预测文章1- Cell Theory
The study of cells--cell biology--began in 1660, when English physicist Robert Hooke melted strands of spun glass to create lenses that he focused on bee stingers, fish scales, fly legs, feathers, and any type of insect he could hold still. When he looked at cork, which is the bark from a type of oak tree, it appeared to be divided into little boxes, which were remnants of cells that were once alive. Hooke called these units “cells” because they looked like the cubicles (cellae) where monks studied and prayed. Although Hooke did not realize the significance of his observation, he was the first person to see the outlines of cells.
In 1673, Antony van Leeuwenhoek of Holland improved lenses further. He used only a single lens, but due to its quality, it was more effective at magnifying and produced a clearer image than most two-lens microscopes then available. One of his first objects of study was tartar scraped from his own teeth, and he observed that it contained many very small animalcules(microscopic organisms). Over the next few years, Leeuwenhoek built more than 500 microscopes that opened a vast new world to the human eye and mind. He viewed bacteria and other microorganisms--life that people had not known existed. However, he failed to see the single-celled “animalcules” reproduce, and therefore he perpetuated the popular idea at the time that life arises from the nonliving or from nothing. Nevertheless, he described with remarkable accuracy microorganisms and microscopic parts of larger organisms, including human red blood cells.
Despite the accumulation of microscopists’ drawings of cells made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cell theory --the idea that the cell is the fundamental unit of all life--did not emerge until the nineteenth century. Historians attribute the delay to poor technology--for example, crude microscopes and a lack of procedures to preserve and study living cells without damaging them. Neither the evidence itself nor early interpretations of it suggested that all organisms were composed of cells. Hooke had not observed actual cells but rather what they had left behind: the cell walls. Leeuwenhoek made important observations, but he did not methodically describe or categorize the structures that cells had in common.
In the nineteenth century, more powerful microscopes, with better magnification and illumination, revealed details of life at the subcellular level. In the early 1830s, Scottish surgeon Robert Brown noted a roughly circular structure in cells from orchid plants. Finding the structure in every orchid cell, he then identified it in all cells from a variety of other organisms. He named it the “nucleus,”a term that had remained in use. Brown memorialized the importance of the structure he discovered, but today we know the nucleus houses DNA for complex cells.
The cell theory finally emerged in 1839 when German biologists Matthias J. Schleiden and Theodore Schwann made careful comparisons of plants and animals. Schleiden first noted that cells were the basic units of plants, and then Schwann compared animal cells to plant cells. After observing many different plant and animal cells, they concluded that cells were “elementary particles of organisms, the unit of structure and function.” Schleiden and Schwann described the components of the cell as a cell body and nucleus contained within a surrounding membrane. Schleiden called a cell a “peculiar little organism” and realized that a cell can be a living entity on its own; but the new theory also recognized that in large plants and animals, cells are part of a larger living organism.
Many cell biologists extended Schleiden and Schwann’s observations and ideas. German physiologist Rudolph Virchow added the important corollary in 1855 that all cells come from preexisting cells, contradicting the still-popular idea that life can arise from the nonliving or from nothingness. Virchow’s statement also challenged the popular concept that cells develop on their own from the inside out, the nucleus forming a cell body around itself, and then the cell body growing a cell membrane. Virchow’s observation set the stage for descriptions of cell division in the 1870s and 1880s. Virchow was ahead of his time because he hypothesized that abnormal cells cause diseases that affect the whole body.
预测词汇1
remnants=remains
预测文章2- Costs and Benefits of Social Life
Many think that the reason so many animals live with others of their species is that social creatures are higher up the evolutionary scale and so are better adapted and leave more offspring than do animals that live solitary lives. However, in each and every species, generation after generation, relatively social and relatively solitary types compete unconsciously with one another in ways that determine who leaves more offspring on average. In some species, the more social individuals have won out, but in a large majority, it is the solitary types that have consistently left more surviving descendants on average.
But how can living alone ever be superior to living together? Under some conditions, a cost-benefit comparison favors solitary life over a more social existence. For example, among most social species, animals have to expend time and energy competing for social status. Those that do not occupy the top positions regularly have to signal their submissive state to their superiors if they are to be permitted to remain in the group. This can take up a major share of a social subordinate's life. In fact, even in small social groups there are both subtle competition and not-so-subtle competition.
Social groups also offer opportunities for reproductive interference. Breeding males that live in close association with more attractive rivals may lose their mates to these individuals. In addition, sociality has two other potential disadvantages. The first is heightened competition for food, which occurs in animals as different as colonial fieldfares (a kind of songbird) and groups of lions, whose females are often pushed from their food by hungry males. The second is increased vulnerability to parasites and disease, which plague social species of all sorts. While it is true that some social animals have evolved special responses designed to combat parasites and disease, those responses can only reduce, but cannot totally eliminate, the damage caused by those threats, and the responses may even carry their own costs. Thus, honeybees warm their hives in response to an infestation by a fungal pathogen, which apparently helps kill the heat-sensitive fungus, but at the price of time and energy expended by the heat-producing workers.
