综合点评

本次考试阅读难度总体持平，主要围绕生物和社科类话题考的比较多，也有少量地质和艺术类文章。

Passage

one

学科分类

题目

历史

英国和西班牙纺织业

参考阅读

Powering the Industrial Revolution

In Britain one of the most dramatic changes of the Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of power. Until the reign of George Ⅲ (1760-1820), available sources of power for work and travel had not increased since the Middle Ages. There were three sources of power: animal or human muscles; the wind, operating on sail or windmill; and running water. Only the last of these was suited at all to the continuous operating of machines, and although waterpower abounded in Lancashire and Scotland and ran grain mills as well as textile mills, it had one great disadvantage: streams flowed where nature intended them to, and water-driven factories had to be located on their banks whether or not the location was desirable for other reasons.  Furthermore, even the most reliable waterpower varied with the seasons and disappeared in a drought. The new age of machinery, in short, could not have been born without a new source of both movable and constant power.

The source had long been known but not exploited. Early in the eighteenth century, a pump had come into use in which expanding steam raised a piston in a cylinder, and atmospheric pressure brought it down again when the steam condensed inside the cylinder to form a vacuum. This “atmospheric engine,” invented by Thomas Savery and vastly improved by his partner, Thomas Newcomer, embodied revolutionary principles, but it was so slow and wasteful of fuel that it could not be employed outside the coal mines for which it had been designed. In the 1760s, James Watt perfected a separate condenser for the steam, so that the cylinder did not have to be cooled at every stroke; then he devised a way to make the piston turn a wheel and thus convert reciprocating (back and forth) motion into rotary motion. He thereby transformed an inefficient pump of limited use into a steam engine of a thousand uses. The final step came when steam was introduced into the cylinder to drive the piston backward as well as forward, thereby increasing the speed of the engine and cutting its fuel consumption.

Watt's steam engine soon showed what it could do. It liberated industry from dependence on running water. The engine eliminated water in the mines by driving efficient pumps, which made possible deeper and deeper mining. The ready availability of coal inspired William Murdoch during the 1790s to develop the first new form of nighttime illumination to be discovered in a millennium and a half. Coal gas rivaled smoky oil lamps and flickering candles, and early in the new century, well-to-do Londoners grew accustomed to gas lit houses and even streets. Iron manufacturers, which had starved for fuel while depending on charcoal, also benefited from ever-increasing supplies of coal: blast furnaces with steam-powered bellows turned out more iron and steel for the new machinery. Steam became the motive force of the Industrial Revolution as coal and iron ore were the raw materials.

By 1800 more than a thousand steam engines were in use in the British Isles, and Britain retained a virtual monopoly on steam engine production until the 1830s. Steam power did not merely spin cotton and roll iron; early in the new century, it also multiplied ten times over the amount of paper that a single worker could produce in a day. At the same time, operators of the first printing presses run by steam rather than by hand found it possible to produce a thousand pages in an hour rather than thirty. Steam also promised to eliminate a transportation problem not fully solved by either canal boats or turnpikes. Boats could carry heavy weights, but canals could not cross hilly terrain; turnpikes could cross the hills, but the roadbeds could not stand up under great weights. These problems needed still another solution, and the ingredients for it lay close at hand. In some industrial regions, heavily laden wagons, with flanged wheels, were being hauled by horses along metal rails; and the stationary steam engine was puffing in the factory and mine. Another generation passed before inventors succeeded in combining these ingredients, by putting the engine on wheels and the wheels on the rails, so as to provide a machine to take the place of the horse. Thus the railroad age sprang from what had already happened in the eighteenth century.

Passage

two

学科分类

题目

生物-动物

increasing popularity of jellyfish

参考阅读

A Warm-Blooded Turtle

When it comes to physiology, the leatherback turtle is, in some ways, more like a reptilian whale than a turtle. It swims farther into the cold of the northern and southern oceans than any other sea turtle, and it deals with the chilly waters in a way unique among reptiles.

