TOEFL阅读经典难句荟萃

TOEFL阅读经典难句荟萃By Saavedro1.Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at theEarth’s surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.2.As a result, claims that eating a diet consisting entirely of organically grown foods prevents orcures disease or provides other benefits to health have come widely publicized and form the basis for folklore.3.The desperate plight of the South has eclipsed the fact that reconstruction had to beundertaken in the North, though less spectacularly.4.The new accessibility of land around the periphery of almost every major city sparked anexplosion of real estate development and fueled what we known as urban sprawl.5.Amid rumors that there were prehistoric mammoths wandering around the unknown regionand that somewhere in its wilds was a mountain of rock salt 80 by 45 miles in extent, the two captains set out.6. A series of mechanical improvements continuing well into the nineteenth century, includingthe introduction of pedals to sustain tone or to soften it, the perfection of a metal frame and steel wire of the finest quality, finally produced an instrument capable of myriad tonal effects from the most delicate harmonies to an almost orchestral fullness of sound, from a liquid, singing tone to a sharp, percussive brilliance.7.For a number of years the selection of music for each film program rested entirely in thehands of the conductor or leader of the orchestra, and very often the principal qualification for holding such a position was not skill or taste so much as the ownership of a large personal library of musical pieces.8.The fact that half of the known species are thought to inhabit the world’s rain forests does notseem surprising, considering the huge numbers of insects that comprise the bulk of the species.9.To appreciate fully the diversity and abundance of life in the area, it helps to think small.10.Science is built with facts just as a house is built with bricks, but a collection of facts cannotbe called science any more than a pile of bricks can be called a house.11.The variation between the hemisphere corresponds to which sides of the body is used toperform specific activities.12.In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition by authorssuch as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates has seemed at time determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on the essentially mimetic quality of her fiction.13.If it were not for this faculty, they would devour all foods available in a short time and wouldprobably starve themselves out of existence.14.People in the United States in the nineteenth century were haunted by the prospect thatunprecedented change in the nation’s economy would bring social chaos.15.Accompanying that growth was a structural change that featured increasing economicdiversification and a gradual shift in the nation’s labor force from agriculture to manufacturing and other nonagricultural pursuits.16.Surrounding the column are three sepals and three petals, sometimes easily recognizable assuch, often distorted into gorgeous, weird, but always functional shapes.17.On the other hand, when it comes to substantive-particularly behavioral-information, crowsare less well known than many comparably common species and, for that matter, not a few quite uncommon ones: the endangered California condor, to cite one obvious example.18.Life’s transition from the sea to the land was perhaps as much of an evolutionary challenge aswas the genesis of life.19.In agriculture, the transformation was marked by the mergence of the grain elevators, thecotton presses, the warehouses, and the commodity exchanges that seemed to so many of the nation’s farmers the visible sign of a vast conspiracy against them.20.But as the number of wage earners in manufacturing rose from 2.7 million in 1880 to 4.5million in 1990 to 8.4 million in 1920, the number of huge plants like the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia burgeoned, as did the size of the average plant.21.What we today call American folk art was, indeed, art of, by, and for ordinary, everyday“folks” who, with increasing prosperity and leisure, created a market for art of all kinds, and especially for portraits.22.On the rare occasion when a fine piece of sculpture was desired, Americans turned to foreignsculptors, as in the 1770’s when the cities of New York and Charleston, South Carolina, commissioned the Englishman Joseph Wilton to make marble statues of William Pitt.23.Add to this the timidity with which unschooled artisans- originally trained as stonemasons,carpenters, or cabinetmakers- attacked the medium from which they were to make their images, and one understands more fully the development of sculpture made in the United States in the late eighteenth century.24.Implicit in it is an aesthetic principle as well: that the medium has certain qualities of beautyand expressiveness with which sculptors must bring their own aesthetic sensibilities into harmony.25.With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects intoincongruous juxtaposition and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.26.By comparison with these familiar yardsticks, the distances to the galaxies areincomprehensibly large, but they too are made more manageable by using a time calibration, in this case the distance that light travels in one year.27.The primary reason was skepticism that a railroad built through so challenging and thinlysettled a stretch of desert, mountain, and semiarid plain could pay a profit.28.The argument that humans, even in prehistoric times, had some number sense, at least to theextent of recognizing the concepts of more and less when some objects were added to or taken away from a small group, seems fair, for studies have shown that some animals possess such a sense.29.A useful definition of an air pollutant is a compound added directly or indirectly by humans tothe atmosphere in such quantities as to affect humans, animals, vegetation, or materials adversely.30.The acute, growing public awareness of the social changes that had been taking place forsome time was tied to tremendous growth in popular journalism in the late nineteenth century, including growth in quantity and circulation of both magazines and newspapers.31.Growing tightly packed together and collectively weaving a dense canopy of branches, a standof red alder trees can totally dominate a site to the exclusion of almost everything else.32.Farm dwellers in their isolation not only found it harder to locate companions in play but alsothanks to the unending demands and pressures of their work, felt it necessary to combine fun with purpose.33.The scientific investigation of an experience as private as consciousness is frustratinglybeyond the usual tools of the experimental psychologist.34.A few art collectors James Bowdoin III of Boston, William Byrd of Virginia, and the Aliensand Hamiltons of Philadelphia introduced European art traditions to those colonists privilegedto visit their galleries, especially aspiring artists, and established in their respective communities the idea of the value of art and the need for institutions devoted to its encouragement.35.Moreover, in addition to its being a transportation pathway equipped with a mammothphysical plant of tracks signals, crossings, bridges, and junctions, plus telegraph and telephone lines the railroad nurtured factory complexes, coat piles, warehouses, and generating stations, forming along its right-of-way what has aptly been called “the metropolitan corridor” of the American landscape.36.Therefore, if the Earth began as a superheated sphere in space, all the rocks making up itscrust may well have been igneous and thus the ancestors of all other rocks.37.It was in the cities that the elements that can be associated with modern capitalism firstappeared- the use of money and commercial paper in place of barter, open competition in place of social deference and hierarchy, with an attendant rise in social disorder, and the appearance of factories using coal or water power in place of independent craftspeople working with hand tools.38.The older painters, most of whom were born before 1835, practiced in a mode oftenself-taught and monopolized by landscape subject matter and were securely established in and fostered by the reigning American art organization, the National Academy of Design.39.Most important, perhaps, was that they had all maintained with a certain fidelity a manner oftechnique and composition consistent with those of America’s first popular landscape artist, Thomas Cole, who built a career painting the Catskill Mountain scenery bordering the Hudson River.40.Matching the influx of foreign immigrants into larger cities of the United States during thelate nineteenth century was a domestic migration, from town and farm to city, wihin the United States.41.The different uses to which societies put these materials are of interest to anthropologists whomay ask, for example, why a person chooses to use clay and not copper when both items are available.42.Herein lay the beginning of what ultimately turned from ignorance to denial of the value ofnutritional therapies in medicine.43.Finally, for the many small mammals that supplement their insect diet with fruits or seeds aninability to span open gaps between tree crowns may be problematic, since trees that yield these foods can be sparse.44.Missing until recently were fossils clearly intermediate, or transitional, between landmammals and cetaceans.45.This new design concept, coupled with the sharp postwar reactions to the styles andconventions of the preceding decades, created an entirely new public taste which caused art Nouveau types of glass to fall out of favor.。