雅思阅读考前必看

　　雅思考试的每一部分都不是容易的，听力，口语，阅读，写作，都是一点点的积累，然后运用之。阅读题最是展现你词汇量，逻辑理解的时候了，平时的阅读积累就显得尤为重要，多看多读多练习。下面是有出国留学网为你整理的《雅思阅读考前必看：Runaway Devils Lake》，希望对你的雅思考试有所参考价值，考出一个好的成绩。

　　雅思阅读：Runaway Devils Lake

　　Devils Lake is where I began my career as a limnologist in 1964, studying the lake's neotenic salamanders and chironomids, or midge flies. Back then, the lake covered about 80 square kilometers, had a maximum depth of about 3 meters and held about 130,000 acre-feet of water. The lake has since risen 13 meters, from a surface elevation of 430 meters above mean sea level to 443 meters. Estimated lake volume is now 4.1 million acre-feet, or about 32 times greater than it was in 1964, and about 370 times greater than it was in 1940 when the lake stood at a record low elevation of 427 meters.

　　The Devils Lake Basin is an endorheic, or closed, basin covering about 9,800 square kilometers in northeastern North Dakota. The basin is at the epicenter of an unprecedented wet period in the lake's modern-day history going back to 1867, when the lake's surface elevation was first measured. Basin climate has become substantially wetter since 1990, with the years 1990 through 2009 ranking as the wettest 20-year period in more than a century. The National Weather Service has referred to this trend as "the new climate" for the Devils Lake region, cautiously predicting that the current weather pattern may continue for several decades an...

　　雅思考试的每一部分都不是容易的，听力，口语，阅读，写作，都是一点点的积累，然后运用之。阅读题最是展现你词汇量，逻辑理解的时候了，平时的阅读积累就显得尤为重要，多看多读多练习。下面是有出国留学网为你整理的《雅思阅读考前必看：A Drier and Hotter Future》，希望对你的雅思考试有所参考价值，考出一个好的成绩。

　　雅思阅读：A Drier and Hotter Future

　　While I was reading William deBuys's new book, A Great Aridness, two massive dust storms reminiscent of the 1930s raged across the skies of Phoenix and of Lubbock, Texas. Newspapers blamed them on the current drought in the West, which is proximately true. But what ultimately is causing this drought, and why would any drought produce such terrifying clouds of dust? The answer is that they may be portents of a more threatening world that we humans are unwittingly creating. As deBuys explains, "Because arid lands tend to be underdressed in terms of vegetation, they are naturally dusty. Humans make them dustier."

　　Agriculture is the main reason for those dust storms—the clearing of native grasslands or sagebrush to grow cotton or wheat, which die quickly when drought occurs and leave the soil unprotected. Phoenix and Lubbock are both caught in severe drought, and it is going to get much worse. We may see many such storms in the decades ahead, along with species extinctions, radical disturbance of ecosystems, and intensified social conflict over land and water. Welcome to the Anthropocene, the epoch when humans have become a major geological and climatic force.

　　DeBuys is an acclaimed historian turned...

　　雅思考试的每一部分都不是容易的，听力，口语，阅读，写作，都是一点点的积累，然后运用之。阅读题最是展现你词汇量，逻辑理解的时候了，平时的阅读积累就显得尤为重要，多看多读多练习。下面是有出国留学网为你整理的《雅思阅读考前必看：Male ostrich》，希望对你的雅思考试有所参考价值，考出一个好的成绩。

　　Mystery of the male ostrich's erection solved

　　Getting an erection is no problem for male ostriches – but maintaining it for more than a few seconds is a different matter. The birds may have inherited their underpowered genitalia from their dinosaur ancestors.

　　The penis is a vital piece of equipment for many vertebrates. Most male reptiles and mammals have them, and two of the most ancient groups of birds have them too, suggesting that dinosaurs, from which birds have descended, also possessed the male member. The majority of male birds don't have one, though: the reason why is something of a mystery.

　　The ostrich belongs to one of those two ancient, penis-bearing bird groups. It is a palaeognath, a group that also includes emus, kiwis and the near-flightless tinamous. The other endowed group is the Galloanserae, commonly known as fowl, which includes chickens, pheasants and ducks.

　　Many of these birds' penises are well understood, but the penises of ostriches and their relatives remained a mystery. So Richard Prum of Yale University and Patricia Brennan, now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, obtained a dead ostrich and three emus to find out more.

　　Fast action

　　In both species they found spongy or...

　　雅思考试的每一部分都不是容易的，听力，口语，阅读，写作，都是一点点的积累，然后运用之。阅读题最是展现你词汇量，逻辑理解的时候了，平时的阅读积累就显得尤为重要，多看多读多练习。下面是有出国留学网为你整理的《雅思阅读考前必看：What's in store》，希望对你的雅思考试有所参考价值，考出一个好的成绩。

　　雅思阅读：What's in store

　　Three weeks ago the government scrapped plans to build the country's first carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at Longannet power station in Fife in Scotland. That was a blow in the fight against climate change: if carbon dioxide can be stripped out of power plant emissions and other factories and stored safely underground, fossil fuels could be used without such damage to the planet. The government has promised to pay £1 billion for a pilot project. Since the Longannet work was going to cost more to build than that, it was abandoned.