If social living carries a heightened risk of infection, then the larger the group, the greater the risk. This prediction holds for cliff swallows, which pack their nests side by side in colonies composed of anywhere from a handful of birds to several thousand pairs. The more swallows nesting together, the greater the chance that at least one bird will be infested with swallow bugs, which can then readily spread from one nest to another.
The parasites and fungi that make life miserable for swallows and other social creatures demonstrate that if sociality is to evolve, the asorted costs of living together must be outweighed by compensatory benefits. Cliff swallows may join others to take advantage of the improved foraging that comes from following companions to good feeding sites, while other animals, such as male imperial penguins, save thermal energy by huddling shoulder to shoulder during the brutal Antarctica winter. Still others, such as lionesses, join forces to fend off enemies of their own species.
The most widespread fitness benefit for social animals, however, probably is improved protection against predators. Many studies have shown that animals in groups gain by reducing the individual risk of being captured, or by spotting danger sooner, or by attacking their enemies in groups. Males in nesting colonies of bluegill sunfish cooperate in driving egg-eating bullhead catfish away from their nests at the bottom of a freshwater lake. While bluegills have adopted social behavior to avoid predation, closely related species that nest alone have evolved means to protect themselves while nesting alone. Thus, the solitary pumpkinseed sunfish, a member of the same genus as the bluegill, has powerful biting jaws and so can repel egg-eating enemies on its own, whereas bluegills have small, delicate mouths good only for inhaling small, soft-bodied insect larvae. Pumpkinseed sunfish are in no way inferior to or less well adapted than bluegills because they are solitary; they simply gain less through social living, which makes solitary nesting the adaptive tactic for them.
预测词汇2
potential=possible
heightened=increased
assorted=various
tactic=strategy
预测文章3- Comets
Comets are among the most interesting and unpredictable bodies in the solar system. They are made of frozen gases (water vapor, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide) that hold together small pieces of rocky and metallic materials. Many comets travel in very elongated orbits that carry them far beyond Pluto. These long-period comets take hundreds of thousands of years to complete a single orbit around the Sun. However, a few short-period comets (those having an orbital period of less than 200 years), such as Halley’s Comet, make a regular encounters with the inner solar system.
When a comet first becomes visible from Earth, it appears very small, but as it approaches the Sun, solar energy begins to vaporize the frozen gases, producing a glowing head called the coma. The size of the coma varies greatly from one comet to another. Extremely rare ones exceed the size of the Sun, but most approximate the size of Jupiter. Within the coma, a small glowing nucleus with a diameter of only a few kilometers can sometimes be detected. As comets approach the Sun, some develop a tail that extends for millions of kilometers. Despite the enormous size of their tails and comas, comets are relatively small members of the solar system.
The observation that the tail of a comet points away from the Sun in a slightly curved manner led early astronomers to propose that the Sun has a repulsive force that pushes the particles of the coma away, thereby forming the tail. Today, two solar forces are known to contribute to this formation. One, radiation pressure, pushes dust particles away from the coma. The second, known as solar wind, is responsible for moving the ionized gases, particularly carbon monoxide. Sometimes a single tail composed of both dust and ionized gases is produced, but often two tails—one of dust, the other, a blue streak of ionized gases—are observed.
As a comet moves away from the Sun, the gases forming the coma recondense, the tail disappears, and the comet returns to distant space. Material that was blown from the coma to form the tail is lost from the comet forever. Consequently, it is believed that most comets cannot survive more than a few hundred close orbits of the Sun. Once all the gases are expelled, the remaining material—a swarm of tiny metallic and stony particles—continues the orbit without a coma or a tail.
Comets apparently originate in two regions of the outer solar system. Most short-period comets are thought to orbit beyond Neptune in a region called the Kuiper belt, in honor of the astronomer Gerald Kuiper. During the past decade over a hundred of these icy bodies have been discovered. Most Kuiper belt comets move in nearly circular orbits that lie roughly in the same plane as the planets. A chance collision between two comets, or the gravitational influence of one of the Jovian planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—may occasionally alter the orbit of a comet in these regions enough to send it to the inner solar system and into our view.
Unlike short-period comets, long-period comets have elliptical orbits that are not confined to the plane of the solar system. These comets appear to be distributed in all directions from the Sun, forming a spherical shell around the solar system, called the Oort cloud, after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort. Millions of comets are believed to orbit the Sun at distances greater than 10,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. The gravitational effect of a distant passing star is thought to send an occasional Oort cloud comet into a highly eccentric orbit that carries it toward the Sun. However, only a tiny portion of the Oort cloud comets have orbits that bring them into the inner solar system.