A warm-blooded turtle may seem to be a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, an adult leatherback can maintain a body temperature of between 25 and 26°C (77-79°F) in seawater that is only 8°C (46.4°F). Accomplishing this feat requires adaptations both to generate heat in the turtle’s body and to keep it from escaping into the surrounding waters. Leatherbacks apparently do not generate internal heat the way we do, or the way birds do, as a by-product of cellular metabolism. A leatherback may be able to pick up some body heat by basking at the surface; its dark, almost black body color may help it to absorb solar radiation. However, most of its internal heat comes from the action of its muscles.

Leatherbacks keep their body heat in three different ways. The first, and simplest, is size. The bigger the animal is, the lower its surface-to-volume ratio; for every ounce of body mass, there is proportionately less surface through which heat can escape. An adult leatherback is twice the size of the biggest chelonian sea turtles and will therefore take longer to cool off. Maintaining a high body temperature through sheer bulks called gigantothermy. It works for elephants, for whales, and, perhaps, it worked for many of the larger dinosaurs. It apparently works, in a smaller way, for some other sea turtles. Large loggerhead and green turtles can maintain their body temperature at a degree or two above that of the surrounding water, and gigantothermy is probably the way they do it. Muscular activity helps, too, and an actively swimming green turtle may be 7°C (12.6°F) warmer than the waters it swims through.

Gigantothermy, though, would not be enough to keep a leatherback warm in cold northern waters. It is not enough for whales, which supplement it with a thick layer of insulating blubber (fat). Leatherbacks do not have blubber, but they do have a reptilian equivalent: thick, oil-saturated skin, with a layer of fibrous, fatty tissue just beneath it. Insulation protects the leatherback everywhere but on its head and flippers. Because the flippers are comparatively thin and blade-like, they are the one part of the leatherback that is likely to become chilled. There is not much that the turtle can do about this without compromising the aerodynamic shape of the flipper. The problem is that as blood flows through the turtle’s flippers, it risks losing enough heat to lower the animal’s central body temperature when it returns. The solution is to allow the flippers to cool down without drawing heat away from the rest of the turtle’s body. The leatherback accomplishes this by arranging the blood vessels in the base of its flipper into a countercurrent exchange system.

In a countercurrent exchange system, the blood vessels carrying cooled blood from the flippers run close enough to the blood vessels carrying warm blood from the body to pick up some heat from the warmer blood vessels; thus, the heat is transferred from the outgoing to the ingoing vessels before it reaches the flipper itself. This is the same arrangement found in an old-fashioned steam radiator, in which the coiled pipes pass heat back and forth as water courses through them. The leatherback is certainly not the only animal with such an arrangement; gulls have a countercurrent exchange in their legs. That is why a gull can stand on an ice floe without freezing.

All this applies, of course, only to an adult leatherback. Hatchlings are simply too small to conserve body heat, even with insulation and countercurrent exchange systems. We do not know how old, or how large, a leatherback has to be before it can switch from a cold-blooded to a warm-blooded mode of life. Leatherbacks reach their immense size in a much shorter time than it takes other sea turtles to grow. Perhaps their rush to adulthood is driven by a simple need to keep warm.

Passage Three

学科分类

题目

环境科学

环境破坏如何与商业联系起来，意识到环境资源的利用价值

参考阅读

The Long-Term Stability of Ecosystems

Plant communities assemble themselves flexibly, and their particular structure depends on the specific history of the area. Ecologists use the term “succession” to refer to the changes that happen in plant communities and ecosystems over time. The first community in a succession is called a pioneer community, while the long-lived community at the end of succession is called a climax community. Pioneer and successional plant communities are said to change over periods from 1 to 500 years. These changes—in plant numbers and the mix of species—are cumulative. Climax communities themselves change but over periods of time greater than about 500 years.

An ecologist who studies a pond today may well find it relatively unchanged in a year’s time. Individual fish may be replaced, but the number of fish will tend to be the same from one year to the next. We can say that the properties of an ecosystem are more stable than the individual organisms that compose the ecosystem.

