朗阁

　　P1 新西兰人类(女囚)头骨 Ahead of Time

　　P2 冰山解决淡水问题

　　P3 拯救濒危语言 Saving Endangered Language

　　朗阁讲师讲评

　　1. 本场考试难度中等，在九月份的考试中属于“友好型”，难点也就是在***后一篇文章。

　　2. 整体分析：涉及历史类(P1)、自然与社会类(P2)、语言类(P3)。

　　本次考试三篇文章都是重复旧题，并且在题型方面基础题型(填空+判断)占到了25道题，所以题型方面难度不大。

　　3. 部分答案及参考文章：

　　Passage 1：新西兰人类(女囚)头骨

　　题型：判断4题+流程图填空5题+笔记填空4题

　　1-4 判断

　　1. TRUE

　　2. TRUE

　　3. FALSE

　　4. NOT GIVEN

　　5-9 流程图填空

　　5. police

　　6. European

　　7. radiocarbon dating

　　8. sample

　　9. 296

　　10-13 笔记填空

　　10. race

　　11. archaeologists

　　12. Australia

　　13. shipwreck

　　文章分析：

　　本文讲述了一个怀拉拉帕(Wairarapa)的本地少年Sam Tobin,在Ruamahanga河边溜狗的时候发现了一个头骨。经过考古学家们的分析，此头骨的时间颠覆了移民到达新西兰的**时间。

　　参考文章：

　　Ahead of Time

　　A chance discovery challenges the recorded history of New Zealand

　　AT ABOUT MIDDAY on 23 October 2004, young Wairarapa local Sam Tobin round up his dogs, Gomez and Bertie, and took a wander down to the nearby Ruamahanga River. Having run high for days, the river had at last fallen and he was eager to see what changes the resent spring floods had wrought. The family at Pukio, 15km southeast of Featherston, bordered the Ruamahanga and a purpose-built four-metre-high flood bank set back 30 or 40 paces from the water testified to its flood-prone nature. Sixteen-year-old Tobin had known the tree-fringed river to keep to its bed in only one year out of the 11 he had lived on the farm, its shoals and sandy margins endlessly dredged and reworked by the big-muscled seasonal flood.

　　Stepping out onto a broad shoulder of river sand, studded with stone chip, he noticed what he took to be the upper surface of a whitish rock lit by the noonday sun. Getting closer he saw that it was bone. Such a thing was not uncommon hereabouts-he had often come across fragments, and even complete skulls, of cows and sheep. But as he scraped aside the stones and pried the object free, he realized with a shock that he held in his hands a human skull, discolored with age, and bleached above and behind the right eyes socket where it had lain exposed. There were several holes, one of them in the right temple, perhaps suggesting a violent death.

　　Tobin replaced the skull and hurried home to tell his mother what the Ruamahanga had delivered to their doorstep. It would prove to be a spectacular find; setting in motion an investigation that would drag on for years and draw in some of the country’s most respected specialists, stirring heated controversy across the country and making headlines on the other side of the world. The debate that ensued challenged our most firmly held assertions of human settlement in New Zealand.

　　THE POLICE WERE called, but despite a thorough search they could find nothing that might shed light on the identity of the skull, or on the circumstances of its sudden appearance on a secluded bank of the Ruamahanga.

　　The skull was taken north to be examined by forensic pathologists Dr Rex Ferris and Dr Tim Koelmeyer at Auckland Hospital. Despite being hampered by its damaged and incomplete condition-the jawbone and lower left portion of the cranium were missing-Ferris and Koelmeyer determined that the skull was that of an adult female. Furthermore, most probably of Caucasian origin and that the deterioration of the bone placed the time of death “beyond living memory”. They conjectured that the holes in the skull, each the size of a 10 cent piece, might represent old injuries, and that one of the perforations looked to have been caused by “ancient buckshot.”

　　Wellington-based forensic anthropologist Dr Robin Watt also examined the skull. He concurred with his northern colleagues, stating in his report that it was “probably that of a female, aged about 40-45 years, and probably of European origin”.

　　The experts agreed, and believing that it could be the remains of an old farm burial, Dr Watt recommended radio carbon dating to make sure it wasn’t a recent death. A sample of bone from the upper part of the skull was duly sent to the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) in Lower Hutt, and a little over three weeks later the result from GNS’s Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory came back. The news was a bombshell.

