托福阅读真题Official 45 Passage 1（六）

托福阅读真题Official 45 Passage 1（六）

The Beringia Landscape

During the peak of the last ice age,northeast Asia(Siberia)and Alaska were connected by a broad land mass called the Bering Land Bridge.This land bridge existed because so much of Earth’s water was frozen in the great ice sheets that sea levels were over 100 meters lower than they are today.Between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago,Siberia,the Bering Land Bridge,and Alaska shared many environmental characteristics.These included a common mammalian fauna of large mammals,a common flora composed of broad grasslands as well as wind-swept dunes and tundra,and a common climate with cold,dry winters and somewhat warmer summers.The recognition that many aspects of the modern flora and fauna were present on both sides of the Bering Sea as remnants of the ice-age landscape led to this region being named Beringia.

It is through Beringia that small groups of large mammal hunters,slowly expanding their hunting territories,eventually colonized North and South America.On this archaeologists generally agree,but that is where the agreement stops.One broad area of disagreement in explaining the peopling of the Americas is the domain of paleoecologists,but it is critical to understanding human history:what was Beringia like?

The Beringian landscape was very different from what it is today.Broad,windswept valleys;glaciated mountains;sparse vegetation;and less moisture created a rather forbidding land mass.This land mass supported herds of now-extinct species of mammoth,bison,and horse and somewhat modern versions of caribou,musk ox,elk,and saiga antelope.These grazers supported in turn a number of impressive carnivores,including the giant short-faced bear,the saber-tooth cat,and a large species of lion.

The presence of mammal species that require grassland vegetation has led Arctic biologist Dale Guthrie to argue that while cold and dry,there must have been broad areas of dense vegetation to support herds of mammoth,horse,and bison.Further,nearly all of the ice-age fauna had teeth that indicate an adaptation to grasses and sedges;they could not have been supported by a modern flora of mosses and lichens.Guthrie has also demonstrated that the landscape must have been subject to intense and continuous winds,especially in winter.He makes this argument based on the anatomy of horse and bison,which do not have the ability to search for food through deep snow cover.They need landscapes with strong winds that remove the winter snows,exposing the dry grasses beneath.Guthrie applied the term“mammoth steppe”to characterize this landscape.

In contrast,Paul Colinvaux has offered a counterargument based on the analysis of pollen in lake sediments dating to the last ice age.He found that the amount of pollen recovered in these sediments is so low that the Beringian landscape during the peak of the last glaciation was more likely to have been what he termed a“polar desert,”with little or only sparse vegetation.In no way was it possible that this region could have supported large herds of mammals and thus,human hunters.Guthrie has argued against this view by pointing out that radiocarbon analysis of mammoth,horse,and bison bones from Beringian deposits revealed that the bones date to the period of most intense glaciation.

The argument seemed to be at a standstill until a number of recent studies resulted in a spectacular suite of new finds.The first was the discovery of a 1,000-square-kilometer preserved patch of Beringian vegetation dating to just over 17,000 years ago—the peak of the last ice age.The plants were preserved under a thick ash fall from a volcanic eruption.Investigations of the plants found grasses,sedges,mosses,and many other varieties in a nearly continuous cover,as was predicted by Guthrie.But this vegetation had a thin root mat with no soil formation,demonstrating that there was little long-term stability in plant cover,a finding supporting some of the arguments of Colinvaux.A mixture of continuous but thin vegetation supporting herds of large mammals is one that seems plausible and realistic with the available data.

Question 11 of 14

The word“plausible”in the passage is closest in meaning to

A.preferable

B.practical

C.reasonable

D.advantageous

正确答案：C

题目详解

题型分类：词汇题

选项分析：

词汇所在句“以现有的数据来看，目前看似plausible和现实的解释是，大型哺乳动物群是以这些连续生长的、薄薄的植被层为食的”。C选项reasonable意思为“合理的”，符合语境。plausible原意为“有道理的”。

A选项preferable更可取的，更合意的。

B选项practical真实的。

D选项advantageous有优势的。

Question 12 of 14

Which of the following best describes the organization of paragraph 6?

A.Two contrasting views are presented,and a study that could decide between them is proposed.

B.An argument is offered,and reasons both for and against the argument are presented.

C.A claim is made,and a study supporting the claim is described.

D.New information is presented,and the information is used to show that two competing explanations can each be seen as correct in some way.

正确答案：D

题目详解

题型分类：事实信息题

原文定位：

选项分析：

本段一共五句话，第一句话引出新的研究，第二句话和第三句话支持了Guthrie的观点。然后用but转折，第四句话支持了Colinvaux的观点，第五句话表示真实的情况可能是两者的结合。

D选项New information对应第一句new finds，two competing explanations对应第三句的Guthrie和第四句的Colinvaux。D选项符合第六段的结构，正确。

A选项，文章第一句就提到了研究，而不是后面才提。

B选项，第一句只是提到了研究，而没有提到argument（论点）。

C选项，supporting the claim与后文提到的两方观点矛盾。

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