托福听力：地质文章实例分析

一．某个理论/假说

内容 scientist therozied that.....

理论如何普及 evidence....discovered that... found that……, get the popularity...

教授对此的反应 geologist/people /professor think....I am sure... most of us thought.... I will predict that.....

不同理论或者看法的对比，或者理论存在的缺陷 there are some speculations.....

二．现象的过程

what happened... how it happened .... It is like this……

三．例题分析

Here is one that comes to mind.....for example.....

TPO1 LECTURE2

1.Main idea

What does the professor mainly discuss?

The difference in age among American mountain ranges

The importance of a technique used for dating geological materials

The recent discovery of an ancient canyon

A comparison of various minerals used for dating

Today I want to talk about a way in which we are able to determine how old a piece of land, or some other geologic feature is - dating techniques

.Before the use of uranium-lead analysis, where did most geologists think the Grand Canyon sandstone came from?

An ancient lake located in the American Southwest

A desert that once connected two continents

Sands carried by a river from the Appalachian Mountains

A nearby mountain range that had flattened out over time

And until just recently, most of us thought the sand had come from an ancient mountain range fairly close by that flattened out over time. That’s been the conventional wisdom among geologists for quite some time. But now we’ve learned something different, and quite surprising, using a technique called Uranium-Lead Dating.

Two geologists discovered that about half of the sand from the Grand Canyon was actually once part of the Appalachian Mountains.

这个题目是典型的前后理论观点的对比题。。。

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2.In the talk, the professor describes the sequence of uranium-lead dating.

Summarize the sequence by putting the events in the correct order. Drag your answer choices to spaces where they belong. To remove an answer choice, click on it.

Zircon in the sandstone is matched to the zircon in a particular mountain range.

The amount of lead in sandstone zircon is measured

The age of zircon in a sandstone sample is determined.

What they did was: they looked at the grains of Zircon in the sandstone. Zircon is a material that contains radioactive Uranium, which makes it very useful for dating purposes. Zircon starts off as molten magma, the hot larva from volcanoes. This magma then crystallizes. And when Zircon crystallizes, theUranium inside it begins to change into Lead. So if you measure the amount of Lead in the Zircon grain, you can figure out when the grain was formed. After that, you can determine the age of Zircon from different mountain ranges. Once you do that, you can compare the age of the Zircon in the sandstone in your sample to the age of the Zircon in the mountains. If the age of the Zircon matches the age of one of the mountain ranges, then it means the sandstone actually used to be part of that particular mountain range.

过程题的标志性信号句。。what they did was……..

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3.According to the professor, what change has caused uranium-lead dating to gain popularity recently?

It can be performed outside a laboratory

It can now be done more efficiently

It no longer involves radioactive elements

It can be used in fields other than geology

So because of this, this new way of doing Uranium-Lead Dating, we’ve been able to determine that one of our major assumptions about the Grand Canyon was wrong.

Like I said before, Uranium-Lead Dating has been with us for a while. But, um… until recently, in order to do it, you really had to study many individual grains. And it took a long time before you got results. It just wasn’t very efficient.

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4.Why does the professor talk about the breaking apart of Earth's continents?新理论新技术的应用。

To give another example of how uranium-lead dating might be useful

To explain how the Grand Canyon was formed

To demonstrate how difficult uranium-lead dating is

To disprove a theory about the age of Earth's first mountain ranges

Here is one that comes to mind. You know the theory that earth’s continents were once joined together and only split apart relatively recently? Well, with Uranium-Lead Dating, we could prove that more conclusively.

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5.What does the professor imply when he says this

The class is easier than other geology classes

The class has already studied the information he is discussing

Some students should take a course in geological dating techniques

He will discuss the topic later in the class

复听推理题，没难度：我相信你们都知道。。。

TPO4 LECTURE3

1. does the professor mainly discuss?

His plans for research involving moving rocks.

A difference between two geological forces that cause rocks to move.

Theories about why desert rocks move.

Reasons why geologists should study moving rocks.

So I’ll just touch on aninteresting subject that I think makes an important point. We’ve been covering rocks and different types of rocks for the last several weeks. But next week we are going to do something a bit different. And to get started I thought I’d mention something that shows how uh…as a geologist, you need to know about more than just rocks and the structure of solid matter, moving rocks, you may have heard about them.

主旨题，无悬念

文章结构，讲述了三种理论，以及三种理论的缺陷（实验证据），最后提出自己的观点，文章是很典型的实验加观点类型的文章。

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2.According to the professor, what have the researchers agreed on?

The rocks cannot move after ice storms.

The rocks do not move at night.

The rocks never move in circles.

The rocks are not moved by people.

But nobody has been able to figure out how they are moving because no one has ever seen it happen.Now there are a lot of theories, but all we know for sure is that people aren’t’？moving the rocks. There are no footprints, no tyre tracks and no heavy machinery like a bulldozer…uh, nothing was ever brought in to move these heavy rocks.

观点题，针对某一现象，普遍的看法

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3.The professor mentions experiments on the wind speed necessary to move rocks. What is the professor’s attitude toward the experiments?

Their results were decisive.

They were not carried out carefully.

They were not continued long enough to reach a conclusion.

The government should not have allowed the experiments.

And guess this, you need winds of at least five hundred miles an hour to move just the smallest rocks. And winds that strong have never been recorded.

Ever! Not on this planet.

So I think it’s safe to say that that issues has been settled.

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4.常考对某个实验的教授的看法。。What important point does the professor make about the area where the rocks are found?

It has been the site of Earth’s highest wind speeds.

It is subject to laws that restrict experimentation.

It is accessible to heavy machinery.

It is not subject to significant changes in temperature.

I bet you are saying to yourself well, why don’t scientists just set up video cameras to record what actually happens? TThing is this is a protective wilderness area. So by law that type of research isn’t allowed.

自问自答式细节题，有提问的话要注意后面跟的答案

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5.What is the professor’s purpose in telling the students about moving rocks?

To teach a lesson about the structure of solid matter.

To share a recent advance in geology.

To give an example of how ice can move rocks.

To show how geologists need to combine information from several fields.

？So all this leads back to my main point – you need to know about more than just  rocks as geologists. The researchers studying moving rocks, well, they combine their knowledge of rocks with knowledge of wind, ice and such…um not successfully, not yet. But you know, they would even have been able to get started without uh… earth science understanding – knowledge about wind,storms, you

最后段落的态度观点题

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