　　Cutting through the bewildering complexity of the scientific analysis was a single line, under the heading “Radiocarbon Calibration Report”, which announced an electrifying conclusion. It read: “Conventional radiocarbon age 296 ± 35 years BP.”

　　If the lab had got its science right, the skull that Sam Tobin had lifted from the sand was 300 or more years old. While a 300-year old skull wasn’t that unusual, three independent experts had suggested that the skull was a European female. And that raised the tantalizing possibility of a white woman having walked among Maori in the Wairarapa long before the arrival of Captain James Cook; perhaps even before the very first recorded European contact-the fleeting visit of the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642.

　　It seemed a preposterous idea. No Northern hemisphere ships were known to have sailed in these waters before Tasman’s and according to records there wasn’t another until Cook’s Endeavour. The Portuguese voyager Ferdinand Magellan had rounded South America and burst into the Pacific in 1520, just six years after its discovery by Europeans, but his route unfolded well to the north of Tahiti and the Marshall Islands. Besides, there is no record of any women among the 240 crew aboard Magellan’s five tiny ships. The same held true with later sixteenth and early seventeenth century Pacific voyages, including those of Francis Drake and Luis Vaez de Torres.

　　Passage 2：冰山解决淡水问题

　　题型：判断7题+填空5题+选择1题

　　14-20 判断题

　　14. TRUE

　　15. FALSE

　　16. NOT GIVEN

　　17. TRUE

　　18. TRUE

　　19. NOT GIVEN

　　20. TRUE

　　21-25 填空题

　　21. wrapping process

　　22. rolls

　　23. cables

　　24. friction

　　25. current

　　26 单选

　　待确认

　　文章分析：

　　这篇文章是关于科学家们想要通过南极洲的冰川来解决淡水资源不足的问题，文中依次论述了这种做法的可行性，运输与包装方式，***后还对比了冰山淡水和海水脱盐两种技术的特点和优劣。

　　Passage 3：拯救濒危语言

　　题型：list of headings7题+特殊词匹配5题+单选2题

　　27-33 list of headings

　　27. v

　　28. x

　　29. iii

　　30. i

　　31. vii

　　32. viii

　　33. ii

　　34-38 特殊词匹配

　　34. C

　　35. B

　　36. E

　　37. A

　　38. D

　　39-40. 单选

　　39. C

　　40. D

　　参考文章(也可参考C4T2P1那篇文章)：

　　Save Endangered Language

　　“Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearing of 90 percent of the very field to which it is dedicated.” Michael Krauss. “The World’s Language in Crisis.”

　　Ten years ago, Michael Krauss sent s shudder through the discipline of linguistics with his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be uttered within a century. Unless scientists and community leaders directed a worldwide effort to stabilize the decline of local languages, he warned, nine tenth of the linguistic diversity of humankind would probably be educated guess, but other respected linguists had been clanging our similar alarms. Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in the same journal issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had since passed into extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90 surviving Aboriginal languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups. The same was true for all but 20 of the 175 Native American languages spoken or remembered in the US., Krauss told a congressional panel in 1992.

　　Many experts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. To start, there is scientific self-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do with the limits of human speech, which are far from fully explored. Many researchers would like to know which structural elements of grammar and vocabulary--if any—are truly universal and probably therefore hardwired into the human brain. Other scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words that appear in otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these cases, the wider the portfolio of languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right.

　　Despite the near constant buzz in linguistics about endangered languages over the past 10 years, the field has accomplished depressingly little. “You would think that there would be some organized response to this dire situation,” some attempt to determine which language can be saved and which should be documented before they disappear, says Sara G. Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “But there isn’t any such effort organized in the profession. It is only recently that it has become fashionable enough to work on endangered languages.” Six years ago, recalls Douglas H. Whales of Yale University, “when I asked linguists who was raising money to deal with these problems. I mostly got blank stares.” So Whalen and a few other linguists founded the Endangered Languages Fund. In the five years to 2001 they were able to collect only $80,000 for research grants. A similar foundation in England, directed by Nicholas Ostler, has raised just $8,000 since 1995.