The most famous short-period comet is Halley’s Comet, named after English astronomer Edmond Halley. Its orbital period averages 76 years, and every one of its 30 appearances since 240 B.C. has been recorded by Chinese astronomers. When seen in 1910, Halley’s Comet had developed a tail nearly 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) long and was visible during daylight hours. Its most recent approach occurred in 1986.
预测词汇3
exceed=go beyond
detected=noticed
propose=offer the theory
roughly=approximately
预测文章4- Agricultural Society in Eighteenth-Century British America
In the northern American colonies, especially New England, tight-knit farming families, organized in communities of several thousand people, dotted the landscape by the mid-eighteenth century. New Englanders staked their future on a mixed economy. They cleared forests for timber used in barrels, ships, houses, and barns. They plumbed the offshore waters for fish to feed local populations. And they cultivated and grazed as much of the thin-soiled, rocky hills and bottomlands as they could recover from the forest.
The farmers of the middle colonies-Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York-set their wooden plows to much richer soils than New Englanders did. They enjoyed the additional advantage of setting an area already partly cleared by Native Americans who had relied more on agriculture than had New England tribes. Thus favored, mid-Atlantic farm families produced modest surpluses of corn, wheat, beef, and pork. By the mid-eighteenth century, ships from New York and Philadelphia were carrying these foodstuffs not only to the West Indies, always a primary market, but also to areas that could no longer feed themselves-England, Spain, Portugal, and even New England.
In the North, the broad ownership of land distinguished farming society from every other agricultural region of the Western world. Although differences in circumstances and ability led gradually toward greater social stratification, in most communities, the truly rich and terribly poor were few and the gap between them small compared with European society. Most men other than indentured servants (servants contracted to work for a specific number of years) lived to purchase or inherit a farm of at least 50 acres. With their family’s labor, they earned a decent existence and provided a small inheritance for each of their children. Settlers valued land highly, for owning land ordinarily guaranteed both economic independence and political rights.
By the eighteenth century, amid widespread property ownership, a rising population pressed against a limited land supply, especially in New England. Family farms could not be divided and subdivided indefinitely, for it took at least fifty acres(of which only a quarter could usually be cropped) to support a single family. In Concurd, Massachusetts, for example, the founders had worked farms averaging about 250 acres. A century later, in the 1730s, the average farm had shrunk by two thirds, as farm owners struggled to provide an inheritance for the three or four sons that the average marriage produced.
The decreasing fertility of the soil compounded the problem of dwindling farm size in New England. When land had been plentiful, farmers planted crops in the same field for three years and then let it lie fallow (unplanted) in pasture seven years or more until it regained its fertility. But on the smaller farms of the eighteenth century, farmers had reduced fallow time to only a year or two. Such intense use of the soil reduced crop yields, forcing farmers to plow marginal land or shift to livestock production.
The diminishing size and productivity of family farms forced many New Englanders to move to the frontier or out of the area altogether in the eighteen century. "Many of our old towns are too full of inhabitants for husbandry, many of them living on small shares of land, " complained one writer. In Concurd, one of every four adult males migrated from town every decade from the 1740s on, and in many towns migration out was even greater. Some drifted south to New York and Pennsylvania. Others sought opportunities as artisans in the coastal towns or took to the sea. More headed for the colonies, western frontier or north into New Hampshire and the eastern frontier of Maine. Several thousand New England families migrated even farther north to the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Throughout New England after the early eighteenth century, most farmers' sons knew that their destiny lay elsewhere.
Wherever they took up farming, northern cultivators engaged in agricultural work routines that were far less intense than in the south. The growing season was much shorter, and the cultivation of cereal crops required incessant labor only during spring planting and autumn harvesting. This less burdensome work rhythm let many northern cultivators to fill out their calendars with intermittent work as clockmakers, shoemakers, carpenters, and weavers.
预测词汇4
modest=moderate
indefinitely=without limit
compounded=added to
burdensome=difficult
预测文章5- Economic Decline in Europe During the Fourteenth Century
After three hundred years of impressive gains in wealth and population, Europe’s economy began to slow around 1300. Several factors accounted for the decline. One the most important, though perhaps the least dramatic to relate, was a shift in climate. The remarkably fair weather of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took a decided turn for the worse in the fourteenth. Chronicler’s comments, tree-ring examination, and pollen analysis all indicate that over the course of the fourteenth century Europe’s average annual temperature declined approximately two degrees Celsius—which may sound like very little at first, but if one considers current projections about the possible effects of global warming, in which the average annual temperature shift is only one degree Celsius, a rather different impression emerges. As the temperature dropped, shortening the summer growing season and affecting the resilience of certain vegetable species, the wind and rain increased. This meant that crop yields declined precipitously and the agricultural economy began to contract. As food supplies dwindled, costs rose accordingly and cut into the amount of capital that people had available for other purchases or investments. This in turn added to the gradual construction of the commercial economy.
