托福(阅读)历年真题试卷汇编4(题后含答案及解析).doc

托福（阅读）历年真题试卷汇编4 (题后含答案及解析) 题型有： 3. Reading Comprehension Sections Three：Reading Comprehension Early Theories of Continental DriftP1: The idea that the geography of Earth was different in the past than it is today is not new. As far back as 1620, Francis Bacon spotted that the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America looked as if they would fit together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Between then and 1912, other people identified further similarities between other continental coastlines. But because much of the early support for mobilism was based on far-flung intercontinental similarities, geologists tended to be skeptical of the fieldwork of others.P2: During the late nineteenth century, Austrian geologist Eduard Suess proposed the name “Gondwanaland” in his book The Face of the Earth (1885) and gave far greater emphasis to the evolutionary nature of the earth and he noted the similarities among the Late Paleozoic plant fossils of India, Australia, South Africa, and South America. Based upon glossopteris fern fossils in such regions, he explained that the three land masses were once connected in a supercontinent which he names Gondwanaland, and that the ocean flooded the spaces currently between those lands. Thus, in his view, the similarities of fossils on these continents could be accounted for by postulating the concept of a land bridge that existed once but subsided later.P3: Later, a number of refinements to Suess’s theory were made. The American geologist Frank Taylor published a pamphlet in 1910 presenting his concept of “horizontal displacement”. He explained the formation of mountain ranges as a result of the lateral movements of continents. With the earth’s capture of the moon, the gravitational forces between them generated a pull towards lower latitudes where they thickened and formed folded mountain belts especially in middle latitudes. Although we now know that Taylor’s explanation of continental drift is erroneous, one of hi