Passage  one

学科分类

题目

动物学

动物行为与日照时长

内容回忆

这篇文章主要讲的是动物的行为会受到日照时间的影响。动物会根据一些事物的变化或是气温的变化去预知时长的变化。文中提到了加拿大一种名叫yellow bird的动物实验的例子。还提到赤道附近几乎没有什么日照的变化，所以动物的行为会受到其他因素诸如雨季等的影响。不同生物会根据自身的情况选择时间，比如鸟的怀孕时间较短，就选择12月，羊的怀孕时间较长就会调整mating的时间。

参考阅读

A circadian rhythm  is any biological process that  displays an endogenous, entrainable  oscillation of about 24 hours. These  24-hour rhythms are driven by a  circadian clock, and they have been widely  observed in plants, animals,  fungi, and cyanobacteria.

The term circadian  comes from the Latin circa, meaning  "around" (or  "approximately"), and diēm,  meaning "day". The formal  study of biological temporal rhythms,  such as daily, tidal, weekly,  seasonal, and annual rhythms, is called  chronobiology.

Although circadian  rhythms are endogenous  ("built-in", self-sustained), they are  adjusted (entrained) to the  local environment by external cues called  zeitgebers (from German, "time  giver"), which include light,  temperature and redox cycles.

Circadian  rhythmicity is present in the sleeping and  feeding patterns of animals,  including human beings. There are also clear  patterns of core body  temperature, brain wave activity, hormone production,  cell  regeneration, and other biological activities. In addition,   photoperiodism, the physiological reaction of organisms to the length  of day  or night, is vital to both plants and animals, and the circadian  system plays  a role in the measurement and interpretation of day  length.

The rhythm is linked  to the light–dark cycle. Animals,  including humans, kept in total  darkness for extended periods eventually  function with a free-running  rhythm. Their sleep cycle is pushed back or  forward each  "day", depending on whether their "day",  their  endogenous period, is shorter or longer than 24 hours. The  environmental  cues that reset the rhythms each day are called zeitgebers (from  the  German, "time-givers"). Totally blind subterranean mammals   (e.g., blind mole rat Spalax sp.) are able to maintain their endogenous   clocks in the apparent absence of external stimuli. Although they lack   image-forming eyes, their photoreceptors (which detect light) are still   functional; they do surface periodically as well.[page needed]

Free-running  organisms that normally have one or two  consolidated sleep episodes  will still have them when in an environment  shielded from external  cues, but the rhythm is, of course, not entrained to  the 24-hour  light–dark cycle in nature. The sleep–wake rhythm may, in these   circumstances, become out of phase with other circadian or ultradian  rhythms  such as metabolic, hormonal, CNS electrical, or  neurotransmitter rhythms.

Recent research has  influenced the design of spacecraft  environments, as systems that mimic  the light–dark cycle have been found to  be highly beneficial to  astronauts.

Norwegian  researchers at the University of Tromsø have  shown that some Arctic  animals (ptarmigan, reindeer) show circadian rhythms  only in the parts  of the year that have daily sunrises and sunsets. In one  study of  reindeer, animals at 70 degrees North showed circadian rhythms in  the  autumn, winter and spring, but not in the summer. Reindeer on Svalbard at   78 degrees North showed such rhythms only in autumn and spring. The   researchers suspect that other Arctic animals as well may not show  circadian  rhythms in the constant light of summer and the constant dark  of winter.

A 2006 study in  northern Alaska found that day-living  ground squirrels and nocturnal  porcupines strictly maintain their circadian  rhythms through 82 days  and nights of sunshine. The researchers speculate  that these two  rodents notice that the apparent distance between the sun and  the  horizon is shortest once a day, and, thus, a sufficient signal to entrain   (adjust) by.

The navigation of  the fall migration of the Eastern  North American monarch butterfly  (Danaus plexippus) to their overwintering  grounds in central Mexico  uses a time-compensated sun compass that depends  upon a circadian clock  in their antennae.[

Passage  two

学科分类

题目

社会学

工业的发展

内容回忆

本文讲述了工业发展有三个主要原因。有人口的增长，机器的发展和家庭关系的改变。因为工业发展所以人们开始有了各自的分工，这样导致工作安全感下降，因为很容易被别人取代。文中举了一个英国早期的例子，也提到了机械化代替劳动力的例子。

参考阅读

Industrialization is  the system of production that has  arisen from the steady development,  study, and use of scientific knowledge.  It is based on the division of  labor and on specialization and uses  mechanical, chemical, and  power-driven, as well as organizational and  intellectual, aids in  production. The primary objective of this method of  organizing economic  life, which had its genesis in the mideighteenth century,  has been to  reduce the real cost, per unit, of producing goods and services.  The  resulting increases in output per manhour have been so large as to   stagger the imagination. The average American worker today produces as  much  in half an hour as his British counterpart did in a whole working  day a  century ago, and that American worker has ten times as much  industrial  capital behind him as he would have had a century ago.