Just as significant were changes in the geopolitics of the Mediterranean world. The decline of the Byzantine Empire, which had dominated the eastern Mediterranean, meant the interruption or trade routes to central and eastern Asia. The rise of new political powers signaled a new era in Mediterranean connections, one in which religious loyalty and ethnic fidelity mattered more than commercial ties. Consequently the movement of goods and services between east and west began to slow. European interest in circumnavigating Africa and exploring westward into the Atlantic Ocean, in fact, originated in the desire to avoid the roadblock in the eastern Mediterranean and to tap directly into the trade with eastern Asia that had long sustained Europe’s economic growth.
A more immediate cause of the sputtering economy was an observable absence: since the eleventh century there had been few significant changes in the technology of agriculture. Developments like the wheeled plow, the rotation of crops, and the use of natural fertilizer that had made possible the agricultural revolution of the past two hundred years had had no
follow-up. Farming was still conducted in 1300 roughly the same way it had been done in 1100, but with a considerably larger population to feed, there was little surplus left to generate fresh capital. As a consequence, food production fell perilously close to subsistence level. Although the failure of agriculture to keep up with the growing population did not become a crisis until the fourteenth century, clear signs of the problem had already emerged by the middle of the thirteenth century, when occasionally low yields due to bad weather or social disruption revealed how perilous the balance between Europe’s population and its food supply had become. Apart from territories beset by war, the tentativeness of the food supply became evident first on the farmlands most recently brought under cultivation during the economic depression of the twelfth century. The less established farmers of these lands frequently did not have the means to survive successive poor harvests. Tenant farmers unable to pay their rents thus began to slip into debt, and landlords who depended on rents for their income began to rely increasingly on urban financiers for credit.
Even whole governments became entangled in the credit crisis, England being the most notable example. The cycle of indebtedness was hardly inevitable, but the string of bank failures and commercial collapses in the first half of the fourteenth century was striking. The famed Bardi and Peruzzi banks of Florence (the two largest financial houses of Europe) collapsed spectacularly in the 1340’s. They were soon followed by the Riccardi bank of Lucca, whose massive loans had kept the English government afloat for years. Many more houses collapsed in turn.
An important demographic trend resulted from and contributed to the economic malaise:
large-scale migration of rural populations into the cities. Europe’s overall population growth from 1050 to 1300 had been primarily due to an increase in the number of rural folk. But as economic forces made agrarian life more perilous around 1300, hard-pressed farmers and their families began to migrate to the cities in large numbers in search of work. Many cities doubled in size, and some even tripled, over the course of just one or two generations. Few were capable of absorbing such large numbers of people.
预测词汇5
accounted for=explained
considerably= significantly
striking=noteworthy
预测文章6- Early Modern Industrialization
Industrial output increased smartly across nearly all of Europe between 1450 and 1575. Although trade with the Americas had something to do with this, the main determinants of this industrial advance lay within Europe itself.
Population grew from 61 million in 1500 to 78 million a century later, and the proportion of Europeans living in cities of 10,000 or more—and thus dependent on the market for what they consumed—expanded from less than 6 percent to nearly 8 percent during the same period. More important than sheer numbers, many Europeans’ incomes rose. This was especially true among more fully employed urban groups, farmers who benefited from higher prices and the intensifying commercialization and specialization in agriculture (which also led them to shed much non-agricultural production in favor of purchased goods), and landlords and other property owners who collected mounting rents. Government activities to build and strengthen the state were a stimulus to numerous industries, notably shipbuilding, textiles, and metallurgy. To cite just one example, France hastened to develop its own iron industry when the Hapsburgs—the family that governed much of Europe, and whom France fought repeatedly in the sixteenth century—came to dominate the manufacture of weapons in Germany and the cities of Liege and Milan, which boasted Europe’s most advanced technology.
The supply of goods was also significantly modified. Migration had long been critical for the diffusion of knowledge that spawned new trades or revived others. Now thousands of workers, and sizeable amounts of capital, moved from one region to another. At the same time, new commodities appeared on the market, often broadening and deepening demand. Most were inexpensive items destined for individual consumers. Knitted stockings, ribbon and lace, buttons, starch, soap, vinegar brewed from beer, knives and tools, pots and ovens, and many more goods, formerly made only for local sale, now entered into channels of national or international trade. The best-known and most widely adopted new industry was printing with movable type, which spread swiftly throughout Europe after Johannes Gutenberg perfected his innovation in 1453. Despite isolated cases of resistance—the scribes’ guild (an association of book copiers) delayed printing’s introduction into Paris for twenty years, for example—more than 380 working presses had sprung up by 1480, and 1,000 (in nearly 250 towns) by 1500. Between 1453 and 1500, all the presses of Europe together turned out some 40,000 editions (known as incunabula), but from 1501 to 1600, that same quantity was produced in Lyon and Paris alone.