At one time, ecologists believed that species diversity made ecosystems stable. They believed that the greater the diversity the more stable the ecosystem. Support for this idea came from the observation that long-lasting climax communities usually have more complex food webs and more species diversity than pioneer communities. Ecologists concluded that the apparent stability of climax ecosystems depended on their complexity. To take an extreme example, farmlands dominated by a single crop are so unstable that one year of bad weather or the invasion of a single pest can destroy the entire crop. In contrast, a complex climax community, such as a temperate forest, will tolerate considerable damage from weather to pests.

The question of ecosystem stability is complicated, however. The first problem is that ecologists do not all agree what “stability” means. Stability can be defined as simply lack of change. In that case, the climax community would be considered the most stable, since, by definition, it changes the least over time. Alternatively, stability can be defined as the speed with which an ecosystem returns to a particular form following a major disturbance, such as a fire. This kind of stability is also called resilience. In that case, climax communities would be the most fragile and the least stable, since they can require hundreds of years to return to the climax state.

Even the kind of stability defined as simple lack of change is not always associated with maximum diversity. At least in temperate zones, maximum diversity is often found in mid-successional stages, not in the climax community. Once a redwood forest matures, for example, the kinds of species and the number of individuals growing on the forest floor are reduced. In general, diversity, by itself, does not ensure stability. Mathematical models of ecosystems likewise suggest that diversity does not guarantee ecosystem stability—just the opposite, in fact. A more complicated system is, in general, more likely than a simple system to break down. A fifteen-speed racing bicycle is more likely to break down than a child's tricycle.

Ecologists are especially interested to know what factors contribute to the resilience of communities because climax communities all over the world are being severely damaged or destroyed by human activities. The destruction caused by the volcanic explosion of Mount St. Helens, in the northwestern United States, for example, pales in comparison to the destruction caused by humans. We need to know what aspects of a community are most important to the community’s resistance to destruction, as well as its recovery.

Many ecologists now think that the relative long-term stability of climax communities comes not from diversity but from the “patchiness” of the environment, an environment that varies from place to place supports more kinds of organisms than an environment that is uniform. A local population that goes extinct is quickly replaced by immigrants from an adjacent community. Even if the new population is of a different species, it can approximately fill the niche vacated by the extinct population and keep the food web intact.

Passage Four

学科分类

题目

农业

wild cereals和domesticated cereals

参考阅读

Early Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa

At the end of the Pleistocene (around 10,000 B.C.), the technologies of food production may have already been employed on the fringes of the rain forests of western and central Africa, where the common use of such root plants as the African yam led people to recognize the advantages of growing their own food. The yam can easily be resprouted if the top is replanted. This primitive form of "vegeculture" (cultivation of root and tree crops) may have been the economic tradition onto which the cultivation of summer rainfall cereal crops was grafted as it came into use south of the grassland areas on the Sahara's southern borders.

As the Sahara dried up after 5000 B.C., pastoral peoples (cattle herders) moved southward along major watercourses into the savanna belt of West Africa and the Sudan. By 3000 B.C., just as ancient Egyptian civilization was coming into being along the Nile, they had settled in the heart of the East African highlands far to the south. The East African highlands are ideal cattle country and the home today of such famous cattle-herding peoples as the Masai. The highlands were inhabited by hunter-gatherers living around mountains near the plains until about 3300 B.C., when the first cattle herders appeared. These cattle people may have moved between fixed settlements during the wet and dry seasons, living off hunting in the dry months and their own livestock and agriculture during the rains.

As was the case elsewhere, cattle were demanding animals in Africa. They required water at least every 24 hours and large tracts of grazing grass if herds of any size were to be maintained. The secret was the careful selection of grazing land, especially in environments where seasonal rainfall led to marked differences in graze quality throughout the year. Even modest cattle herds required plenty of land and considerable mobility. To acquire such land often required moving herds considerable distances, even from summer to winter pastures.  At the same time, the cattle owners had to graze their stock in tsetse-fly-free areas  The only protection against human and animal sleeping sickness, a disease carried by the tsetse fly, was to avoid settling or farming such areas -  a constraint severely limiting the movements of cattle-owning farmers in eastern and central Africa.  As a result, small cattle herds spread south rapidly in areas where they could be grazed.  Long before cereal agriculture took hold far south of the Sahara, some hunter-gatherer groups in the savanna woodlands of eastern and southern Africa may have acquired cattle, and perhaps other domesticated animals, by gift exchange or through raids on herding neighbors.

