【语言】2014年9月14日托福考试阅读真题解析

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　　这次阅读整体难度不大，尤其是词汇题。三篇文章题材分别为人类研究、地质地理研究和动物研究，TPO中也有不少相似篇章。

　　三篇词汇题

　　ingenuity=cleverness merely=simply acquire random investigate inspect=exam potential replicate=copy explicit underlie distinct

　　第一篇：Children's play

　　题材划分：人类研究

　　主要内容：

　　讲pretend play对孩子的作用，分阶段讲。早期的孩子最开始玩什么玩具，后来就能pretend，他们自己pretend他们在吃饭等的一些简单的familiar的事(有题，选关于familiar的)，后来就更复杂了，后来小孩可以理解大人pretend的一些事，并参与进来。后来他们就可以扮演了一些社会角色，比如说爸爸、妈妈、护士之类的，类似过家家，他们还知道该停止的时候就得停止(有题，排除题，选他们不知道停止)。说这些不仅对social development和intelligence有好处，还能让孩子认识cognitive the authority and rules。

　　相似TPO练习推荐

　　TPO6 Infantile Amnesia

　　TPO30 Role of Play in Development

　　相关知识背景

　　Imitation andverbal behavior of children

　　Behaviorists have studied verbal behavior since the 1920s. E.A. Esper (1920) studied associative models of language, which has evolved into the current language interventions of matrix training andrecombinative generalization. Skinner(1957) created a comprehensive taxonomy of language for speakers. Baer, along with Zettle and Haynes (1989), provided a developmental analysis of rule-governed behavior for the listener and for the listener Zettle and Hayes(1989) with Don Baer providing a developmental analysis of rule-governed behavior. According to Skinner,language learning depends on environmental variables, which can be mastered by a child through imitation, practice, and selective reinforcement including automatic reinforcement.

　　B.F. Skinner was one of the first psychologists to take the role of imitation in verbal behavior as a serious mechanism for acquisition. He identified echoic behavior as one of his basic verbal operant, postulating that verbal behavior was learned by an infant from a verbalcommunity. Skinner's account takes verbal behavior beyond an intra-individualprocess to an inter-individual process. He dined verbal behavior as"behavior reinforced through the mediation of others". Noam ruted Skinner's assumptions.

　　Inthe behavioral model, the child is prepared to contact the contingencies to"join" the listener and speaker. At the very core, verbal episodes involve the rotation of the roles as speaker and listener. These kinds of exchanges are called conversational units and have been the focus of research at Columbia's communication disorders department.

　　Conversational units is a measure of socialization because they consist of verbal interactionsin which the exchange is reinforced by both the speaker and the listener. H.C.Chu (1998) demonstrated contextual conditions for inducing and expanding conversational units between children with autism and non-handicapped siblings in two separate experiments. The acquisition of conversational units and theexpansion of verbal behavior decrease incidences of physical "aggression" in the Chu study and several other reviews suggest similar fects. The joining of the listener andspeaker progresses from listener speaker rotations with others as a likely precedent for the three major components of speaker-as-own listener—say socorrespondence, self-talk conversational units, and naming.

　　第二篇

　　题材划分：地质地理

　　主要内容：

　　地球内部的构造(有一张图讲各个底层)。说人类只能接触比较表层的构造，然后讲了几种方法可以研究(有问题，问的哪个方法没提到)，比如分析火山的坑、还有什么岩石样本。后来讲了有一个特别深的洞(也是一个排除题)，是世界上最深的洞，但是这个洞相比较而言还是很浅，还是到达不了地球的内部，所以不能研究地球内部。用实验模拟地球内部的环境，看看哪些物质能在高温、高压下面比较稳定，但是这种方法不能确定地球内部物质组成的比例。如果地球一直散热的话，地球早就冷了(有题，问为什么没有冷掉)，但是没有冷是因为很多物质可以有热辐射，加上地球内部比外部的温度高很多，内部的岩石在高温高压的情况下可以运动，这就造成了convection(有题，说关于这个convection哪个是错的)，然后举了个例子来理解，说就像在玻璃里面，还说这造成了板块运动，板块运动非常慢，一年只有几厘米，但是在地质学的时间来看，这种运动非常的快。

　　相似TPO练习推荐

　　TPO7 The Geologic History of the Mediterranean

　　TPO28 Groundwater

　　相关知识背景

　　Mantle convection is the slow creeping motion of Earth's rocky mantle caused by convection currents carrying heat from the interior of the earth to thesurface. It is the driving force that causes tectonic plates to move around the Earth's surface.

　　The Earth's surface is divided into a number of tectonic plates that are continuously being created and consumed at their opposite plate boundaries. Creation (accretion) occurs as mantle is added to the growing edges of a plate. This hot added material cools down by conduction and convection of heat. At the consumption edges of the plate, the material has thermally contracted to become dense, and it sinks under its own weight in the process of subduction at an ocean trench. This subducted material sinks to somedepth in the Earth's interior where it is prohibited from sinking further. The subducted oceanic crust triggers volcanism.

　　第三篇：

　　题材划分：动物学(与2013年12月15日阅读的第二篇一样)主要内容：

　　因为猩猩没法发音，很多人就开始对教猩猩的手语比较感兴趣了(有题，问为什么开始对教猩猩感兴趣);第二段讲了一个实验，说让猩猩待在一群人中间，这群人不说话，都是用手语表达，还做了一些特别的帮助，来教猩猩手语(排除题，问哪个方法没用到)。猩猩学了很多词，还能同时说2个词了，2个词是有结构的而不是ramdom(词汇题)，最后猩猩还会创新，说了一个water bird(有题，问water bird说明了什么)。第三段讲第二段的这个实验发表在科学杂志上面了，刺激了很多人研究猩猩的手语，结果这些热情因为一个实验给停止了(有题，问对这种研究的热情怎么停止了)。讲这个实验表面，猩猩学了很多词，也能用2个词来表达。但是小孩的词汇量达到一定程度就可以说一些句子，但是猩猩的词汇量到了125，还是不能表达复杂的句子，而且猩猩只能说2个词，如果说3、4个词，他就只能重复，比如说Nim(一个名字) eat，youeat，它这么说只是为了强调，而不是为了表达。第四段讲得一个film，一个trainer教猩猩，猩猩更多的是重复trainer的话。最后一段比较了一下孩子和猩猩，说孩子可以说很多变化的句子。

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　　TPO9 Rlection in Teaching

　　TPO13 Methods of Studying Infant Perception

　　Chimpanzees make tools anduse them to acquire foods and for social displays; they have sophisticated hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative and capable of deception; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence; and they are capable of spontaneous planning for a future state or event.

　　Chimps communicate in a manner similar to human nonverbal communication, using vocalizations, hand gestures, and facial expressions. Research into the chimpanzee brain has revealed chimp communication activates an area of the chimp brain in the same position as Broca's area, a language center in the human brain.

　　Thereis some debate as to whether chimpanzees have the ability to express hierarchical ideas in language. Studies have found that chimps are capable of learning a limited set of sign language symbols, which they can use to communicate with human trainers. However, it is clear that there are distinct limits to the complexity of knowledge structures with which chimps are capable of dealing. The sentences that they can express are limited to specific simple noun-verbsequences and are not capable of the indinite expansion of complexity characteristic of humans.