In metals and mining, technical improvements were available that saved substantially on raw materials and fuel, causing prices to drop. The construction of ever-larger furnaces capable of higher temperatures culminated in the blast furnace, which used cheaper ores and economized on scarce and expensive wood, cutting costs per ton by 20 percent while boosting output substantially. A new technique for separating silver from copper allowed formerly worthless ores to be exploited. Better drainage channels, pumps, and other devices made it possible to tunnel more deeply into the earth as surface deposits began to be exhausted. In most established industries, however, technological change played little role, as in the past, new customers were sought by developing novel products based on existing technologies, such as a new type of woolen cloth with the texture of silk.
Sharply declining transaction costs (the direct and indirect expenses associated with transporting, distributing, and marketing goods and services) were more influential. On a general level, the decrease was due to greater security thanks to the lessening of wartime disruptions and to the economies of scale achieved when selling to large, concentrated urban populations. More specifically, it can be traced to transport innovations such as the carrack, a large ship that reduced rates for oceanborne freight by up to 25 percent, and big four-wheeled Hesse carts for overland routes. The spread of efficient organizational forms further contributed to declining costs, as did falling interest rates, which dropped from 20 percent or 25 percent in the mid-fifteenth century to 10 percent 100 years later.
预测词汇6
determinants=causes
hastened=rushed
diffusion = dispersal
perfected = completed
预测文章7- the climate of Japan
At the most general level, two major climatic forces determine Japan’s weather. Prevailing westerly winds move across Eurasia, sweep over the Japanese islands, and continue eastward across the Pacific Ocean. In addition, great cyclonic airflows (masses of rapidly circulating air) that arise over the western equatorial Pacific move in a wheel-like fashion northeastward across Japan and nearby regions. During winter months heavy masses of cold air from Siberia dominate the weather around Japan. Persistent cold winds skim across the Sea of Japan from the northwest, picking up moisture that they deposit as several feet of snow on the western side of the mountain ranges on Honshu Island. As the cold air drops its moisture, it flows over high ridges and down eastern slopes to bring cold, relatively dry weather to valleys and coastal plains and cities.
In spring the Siberian air mass warms and loses density, enabling atmospheric currents over the Pacific to steer warmer air into northeast Asia. This warm, moisture-laden air covers most of southern Japan during June and July. The resulting late spring rains then give way to a drier summer that is sufficiently hot and muggy, despite the island chain’s northerly latitude, to allow widespread rice cultivation.
Summer heat is followed by the highly unpredictable autumn rains that accompany the violent tropical windstorms known as typhoons. These cyclonic storms originate over the western Pacific and travel in great clockwise arcs, initially heading west toward the Philippines and southern China, curving northward later in the season. Cold weather drives these storms eastward across Japan through early autumn, revitalizing the Siberian air mass and ushering in a new annual weather cycle.
This yearly cycle has played a key role in shaping Japanese civilization. It has assured the islands ample precipitation, ranging irregularly from more than 200 centimeters annually in parts of the southwest to about 100 in the northeast and averaging 180 for the country as a whole. The moisture enables the islands to support uncommonly lush forest cover, but the combination of precipitous slopes and heavy rainfall also gives the islands one of the world’s highest rates of natural erosion, intensified by both human activity and the natural shocks of earthquakes and volcanism. These factors have given Japan its wealth of sedimentary basins, but they have also made mountainsides extremely susceptible to erosion and landslides and hence generally unsuitable for agricultural manipulation.
The island chain’s mountains backbone and great length from north to south produce climatic diversity that has contributed to regional differences. Generally sunny winters along the Pacific seaboard have made habitation there relatively pleasant. Along the Sea of Japan, on the other hand, cold, snowy winters have discouraged settlement. Furthermore, although annual precipitation is high in that region, much of it comes as snow and rushes to the sea as spring runoff, leaving little moisture for farming.
Summer weather patterns in northern Honshu, and especially along the Sea of Japan, have also discouraged agriculture. The area is subject to the yamase effect, when cool air from the north sometimes lowers temperatures sharply and damages farm production. The impact of this effect has been especially great on rice cultivation because, if it is to grow well, the rice grown in Japan requires a mean summer temperature of 20° centigrade or higher. A drop of 2°-3° can lead to a 30-50 percent drop in rice yield, and the yamase effect is capable of exceeding that level. This yamase effect does not, however, extend very far south, where most precipitation comes in the form of rain and the bulk of it in spring, summer, and fall, when most useful for cultivation. Even the autumn typhoons, which deposit most of their moisture along the southern seaboard, are beneficial because they promote the start of the winter crops that for centuries have been grown in southern Japan.
In short, for the past two millennia, the climate in general and patterns of precipitation in particular have encouraged the Japanese to cluster their settlements along the southern coast, most densely along the sheltered Inland Sea, moving into the northeast. There the limits that topography imposed on production have been tightened by climate, with the result that agricultural output has been more modest and less reliable, making the risk of crop failure and hardship commensurately greater.