Contrary to popular belief: there is no such phenomenon as "pure" pastoralists, a society that subsists on its herds alone. The Saharan herders who moved southward to escape drought were almost certainly also cultivating sorghum, millet; and other tropical rainfall crops. By 1500 B.C., cereal agriculture was widespread throughout the savanna belt south of the Sahara. Small farming communities dotted the grasslands and forest margins of eastern West Africa, all of them depending on what is called shifting agriculture. This form of agriculture involved clearing woodland, burning the felled brush over the cleared plot, mixing the ash into the soil, and then cultivating the prepared fields. After a few years, the soil was exhausted, so the farmer moved on, exploiting new woodland and leaving the abandoned fields to lie fallow. Shifting agriculture, often called slash-and-burn, was highly adaptive for savanna farmers without plows, for it allowed cereal farming with the minimal expenditure of energy.

The process of clearance and burning may have seemed haphazard to the uninformed eye, but it was not. Except in favored areas, such as regularly inundated floodplains: tropical Africa's soils were of only moderate to low fertility. The art of farming was careful soil selection, that is, knowing which soils were light and easily cultivable, could be readily turned with small hoes, and would maintain their fertility over several years' planting, for cereal crops rapidly remove nitrogen and other nutrients from the soil. Once it had taken hold: slash-and-burn agriculture expanded its frontiers rapidly as village after village took up new lands, moving forward so rapidly that one expert has estimated it took a mere two centuries to cover 2,000 kilometers from eastern to southern Africa.

Passage

Five

学科分类

题目

生物-植物

Plant disease

参考阅读

Seagrasses

Many areas of the shallow sea bottom are covered with a lush growth of aquatic flowering plants adapted to live submerged in seawater. These plants are collectively called seagrasses. Seagrass beds are strongly influenced by several physical factors. The most significant is water motion: currents and waves. Since seagrass systems exist in both sheltered and relatively open areas, they are subject to differing amounts of water motion. For any given seagrass system, however, the water motion is relatively constant. Seagrass meadows in relatively turbulent waters tend to form a mosaic of individual mounds, whereas meadows in relatively calm waters tend to form flat, extensive carpets. The seagrass beds, in turn, dampen wave action, particularly if the blades reach the water surface. This damping effect can be significant to the point where just one meter into a seagrass bed the wave motion can be reduced to zero. Currents are also slowed as they move into the bed.

The slowing of wave action and currents means that seagrass beds tend to accumulate sediment. However, this is not universal and depends on the currents under which the bed exists. Seagrass beds under the influence of strong currents tend to have many of the lighter particles, including seagrass debris, moved out, whereas beds in weak current areas accumulate lighter detrital material. It is interesting that temperate seagrass beds accumulate sediments from sources outside the beds, whereas tropical seagrass beds derive most of their sediments from within.

Since most seagrass systems are depositional environments, they eventually accumulate organic material that leads to the creation of fine-grained sediments with a much higher organic content than that of the surrounding unvegetated areas. This accumulation, in turn, reduces the water movement and the oxygen supply. The high rate of metabolism (the processing of energy for survival) of the microorganisms in the sediments causes sediments to be anaerobic (without oxygen) below the first few millimeters. According to ecologist J. W. Kenworthy, anaerobic processes of the microorganisms in the sediment are an important mechanism for regenerating and recycling nutrients and carbon, ensuring the high rates of productivity—that is, the amount of organic material produced-that are measured in those beds. In contrast to other productivity in the ocean, which is confined to various species of algae and bacteria dependent on nutrient concentrations in the water column, seagrasses are rooted plants that absorb nutrients from the sediment or substrate. They are, therefore, capable of recycling nutrients into the ecosystem that would otherwise be trapped in the bottom and rendered unavailable.

