. Jared Diamonds View Dia
45、mond believes that the Polynesian settlers on Rapa Nui destroyed its forests, cutting down its trees for fuel and clearing land for 21 _. Twentieth-century discoveries of pollen prove that Rapu Nui had once been covered in palm forests, which had turned into grassland by the time the Europeans arriv
46、ed on the island. When the islanders were no longer able to build the 22 _ they needed to go fishing, they began using the islands 23 _ as a food source, according to Diamond. Diamond also claims that the moai were built to show the power of the islands chieftains, and that the methods of transporti
47、ng the statues needed not only a great number of people, but also a great deal of 24 _. Questions 25 and 26 Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet. On what points do Hunt and Lipo disagree with Diamond? A the period when the moai were created B how the moai were transported C the impact of the moai on Rapanui society D how the moai were carved E the origins of the people who ma