预测词汇7
enabling=allowing
susceptible to= likely to be affected by
exceeding=going beyond
cluster=group
预测文章9- Plant and Animal Life of the Pacific Islands
There are both great similarities and considerable diversity in the ecosystems that evolved on the islands of Oceania in and around the Pacific Ocean. The islands, such as New Zealand, that were originally parts of continents still carry some small plant and animal remnants of their earlier biota (animal and plant life), and they also have been extensively modified by evolution, adaptation, and the arrival of new species. By contrast, the other islands, which emerged via geological processes such as volcanism, possessed no terrestrial life, but over long periods, winds, ocean currents, and the feet, feathers, and digestive tracts of birds brought the seeds of plants and a few species of animals. Only those species with ways of spreading to these islands were able to undertake the long journeys, and the various factors at play resulted in diverse combinations of new colonists on the islands. One estimate is that the distribution of plants was 75 percent by birds, 23 percent by floating, and 2 percent by wind.
The migration of Oceanic biota was generally from west to east, with four major factors influencing their distribution and establishment. The first was the size and fertility of the islands on which they landed, with larger islands able to provide hospitality for a wider range of species. Second, the further east the islands, generally the less the species diversity, largely because of the distance that had to be crossed and because the eastern islands tended to be smaller, more scattered, and remote. This easterly decline in species diversity is well demonstrated by birds and coral fish. It is estimated that there were over 550 species of birds in New Guinea, 127 in the Solomon Islands, 54 in Fiji, and 17 in the Society Islands. From the west across the Pacific, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands have more than 90 families of shore fish (with many species within the families), Fiji has 50 families, and the Society Islands have 30. Third, the latitude of the islands also influenced the biotic mix, as those islands in relatively cooler latitudes, notably New Zealand, were unsuited to supporting some of the tropical plants with which Pacific islands are generally associated.
Finally, a fourth major factor in species distribution, and indeed in the shaping of Pacific ecosystems, was wind. It takes little experience on Pacific islands to be aware that there are prevailing winds. To the north of the equator these are called north-easterlies, while to the south they are called south-easterlies. Further south, from about 30°south, the winds are generally
from the west. As a result on nearly every island of significant size there is an ecological difference between its windward and leeward (away from the wind) sides. Apart from the wind action itself on plants and soils, wind has a major effect on rain distribution. The Big Island of Hawaii offers a prime example; one can leave Kona on the leeward side in brilliant sunshine and drive across to the windward side where the city of Hilo is blanketed in mist and rain.
While such localized plant life and climatic conditions are very noticeable, over Oceania as a whole there is relatively little biodiversity, and the smaller the island and the further east it lies, the less there is likely to be. When humans moved beyond the islands of Near Oceania (Australia, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands), they encountered no indigenous mammals except for flying foxes, fruit bats, and seals on some islands. Other vertebrate species were restricted to flying animals and a few small reptiles. However, local adaptations and evolution over long periods of isolation promoted fascinating species adaptations to local conditions. Perhaps most notable, in the absence of mammals and other predators, are the many species of flightless and ground-nesting birds. Another consequence of evolution was that many small environments boasted their own endemic (native) species, often small in number, unused to serious predation, limited in range, and therefore vulnerable to disruption. In Hawaii, for example, the highly adapted 39 species and subspecies of honeycreepers, several hundred species of fruit flies, and more than 750 species of tree snails are often cited to epitomize the extent of localized Oceanic endemism (species being native to the area).
预测词汇9
remnants=remainders
remote=isolated
cited=mentioned
预测文章8- Water Management in Early Agriculture
As the first cities formed in Mesopotamia in the Middle East, probably around 3000 B.C., it became necessarily to provide food for larger populations, and thus to find ways of increasing agricultural production. This, in turn, led to the problem of obtaining sufficient water.
Irrigation must have started on a small scale with rather simple constructions, but as its value became apparent, more effort was invested in new construction to divert more water into the canals and to extend the canal system to reach greater areas of potential farmland. Because of changing water levels and clogging by waterborne particles, canals and their intakes required additional labor to maintain, besides the normal labor required to guide water from field to field. Beyond this,some personnel had to be devoted to making decisions about the allocation of available water among the users and ensuring that these directions were carried out. With irrigation water also came potential problems, the most obvious being the susceptibility of low-lying farmlands to disastrous flooding and the longer-term problem of salinization (elevated levels of salt in the soil). To combat flooding from rivers, people from early historic times until today have constructed protective levees (raised barriers of earth) between the river and the settlement or fields to be protected. This, of course, is effective up to a certain level of flooding but changes the basic water patterns of the area and can multiply the damage when the flood level exceeds the height of the levee.
Salinization is caused by an accumulation of salt in the soil near its surface. This salt is carried by river water from the sedimentary rocks in the mountains and deposited on the Mesopotamian fields during natural flooding or purposeful irrigation. Evaporation of water sitting on the surface in hot climates is rapid, concentrating the salts in the remaining water that then descends through the soil to the underlying water table. In southern Mesopotamia, for example, the natural water table comes to within roughly six feet of the surface. Conditions of excessive irrigation bring the water table to eighteen inches, and water can rise further to the root zone, where the high concentration of salts would kill most plants.