Other physical factors that have an effect on seagrass beds include light, temperature, and desiccation (drying out). For example, water depth and turbidity (density of particles in the water) together or separately control the amount of light available to the plants and the depth to which the seagrasses may extend. Although marine botanist W. A. Setchell suggested early on that temperature was critical to the growth and reproduction of eelgrass, it has since been shown that this particularly widespread seagrass grows and reproduces at temperatures between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius in the Arctic and at temperatures up to 28 degrees Celsius on the northeastern coast of the United States. Still, extremetemperatures, in combination with other factors, may have dramatic detrimental effects. For example, in areas of the cold North Atlantic, ice may form in winter. Researchers Robertson and Mann note that when the ice begins to breakup, the wind and tides may move the ice around, scouring the bottom and uprooting the eelgrass. In contrast, at the southern end of the eelgrass range, on the southeastern coast of the United States, temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius in summer cause excessive mortality. Seagrass beds also decline if they are subjected to too much exposure to the air. The effect of desiccation is often difficult to separate from the effect of temperature. Most seagrass beds seem tolerant of considerable changes in salinity (salt levels) and can be found in brackish (somewhat salty) waters as well as in full- strength seawater.

Passage

Six

学科分类

题目

古生物学

大恐龙的认识被推翻

参考阅读

Explaining Dinosaur Extinction

Dinosaurs rapidly became extinct about 65 million years ago as part of a mass extinction known as the K-T event, because it is associated with a geological signature known as the K-T boundary, usually a thin band of sedimentation found in various parts of the world (K is the traditional abbreviation for the Cretaceous, derived from the German name Kreidezeit). Many explanations have been proposed for why dinosaurs became extinct. For example, some have blamed dinosaur extinction on the development of flowering plants, which were supposedly more difficult to digest and could have caused constipation or indigestion - except that flowering plants first evolved in the Early Cretaceous, about 60 million years before the dinosaurs died out. In fact, several scientists have suggested that the duckbill dinosaurs and horned dinosaurs, with their complex battery of grinding teeth, evolved to exploit this new resource of rapidly growing flowering plants. Others have blamed extinction on competition from the mammals, which allegedly ate all the dinosaur eggs—except that mammals and dinosaurs appeared at the same time in the Late Triassic, about 190 million years ago, and there is no reason to believe that mammals suddenly acquired a taste for dinosaur eggs after 120 million years of coexistence. Some explanations (such as the one stating that dinosaurs all died of diseases) fail because there is no way to scientifically test them, and they cannot move beyond the realm of speculation and guesswork.

This focus on explaining dinosaur extinction misses an important point: the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous was a global event that killed off organisms up and down the food chain. It wiped out many kinds of plankton in the ocean and many marine organisms that lived on the plankton at the base of the food chain. These included a variety of clams and snails, and especially the ammonites, a group of shelled squid like creatures that dominated the Mesozoic seas and had survived many previous mass extinctions. The K-T event marked the end of the marine reptiles, such as the mosasaurs and the plesiosaurs, which were the largest creatures that had ever lived in the seas and which ruled the seas long before whales evolved. On land, there was also a crisis among the land plants, in addition to the disappearance of dinosaurs. So any event that can explain the destruction of the base of the food chain (plankton in the ocean, plants on land) can better explain what happened to organisms at the top of the food chain, such as the dinosaurs. By contrast, any explanation that focuses strictly on the dinosaurs completely misses the point. The Cretaceous extinctions were a global phenomenon, and dinosaurs were just a part of a bigger picture.

According to one theory, the Age of Dinosaurs ended suddenly 65 million years ago when a giant rock from space plummeted to Earth. Estimated to be ten to fifteen kilometers in diameter, this bolide (either a comet or an asteroid) was traveling at cosmic speeds of 20-70 kilometers per second, or 45,000-156,000 miles per hour. Such a huge mass traveling at such tremendous speeds carries an enormous amount of energy. When the bolide struck this energy was released and generated a huge shock wave that leveled everything for thousands of kilometers around the impact and caused most of the landscape to burst into flames. The bolide struck an area of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico known as Chicxulub, excavating a crater 15-20 kilometers deep and at least 170 kilometers in diameter. The impact displaced huge volumes of seawater, causing much flood damage in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, the bolide itself excavated 100 cubic kilometers of rock and debris from the site, which rose to an altitude of 100 kilometers. Most of it fell back immediately, but some of it remained as dust in the atmosphere for months. This material, along with the smoke from the fires, shrouded Earth, creating a form of nuclear winter. According to computerized climate models, global temperatures fell to near the freezing point, photosynthesis halted, and most plants on land and in the sea died. With the bottom of the food chain destroyed, dinosaurs could not survive.

