字神帝國英語天地

康康聽到同學的心聲了，為何台灣都沒有雅思考場題目

所以，老師暑假雖忙，還是特別少睡一點，

幫同學整理雅思考題哦。

上週六7/20 考的三篇閱讀分別是

Passage1：霸王龍獵手 T-rex hunter

Passage2：自我認知

Passage3：雕塑和寫生

趕緊來看第一篇：

Section 1 ：霸王龍獵手 T-rex hunter

Jack Homer is an unlikely academic: his dyslexia is so bad that he has trouble reading a book. But he can read the imprint of life in sandstone or muddy shale across a distance of 100 years, and it is this gift that has made him curator of palaeontology at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies, the leader of a multi-million dollar scientific project to expose a complete slice of life 68 million years ago, and a consultant to Steven and other Hollywood figures.

His father had a sand and gravel quarry in Montana, and the young Homer was a collector of stones and bones, complete with notes about when and where he found them. “My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana,” he says. “He was enough, of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur: it probably wasn’t a duck billed dinosaur but closely related to that. I catalogued it, and took good care of it, and then later when I was in high school, excavated my first dinosaur skeleton. It obviously started earlier than eight and I literally have been driven ever since. I feel like I was born this way.”

Homer spent seven years at university, but never graduated. “I have a learning disability, I would call it a learning difference---dyslexia, they call it---and I just had a terrible time with English and foreign languages and things like that. For a degree in geology orbiology they required two years of a foreign language. There was no way in the world I could do that. In fact, I didn’t really pass English. So I couldn’t get a degree, I just wasn’t capable of it. But I took all of the courses required and I wrote a thesis and I did all sorts of things. So I have the education. I just don’t have the piece of paper.” he says.

“We definitely know we are working on a very broad coastal plain with the streams and rivers bordered by conifers and hardwood plants, and the areas in between these rivers were probably fern-covered. There were no grasses at all: just ferns and bushes---an unusual landscape, kind of taking the south-eastern United States---Georgia,Florida---and mixing it with the moors of England and flattening it out,” he says. “Triceratops is very common, but not as common astriceratops and T-rex, for a meat-eating dinosaur, is very common. What we would consider the predator-prey ratio seems really off the scale. What is interesting is the little dromacosaurs, the ones we know for sure were good predators, haven’t been found.”

That is why he sees T-rex not as the lion of the Cretaceous savannah but its vulture. “Look at the wildebeest that migrate in the Serengeti of Africa, a million individuals lose about 200,000 individuals in that annual migration. There is a tremendous carrion base there. And so you have hyenas, you have tremendous numbers of vultures that are scavenging，you don't have all that many animals that are good predators. If T-rex was a top predator,especially considering how big it i, you'd expect it to be extremely rare,much rarer than the little dromaeosaurs,and yet they are eveywhere, they are a dime a dozen." he says, A 12-tonne T-rex is a lot of vulture, but he doesn't see the monster as clumsy. He insisted his theory and finding, dedicated to further research upon it,of course, he would like to reevaluate if there is any case that additional evidence found or explanation raised by others in the future.

He examined the leg bones of the T-rex,and compared the length of the thigh bonc(upper leg) to the shin bone(lower leg).He found that the thigh bone was equal in length or slightly longer than the shin bone, and much thicker and beavier, which proves that the animal was built to be a slow walker rather than fast running. On the other hand, the fossils of fast hunting dinosaurs always showed that the shin bone was longer than the thigh bone.This same truth can be observed in many animals of today which are designed to run fast: the ostrich, cheetah,cic.

He also studied the fossil teeth of theT-rex,and compared them with the teeth of the Velocirapor,and put the nail in the coffin of the "hunter T-rex theory".The Velocirapor's teeth which like stake knife are sharp,razor-edged,and capable of tearing through flesh with ease.The T-rex teeth were huge, sharp at their tip,but blunt,propelled by enonnous jaw muscles,which enabled them to only crush bones.

With the evidence presented in his documentary,Homer was ahle to prove that the idea of the T-rex as being a hunting and ruthless killing machine is probably just a myth .In light of the scientific clues he was able to unearth,the T-rex was a slow,sluggish animal which had poor vision, an extraordinary sense of smell, that often reached its"prey" after the real hunters were done feeding ,and sometimes it had to scare the hunters away from a corpse. In order to do that, the T-rex had to have been ugly, nasty-looking and stinky.This is actually true of nearly all scavenger animals.They are usually vile and nasty looking.

1-7：判斷題

1 Jack Homer knew exactly that the bone pocked up in his father’s ranch belonged to a certain dinosaur when he was at the age of 8. TRUE

2 Jack Homer achieved a distinctive degree in university when he graduated. FALSE

3 Jack Homer believes that the number of prey should be more than that of predators. TRUE

4 T-rex‘s number is equivalent to the number of vulture in the Serengeti. NOT GIVEN

5 The hypothesis that T-rex is the top predator conflicts with the fact of predator-prey ratio which Jack found. TRUE

6 Jack Homer refused to accept any other viewpoints about T-rex’s theory. FALSE

7 Jack Homer is the first man that discovered T-rex’s bones in the world. NOT GIVEN

Queation 8-13： Complete the sentences below

Jack Homer found that T-rex’s 8. shine bone is shorter than the thigh bone, which demonstrates that it was actually a 9. slow walker, unlike other swift animals such as ostrich or 10. cheetah that was bulit to 11. run fast . Another explanation supports his idea is that T-rex’s teeth were rather 12. blunt , which only allowed T-rex to 13.crush hard bones instead of tearing flesh like Velociraptor.