Solutions for salinization were not as straightforward as for flooding, but even in ancient times it was understood that the deleterious effects of salinization could be minimized by removing harmful elements through leaching the fields with additional fresh water, digging deep wells to lower the water table, or instituting a system of leaving fields uncultivated. The first two cures would have required considerable labor, and the third solution would have led to diminished productivity, not often viewed as a likely decision in periods of growing population. An effective irrigation system laid the foundation for many of the world’s early civilizations, but it also required a great deal of labor input.
Growing agrarian societies often tried to meet their food-producing needs by farming less-desirable hill slopes surrounding the favored low-lying valley bottoms. Since bringing irrigation water to a hill slope is usually impractical, the key is effective utilization of rainfall. Rainfall either soaks into the soil or runs off of it due to gravity. A soil that is deep, well-structured, and covered by protective vegetation and much will normally absorb almost all of the rain that falls on it, provided that the slope is not too steep. However, soils that have lost their vegetative cover and surface mulch will absorb much less, with almost half the water being carried away by runoff in more extreme conditions. This runoff carries with it topsoil particles, nutrients, and humus (decayed vegetable matter) that are concentrated in the topsoil. The loss of this material reduces the thickness of the rooting zone and its capacity to absorb moisture for crop needs.
The most direct solution to this problem of slope runoff was to lay lines of stones along the contours of the slope and hence, perpendicular to the probable flow of water and sediment. These stones could then act as small dams, slowing the downhill flow of water and allowing more water to infiltrate and soil particles to collect behind the dam. This provided a buildup of sediments for plants and improved the landscape’s water-retention properties.
预测词汇8
potential=possible
accumulation=buildup
straightforward=simple
impractical=unrealistic
预测文章10- Determining the Ages of the Planets and the Universe
The planets of our solar system all revolve around the Sun in the same direction and in orbits that lie in nearly the same plane. This is strong evidence that the planets formed simultaneously from a single disk of material that rotated in the same direction as the modern planets.
Precisely when the planets came into being has been a difficult issue to resolve. While Earth’s water is necessary for life, its abundance near the planet’s surface makes rapid erosion inevitable. Continuous alteration of the crust by erosion and also by igneous (volcanic) and metamorphic (pressure and heat within Earth) processes makes unlikely any discovery of rocks nearly as old as Earth. Thus geologists have had to look beyond this planet in their efforts to date Earth’s origin. Fortunately, we do have samples of rock that appear to represent the primitive material of the solar system. These samples are meteorites, which originate as extraterrestrial objects, called meteors, that have been captured in Earth’s gravitational field and have then crashed into our planet.
Some meteorites consist of rocky material and, accordingly, are called stony meteorites. Others are metallic and have been designated iron meteorites even though they contain lesser amounts of elements other than iron. Still others consist of mixtures of rocky and metallic material and thus are called stony-iron meteorites. Meteors come in all sizes, from small particles to the small planets known as asteroids; no asteroid, however, has struck Earth during recorded human history. Many meteorites appear to be fragments of larger bodies that have undergone collisions and broken into pieces. Iron meteorites are fragments of the interiors of these bodies, comparable to Earth’s core, and stony meteorites are from outer portions of these bodies, comparable to Earth’s mantle (the layer between the core and outer crust).
Meteorites have been radiometrically dated by means of several decay systems, including rubidium-strontium, potassium-argon, and uranium-thorium. The dates thus derived tend to cluster around 4.6 billion years, which suggests that this is the approximate age of the solar system. After many meteorites had been dated, it was gratifying to find that the oldest ages obtained for rocks gathered on the surface of the Moon also were approximately 4.6 billion years. This must, indeed, be the age of the solar system. Ancient rocks can be found on the Moon because the lunar surface, unlike that of Earth, has no water to weather and erode rocks and is characterized by only weak movements of its crust.
Determining the age of the universe has been more complicated. Most stars in the universe are clustered into enormous disk-like galaxies. The distance between our galaxy, known as the Milky Way, and all others is increasing. In fact, all galaxies are moving away from one another, evidence that the universe is expanding. It is not the galaxies themselves that are expanding but the space between them. What is happening is analogous to inflating a balloon with small coins attached to its surface. The coins behave like galaxies: although they do not expand, the space between them does. Before the galaxies formed, matter that they contain was concentrated with infinite density at a single point from which it exploded in an event called the big bang. Even after it assembled into galaxies, matter continued to spread in all directions from the site of the big bang.
The evidence that the universe is expanding makes it possible to estimate its age. This evidence, called the redshift, is an increase in the wavelengths of light waves traveling through space—a shift toward the red end of the visible spectrum of wavelengths. Expansion of the space between galaxies causes this shift by stretching light waves as they pass through it. The farther these light waves have traveled through space, the greater the redshift they have undergone. For this reason, light waves that reach Earth from distant galaxies have larger redshifts than those from nearby galaxies. Calculations based on these redshifts indicate that about 13.7 billion years ago all of the galaxies would have been at one spot, the site of the big bang. This, then, is the approximate date of the big bang and the age of the universe.