　　Even as that project was being ditched, government officials were quietly murmuring about a proposal for CCS at a gas-fired power station at Petershead, Aberdeenshire. Sure enough, a few weeks on another piece of good news has dribbled out: SSE, which runs the Petershead plant, has teamed up with Shell on the project it is proposing. SSE had already applied for European funding for CCS at Petershead. But the tie-up with the oil and gas major is new.

　　It's certainly a good idea. This should give SSE extra cash to help fund a detailed engineering design. As importantly, it means that, if the project goes ahead, the gas will be transported to the Shell-operated Goldeneye gas f...

　　雅思考试的每一部分都不是容易的，听力，口语，阅读，写作，都是一点点的积累，然后运用之。阅读题最是展现你词汇量，逻辑理解的时候了，平时的阅读积累就显得尤为重要，多看多读多练习。下面是有出国留学网为你整理的《雅思阅读考前必看：Reviving autopsy》，希望对你的雅思考试有所参考价值，考出一个好的成绩。

　　雅思阅读：Reviving autopsy

　　TECHNOLOGY advances not only through new inventions, but also by the imaginative application of old ones. And one of the most ancient forms of scientific investigation, the post-mortem autopsy, may be ripe for just such a technological upgrade. According to a paper in this week's Lancet, published by Ian Roberts of the John Radcliffe Hospital, in Oxford, it may soon be time to put away the scalpel and the retractor clamp, and to replace them with the body scanner.

　　The study of death is never a cheerful topic, but it has gone through a particularly gloomy patch over the past few decades. A recent tally by America's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in 2007 only 8.5% of deaths in America were investigated by autopsy. In 1972 that figure was 19.3%. Britain's coroners are more active, but perhaps not more accurate. Twenty-two percent of deaths in the United Kingdom lead to an autopsy. According to a government review, however, one in four is of miserable quality. The upshot in both cases is not just that the cause of individual deaths may be misascribed. More seriously, data about the processes of disease are lost, and those diseases are thus not as well understood as they might have been. Squeamish relati...

　　雅思考试的每一部分都不是容易的，听力，口语，阅读，写作，都是一点点的积累，然后运用之。阅读题最是展现你词汇量，逻辑理解的时候了，平时的阅读积累就显得尤为重要，多看多读多练习。下面是有出国留学网为你整理的《雅思阅读考前必看：Whirly-splat》，希望对你的雅思考试有所参考价值，考出一个好的成绩。

　　雅思阅读：No more whirly-splat

　　ALTHOUGH rare, engine failure is a stressful thing for a helicopter pilot to have to deal with. The pilot of a fixed-wing aircraft that loses power can at least rely on those wings to provide him with lift until his plane's forward velocity falls below its stall speed. A helicopter, by contrast, derives both propulsion and lift from its blades. If they stop rotating, a rapid and terminal encounter with the ground beckons.

　　To prevent that, the blades of most helicopters have a special clutch that disengages them from the engine if the engine stops. The pilot has then to change the pitch of his craft to allow it to enter a mode called autorotation, in which the rush of air as it descends keeps the blades whirling, thus providing lift that slows the fall. The transition to autorotation is perilous, though, because it involves a reversal of the airflow through the blades. And even if he survives that, the pilot has to perform a second manoeuvre, known as flaring, just before he hits the ground. This involves pitching the machine's nose up, in order to reduce its forward velocity and increase the speed of rotation of the blades—and thus the amount of lift they provide—to soften the landing.

　　Both of these maneuvers wou...

　　雅思考试的每一部分都不是容易的，听力，口语，阅读，写作，都是一点点的积累，然后运用之。阅读题最是展现你词汇量，逻辑理解的时候了，平时的阅读积累就显得尤为重要，多看多读多练习。下面是有出国留学网为你整理的《雅思阅读考前必看：Volt farce》，希望对你的雅思考试有所参考价值，考出一个好的成绩。

　　雅思阅读：Difference Engine: Volt farce

　　FOR General Motors, a good deal of the company's recovery from its brush with bankruptcy is riding on the Chevrolet Volt (Opel or Vauxhall Ampera in Europe), its plug-in hybrid electric vehicle launched a year ago. Not that GM expects the sleek four-seater to be a cash cow. Indeed, the car company loses money on every one it makes. But the $41,000 (before tax breaks) Chevy Volt is a "halo" car designed to show the world what GM is capable of, and to lure customers into dealers' showrooms—to marvel at the vehicle's ingenious technology and its fuel economy of 60 miles per gallon (3.9litres/100km)—and then to drive off in one or other of GM's bread-and-butter models.

　　So, it is no surprise that GM should bend over backwards to mollify customers concerned by recent news of the Volt's lithium-ion battery catching fire following crash tests. GM is offering to loan cars to Volt owners worried about their vehicle's safety while an official investigation is underway and modifications made if deemed necessary. The company has

　　Even offered to buy vehicles back from owners who have lost confidence in the technology. There have not been many takers. As of December 5th, fewer than three dozen owners—out of 6,400 Volts s...