The history of  economic change in the two hundred-odd  years since the classical  industrial revolution in England is varied and  would have been  difficult to predict. The ever-changing tides of technology,  and the  society that produces technical change, are manifestations of   continuing growth of complexity in human specialization in all matters   relating to economic life. Hence, by the 1960s two-thirds of the labor  force  in the United States worked in areas not concerned directly with  the  production of food and manufactured goods, compared with only 16  per cent of  the labor force thus employed in 1820. European and  Japanese industrial  growth shows the same result in the occupational  distribution of the labor  force over time. Occupational diversity in  nonmanufacturing life seems to be  a product of industrialization  wherever human society is free to respond to  its own potentials as  efficiency in economic life permits labor to go beyond direct   production. What begins as mastery of basic mechanical technique ends  by  creating both the demands and the resources for a revolution in mass   education and in science—a change in the “quality” of the labor force.   Historical support for these general observations may be seen in the   development and general characteristics of industrial society.

The phrase  “industrial revolution” has long been used  to identify the period  roughly from 1750 to 1825, during which the  accelerated application of  mechanical principles, including steam power, to  manufacturing in Great  Britain produced an identifiable change in economic  structure and  growth. Workers were grouped together in factories using  concentrations  of capital equipment greater in cost and more efficient in  operation  than the capital equipment known in Britain earlier. These  factories  utilized a few mechanical innovations, primarily in textiles and  iron  manufacturing, which, with the application of the steam engine, made   factory-sized scale the most economic size for the production unit. The   proximity of others engaged in such manufacturing activities became a  further  cost-reducing factor of great importance, resulting in  “external economies”  that encouraged the grouping together of  manufacturing enterprises and,  hence, the growth of new urban  aggregations. The result was that Britain  rapidly became the first  urbanized industrial state.

Since industry  cannot grow without markets and sources  of capital, similarities in the  economic “preconditions” for industrial  development have been  identified. These bases for the development of an  industrial sector  include an available labor force, markets for finished  production,  access to raw materials (whether at home or through foreign  trade), a  source of investment funds (whether from the wealth and savings of  the  private sector, from the accumulations of the public sector, or from   abroad), and, finally, access to technology. The last has in every case   necessitated the extensive development of mass education, because  access to  technology on a large scale means, ultimately, access to  science. In the long  run, successful industrialization has been  achieved in those nations which  not only realized the preconditions but  also were able to adapt to changes in  technology which required  extensive organizational flexibility on all levels.  Examples of such  necessary flexibility are antitrust laws, internal  population  migrations, and changes in representational balance due to shifts  in  the franchise.

Passage  three

学科分类

题目

生物/考古学

白垩纪恐龙灭绝

内容回忆

本文主要讲述了白垩纪时期恐龙灭绝。一个证据是，在某个岩层里发现了一种放射性元素，地球上很少，但是陨石里很多。所以是行星撞击了地球，然后dust影响了大气，接着气候变化，生物链被破坏。在墨西哥某个地方也发现了陨石撞击的巨坑。

参考阅读

Perhaps the most  notable event of the Cretaceous was  its conclusion. About 65 million  years ago the second greatest mass  extinction in Earth history  occurred, resulting in the loss of the dinosaurs  as well as nearly 50%  of all the world’s species. Though not nearly as severe  as the  end-Permian mass extinction, the end-Cretaceous extinction is the most  famous  mass extinction in Earth history. Other great animals also went  extinct  at that time, including flying reptiles (pterosaurs) and the last   mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. Many mollusks, including rudistid and  inoceramid  clams, ammonites, and belemnites, also became extinct, as  did many species of  microscopic marine plankton. Terrestrial plants  also suffered a major  extinction at this time; in some regions up to  60% of latest Cretaceous plant  species were absent in the subsequent  Paleocene. Terrestrial insects also  suffered a high level of  extinction, especially those that were highly  specialized to feed on  one or a few types of plants. In fact, the level of insect   herbivory—both generalized and specialized—did not recover to latest   Cretaceous levels until the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, approximately 9   million years later. In spite of the severity of extinctions at the end  of  the Cretaceous, many types of animals and plants survived and gave  rise to  new groups of organisms in the Paleocene.

The causes of the  end-Cretaceous extinction are still  being debated by paleontologists.  Researchers agree that a major factor was  an asteroid about 10  kilometers in diameter that struck what is now the  Yucatán peninsula in  Mexico. The effects of the impact were catastrophic,  probably including  global forest fires, possibly a period of cold weather due  to  sunlight-blocking dust and smoke, and a subsequent period of hot climate  caused  by the high levels of CO2 released into the atmosphere by the  impact.  Evidence for the devastation of terrestrial vegetation comes in  the form of a  thin rock layer deposited just after the impact that is  dominated by fossil  plants whose present-day relatives recover well  after fires or other  disturbances. Some paleontologists argue that dinosaurs  were already in  decline before the asteroid impact, so that its  environmental effects merely  hastened their extinction. Alternatively,  others point to the high abundance  and variety of dinosaur species  recorded even in the sediments deposited just  below the asteroid impact  layer in the Hell Creek Formation of western North  America.

Regardless of what  caused the disappearance of the  dinosaurs, the mass extinction at the  end of the Cretaceous led the way for  the rapid rise to dominance of  new groups of organisms during the following  time period, the  Paleocene. In particular, Paleocene mammals would spread and  evolve  into the many ecological niches left open by the extinction of the   dinosaurs.

所考词汇

部分词汇题回忆：

gradually＝slowly，

deciphering=figuring out,  

vicinity=area ,

appeal=attraction,

adapt=adjust，

peak＝maximum，

lethal=deadly，

component＝piece