                          综合点评

个别同学碰到双加试，难度适中

                         Conversation

话题分类

论文

内容回忆

一个男孩找教授问自己essay citation方法，有Chicago和MLA； 考点有个开头她说自己之后有appointment是为啥？两种citation应怎么用？

参考文章：28C1

                         Conversation

话题分类

活动

内容回忆

女孩邀请乐队搞活动，申请经费

参考文章：42L2

                         Conversation

话题分类

活动

内容回忆

学生要资金参与教授救护海龟的项目

参考文章：30C1

                         Conversation

话题分类

师生讨论

内容回忆

教授邀请学生参加teaching program

参考文章：45C2

                               Lecture

话题分类

生物

内容回忆

mimicry related to predator-prey relationship

参考文章：11L1；25L4

                               Lecture

话题分类

考古

内容回忆

探索cave paintings age的方法

参考文章：17L1；54L2

                              Lecture

话题分类

天文

内容回忆

some new insights about the formation of solar system，跟Chondrul有关

参考文章：13L4；22L2

                              Lecture

话题分类

心理

内容回忆

关于大脑对两种类型笑话的反应

参考文章：15L1

                              Lecture

话题分类

艺术

内容回忆

关于文艺复兴

参考文章：41L3

                              Lecture

话题分类

工程

内容回忆

仿生学设计，模仿章鱼设计什么产品

参考文章：44L1

                              Lecture

话题分类

生物

内容回忆

鸟类迁徙从什么印度到印度洋小岛到非洲之后回印度循环

参考文章：47L2

Task 1

内容回忆

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Instead of requiring (elementary school) students to do experiments themselves, schools should only allow them to watch experiments demonstrated by their teachers.

参考答案

In my opinion, elementary school students should only be allowed to watch experiments demonstrated by the teachers. This is because elementary school students are mostly at the age of 7 to 12. They are too young to handle those various and complicated experimental tools. Also, it can be really dangerous for such young students to do experiments. They are likely to break some tools or instruments, and may even get hurt by the glass or chemicals. Therefore, I think they should only watch instead of doing themselves.

Task 2

阅读

学校要请一个专业的导演开指导音乐会，说会更专业而且因为导演知名度高所以能吸引更多人来看。

听力

学生说导演太忙，可能还是自己练习，而且不会吸引很多人，因为普通学生不知道这个导演即使他在业内知名

Task 3

阅读

business incentive

听力

举例子说明，公司给每个销售人员提成，注册一个用户提成一笔钱，但是销售会以更低的价格给下家，然后他们注册。这会让员工行为致使公司利益受损，制度不完善

Task 4

话题

水鸟为了增加游泳捕食技能的两个方式致使进化不同

听力

一个是增加翅膀长度，俯冲更有利，但是飞行能力降低；

另一个是把腿往后长，这样游泳的时候就可以做助推器，但是走路就受影响。例子用的oak和gtete

综合点评

本次综合写作难度不高，听力和阅读是相互反驳的，难点在于把握听力中的细节信息。

另外，独立写作是媒体类话题，要看准题目核心词，审题不要跑题。

综合写作

话题分类

艺术类

考题回忆

总论点

是否能够解释Elizabeth Playhouse的设计

阅读部分

伊丽莎白 playhouse 的设计，为什么是圆的没有屋棚，有 3 个假说

原因1：受罗马建筑影响，因为罗马设计师的一本书在当时出版了，那些英国的建筑师很熟悉这本书 ；

原因2：受运动场影响，主要是说因为以前马戏团没有屋棚；

原因3：因为资金问题，financial problem，为了省钱，因为圆棚可以容纳更多人。

听力部分

观点1：罗马建筑相关的书都是拉丁文写的，只有内行人看得懂，但是伊丽莎白的建筑者都是商人和木匠，他们没有受过相关教育，看不懂；

观点2：马戏团运动场的设计是为了维护观众，隔开动物和运动员，但如果伊丽莎白的建筑利用相同设计会让观众看不见舞台；

观点3：并不是资金问题，因为没有屋棚，下雨天或者风大的天反而没有观众看表演，反而会亏损，reduce income。

解题思路

听力部分分别反驳了阅读中提出的理论行不通。

参考范文

The reading passage and lecture debate on the design of Elizabeth Playhouse. The reading passage proposes three theories to account for the lack of roof in the desigh, which are all contradicted by the following lecture.

