P1 第一座城市的发展变革 The First City in The World

P2 债券和利息 Bonds

P3 多任务处理Multitasking

 

朗阁名师郝丹丹点评

1. 本次考试难度中等。

2. 整体分析：涉及人文历史（P1）与经济（P2）及科学（P3）

3. 主要题型：延续历来考试的重点，主流题型依然为填空题（11题）；判断题（10题）。本场还较多的考察了选项型的题目：单选、多选、选择性完成句子。在本场考试中并未出现热门的段落细节配对或人名理论配对，但是P2出现了List of Headings 题型。

4. P1 第一座城市的发展

参考答案：

1. NOT GIVEN
2. FALSE
3. TRUE
4. FALSE
5. TRUE
6. FALSE
7. 待补充
8. pyramid
9. 待补充
10. storeroom
11. banks
12. clay
13. fires

（答案仅供参考）

参考文章：

City of Ur

Ur continued as a minor capital for Sumer and succeeding civilizations, but during the 4th century BC, the Euphrates changed course, and the city was abandoned.

Living in Sumerian Ur

During Ur's heyday in the Early Dynastic period, four main residential areas of the city included homes made of baked mud brick foundations arranged along long, narrow, winding streets and alleyways.

Typical houses included an open central courtyard with two or more main living rooms in which the families resided. Each house had a domestic chapel where cult structures and the family burial vault was kept. Kitchens, stairways, workrooms, lavatories were all part of the household structures.

The houses were packed in very tightly together, with exterior walls of one household immediately abutting the next one. Although the cities appear very closed off, the interior courtyards and wide streets provided light, and the close-set houses protected the exposure of the exterior walls to heating especially during the hot summers.

Royal Cemetery

Between 1926 and 1931, Woolley's investigations at Ur focused on the Royal Cemetery, where he eventually excavated approximately 2,100 graves, within an area of 70x55 m (230x180 ft): Woolley estimated there were up to three times as many burials originally. Of those, 660 were determined to be dated to the Early Dynastic IIIA (2600-2450 BC)period, and Woolley designated 16 of those as "royal tombs". These tombs had a stone-built chamber with multiple rooms, where the principal royal burial was placed. Retainers--people who presumably served the royal personage and were buried with him or her--were found in a pit outside of the chamber or adjacent to it.

The largest of these pits, called "death pits" by Woolley, held the remains of 74 people. Woolley came to the conclusion that the attendants had willingly drunk some drug and then lay down in rows to go with their master or mistress.

5.P2 债券和利息

参考答案：

14. vi

15. vii

16. ii

17. iv

18. i

19. viii

20. iii

21.&

22. AD

23. salt monopoly

24. secondary market

25. interest rate

26. quantitative easing

（答案仅供参考）

 

参考文章：

Bond Investing

Bonds have been around for thousands of years, dating back to as far as 2400 BC. Throughout the centuries, the use of bonds has grown exponentially, with both governments and companies using these securities for crucial funding. In this piece, we take a brief, but important, look at the history of bond investing, focusing in on the U.S. bond market.

The first recorded bond in history dates back to 2400 B.C. – a stone discovered at Nippur, in Mesopotamia, now present-day Iraq.

This particular bond guaranteed the payment of grain by the principal and the surety bond guaranteed reimbursement if the principal failed to make payment. Corn was the currency of that time period.

The first U.S. Treasury bonds, which were initially called “Liberty Bonds,” were issued to fund World War I. In 1917, the First Liberty Loan Act authorized the issue of $5 billion worth of bonds at 3.5 percent interest three weeks after the United States declared war on Germany. Long-term government bonds proved to be a safe haven from the stock market collapse in 1929, a year in which they returned 3.4%. Following the crash and the resulting depression, U.S. bonds logged in impressive returns.

6. P3 多任务处理

参考答案：

27. C

28. D

29. C

30. D

31. B

32. C

33. C

34. E

35. D

36. B

37. NOT GIVEN

38. YES

39. NOT GIVEN

40. NO

（答案仅供参考）

 

参考文章：

Multitasking Debate

Can you do them at the same time?

The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they’re flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed,” he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.

There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we're looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognise a second item. This limitation is known as the "attentional blink”: experiments have shown that if you're watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it. Interestingly, if you don’t expect the first event, you have no trouble responding to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.

A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It’s estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos - say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other - and they will fail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?

 

考试预测

1.本场考试依然延续雅思阅读考试的基本趋势，半数题目考察基础拿分题型判断题和填空题。考生须重点关注主流题型及其题目的综合解题方法。本场考试中出现了Heading题，难度相对较大，做题时注意段落首尾句、段落中的问句及转折词、段落中例子前面的观点句等重点内容。需要注意最近考试的重点题型配对题，尤其是难度较大的段落细节配对题。该题型在本场考试中没有出现，警惕下场考试的回归。

2.下场考试的话题可能有生化科技类、自然环境类。

3. 重点浏览14-15年机经。

 

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