　　But there are encouraging signs that the field has turned a corner, The Volkswagen Foundation, a German charity, just issued its second round of grants totally more than $2 million. It has created a multimedia archive at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house recordings, grammars dictionaries and other data on endangered languages. To fill the archive, the foundation has dispatched field linguists to document Aweti (100 or so speakers in Brazil). Ega (about 300 speakers in Ivory Coast). Waima’a (a few hundred speakers in East Timor), and a dozen or so other languages unlikely to survive the century. The Ford Foundation as also edged in to the arena. Its contributions helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice program created in 1992 by Leanne Hinton of Berkeley and Native Americans worried about the imminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in California. Fluent speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their native tongue through 360 hours of shared activities, spread over six months. So far about 5 teams have completed the program, Hinton says, transmitting at least some knowledge of 25 languages. “It’s too early to call this language revitalization.” Hinton admits. “In California the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the recruitment rate of young speakers. But at least we prolong the survival of the language.” That will give linguists more time to record these tongues before they vanish.

　　But the master-apprentice approach hasn’t caught on outside the U.S., and Hinton’s effort is a drop in the sea. At least 440 languages have been reduced to a mere handful of elders, according to the Ethnologue, a catalogue of languages produced by the Dallas-based group SIL International that comes closest to global coverage. For the vast majority of their languages, there is little or no records pf their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or use in daily life. Even if a language has been fully documented, all that remains once it vanishes from active use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of features that the scientists was lucky and astute enough to capture. Linguists may be able to sketch on outline of the forgotten language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree, but little more. “How did people start conversations and talk to babies? How did husband and wives converse?” Hinton asks. “Those are the first things you want to learn when you want to revitalize the language.”

　　But there is as yet no discipline of “conversion linguistics,” as there is for biology. Almost every strategy tried so far has succeeded in some places but failed in others and there seems to be no way to predict with certainty what will work where. Twenty years ago in New Zealand, Maori speakers set up ‘language nests,” in which preschoolers were immersed in the native language. Additional Maori-only classes were added as the children progressed through elementary and secondary school. A similar approach was tried in Hawaii, with some success--the number of native speakers has stabilized at 1,000 or so, reports Joseph E. Grimes of SIL International, who is working on Oahu. Students can now get instruction in Hawaiian all the way through university.

　　One factors that always seems to occur in the demise of a language is that the speakers begin to have collective doubts about the usefulness of language loyalty. Once they start regarding their own language as inferior to the majority language, people stop using it for all situations. Kids pick up on the attitude and prefer the dominant language. In many cases, people don’t notice until they suddenly realize that their kids never speak language, even at home. This is how Cornish and some dialects of Scottish Gaelic is still only rarely used for daily home life in Ireland, 80 years after the republic was founded with Irish as its first official language.

　　Linguists agree that ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is multilingualism. Even uneducated people can learn several languages, as long as they start as children. Indeed, most people in the world speak more than one tongue, and in places such as Cameroon (279 languages), Papua New Guinea (823) and India (387) it is common to speak three or four distinct languages and a dialect or two as well. Most Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec, have a gut reaction that anyone speaking another language in front of them is committing an immoral act. You get the same reaction in Australia and Russia. It is no coincidence that these are the areas where languages are disappearing the fastest. The first step in saving dying languages is to persuade the world’s majorities to allow the minorities among them to speak with their own voices.

　　考试建议

　　1. 本场考试属于近期考试中较为友好的一场，难度适中，基础题型(填空和判断)占据了大半壁江山，考生只要稳定发挥即可。***后一篇题型方面比前两篇略*些，但是文章也是属于旧题，并且文章话题与内容在剑桥真题中也有出现，所以对于认真做过剑桥真题的同学而言也会是比较轻松的。纵观近几个月的雅思考试来看，基础题型(填空，判断，选择)依然是重点，考生要在平时的练习中稳扎稳打，**基础题型较为稳定且较高的正确率。在此基础之上，加强对较难题型的练习，主要是各类配对题以及段落标题选择题。此外，考前多做模考，注意根据题型搭配选择相应的解题策略，合理分配时间。报名机考的同学一定要上机练习，熟悉机考操作。

　　2. 下场考试的话题可能有生物类，社会类，考古类和历史类。

　　3. 重点浏览2016到2021年机经。