The first theory in the reading suggests that it was under the influence of Roman architecture, based on the fact that a book on Roman architecture was published back then, which was popular among architects in Britain. Also, the house resembles Roman structures with arched dome. However, the lecturer challenges the theory by pointing out that those in charge of the construction were all merchants with little education background. The book was written in Latin, which can be only read by well-educated people, rather than merchants.

The second theory in the reading proposes that it was influenced by the design of circus, since it is the first to adopt the dome design. Yet the lecture states that circus is often surrounded by fences, which keep animals in captivity. Also, audiences’ views will be blocked with the fences.

The last theory, according to the reading, claims that the design is adopted with economic benefit. Without roof, sunlight can come into the structure, reducing the need for candles. On the contrary, the professor in the lecture contends that the roofless building will be easily bothered by severe weather conditions. On a rainy day, the ground will get wet, resulting in fewer audiences and lower profit.

独立写作

话题分类

媒体类

考题回忆

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?  Movies are only worth watching when they can teach us about things in real life.

解题思路

这道题的观点是只有符合现实生活的电影才值得看。在讨论这个观点时可以结合自己的生活经历，考虑这个观点的合理性和不足。

符合现实生活的电影更加感人，能给人带来教育和启迪，也能具有更强的社会影响力。但是这类电影可能比较枯燥，吸引力不够强。

另外，其他类型的电影比如科幻片、历史片创意更加独特，内容更加具有吸引力，能够收到大众的欢迎。但是可能娱乐性较强，而现实意义不大。

参考范文

For decades, films, as the main source of entertainment and inspiration, have always stood in the limelight of public attention. However, people’s views differ as to whether citizens should only watch those movies that can teach something in real life. As I see it, I disagree that films that worth watching have to teach a lesson about real life; instead, a variety of reasons should be taken into account when picking films to watch.

To begin with, the greatest of all benefits of watching a movie is that it entertains people. Be it comedy or science-fiction, movies are a medium of leisure and recreation for every individual ranging from the young to the elder. Take my father as an example. He feels very tired after the full devotion to his career in a week and there is no time for the gym and outdoor activities just because of his busy work schedules. Then, on weekends, he always chooses to lie on the sofa munching on some chips and sipping his favorite soda, and watch all kinds of movies. Engrossed in a comedy, he laughs heartily and feels relaxed. If it is a horror movie, he feels excited and scared, emotions that he hardly experiences during his workdays. After watching a movie, he becomes refreshed and more energetic. Therefore, movies serving as recreation for people are also worth watching.

Besides, watching movies helps people improve their relationship with others. More often than not, what audiences are more focused on during the process of watching movies is the time they spend with their friends or family rather than the well-orchestrated plots or the life lessons they might disclose. While watching movies with others, people can share the same excitement and pleasure with them, which are opportunities to strengthen the bonds with them. My own experience can well illustrate this point. In high school, I usually went to the cinema with my friends. Whatever the genre was, we enjoyed the time staying together. We spent quality time while laughing out loud at hilarious scenes and impersonating the characters in the movies. We also relived the experience together while talking about our favorite scenes and lines. The movies were nothing about our life; however, while watching them, we felt our mental distance shortened and our friendship strengthened. Accordingly, the importance of watching movies in terms of helping strengthen bonds between people should not be disregarded.

To sum up, given the discussion above, we can firmly come to the conclusion that it is too unilateral to say only those movies telling us important life stories are worth watching. Rather, movies that can entertain audiences and provide viewers with a chance to stay with each other are also welcomed.