预测词汇10
inevitable=certain
accordingly=correspondingly
cluster=group
enormous=huge
预测文章11- Costs and Benefits of Dispersal
In order to move from one home base to another, animals must expend calories not only while moving but even before the dispersal when they invest in the development of the muscles needed to move. For example, if a cricket is to leave a deteriorating environment and move to a new and better place, it will need large flight muscles to fly away. Presumably, the calories and materials that go into flight muscle development and maintenance have to come out of the general energy budget of the animal. This means that other organ systems cannot develop as rapidly as they could otherwise, which may mean that the flight-capable individual is, in some other respects, less fit to survive.
Dispersing individuals not only have to pay energetic, developmental, and travel costs but are also more often exposed to predators—all of which raises the question, why are animals so often willing to leave home even when this means leaving a familiar, resource-rich location? This question is particularly pertinent for species in which some individuals disperse while others do not or do not disperse as far. One species in which some individuals travel farther than others is Belding’s ground squirrel. Young male squirrels travel about 150 meters from the burrow in which they were born, whereas young females usually settle down only 50 meters or so from where they were born. Why should young Belding’s ground squirrels disperse at all, and why should the males disperse farther than their sisters?
According to one argument, dispersal by juvenile animals of many species may be an adaptation against problems associated with inbreeding. When two closely related individuals mate, their offspring are more likely to manifest genetic diseases than are the offspring of genetically unrelated individuals, and as a result, inbreeding tends to produce animals that are less likely to survive to adulthood and reproduce. Dispersal of juveniles makes inbreeding less likely.
If avoidance of inbreeding is the point of dispersing, then one might expect as many female ground squirrels as males to travel 150 meters from their natal burrow. In fact females do not disperse as far as males, perhaps because the costs and benefits of dispersal differ for the two sexes. It has been suggested that the reproductive success of female Belding’s ground squirrels depends on their possession of a territory in which to rear their young. Female ground squirrels that remain near their birthplace enjoy assistance from their mothers in the defense of their burrows against rival females. Thus, the benefits of remaining on familiar ground are greater for females than for males.
There may, however, be another reason why male mammals disperse greater distances than females. The usual rule is that males, not females, fight with one another for access to mates, and, therefore, males that lose such conflicts may find it advantageous to move away from same-sex rivals that they cannot subdue. Although this hypothesis probably does not apply to Belding’s ground squirrels, since young males have not been seen fighting with older ones around the time of dispersal, the idea is more plausible with respect to some other species, such as lions.
Lions live in large groups, or prides, from which young males disperse. In contrast, the daughters of the resident lionesses usually spend their entire lives close to where they were born. The sedentary females benefit from their familiarity with good hunting grounds and safe breeding dens in their natal territory, among other things. The departure of many young male lions coincides with the arrival of new mature males that violently displace the previous masters of the pride and chase off the males that are not yet adults in the pride as well. These observations support the mate-competition hypothesis for male dispersal. However, if young males are not evicted after a pride takeover, they often leave anyway without any coercion from adult males and without ever having attempted to mate with their female relatives. Moreover, mature males that have claimed a pride sometimes disperse again, expanding their range to add a second pride of females, at a time when their daughters in the first pride are becoming sexually mature. Inhibitions against inbreeding apparently exist in lions and cause males to leave home.
预测词汇11
presumably= It is reasonable to assume
pertinent=relevant
subdue=defeat
coincide with= occurs at the same time as
预测文章12- Bird Colonies
About 13 percent of bird species, including most seabirds, nest in colonies. Colonial nesting evolves in response to a combination of two environmental conditions: (1) a shortage of nesting sites that are safe from predators and (2) abundant or unpredictable food that is distant from safe nest sites. First and foremost, individual birds are safer in colonies that are inaccessible to predators, as on small rocky islands. In addition, colonial birds detect predators more quickly than do small groups or pairs and can drive the predators from the vicinity of the nesting area. Because nests at the edges of breeding colonies are more vulnerable to predators than those in the centers, the preference for advantageous central sites promotes dense centralized packing of nests.
The yellow-rumped cacique, which nests in colonies in Amazonian Peru, demonstrates how colonial birds prevent predation. These tropical blackbirds defend their closed, pouchlike nests against predators in three ways. First, by nesting on islands and near wasp nests, caciques are safe from arboreal mammals such primates. Second, caciques mob predators (work together as a group to attack predators). The effectiveness of mobbing increases with group size, which increases with colony size. Third, caciques hide their nests from predators by mixing active nests with abandoned nests. Overall, nests in cluster on islands and near wasp nests suffer the least predation.
Coordinated social interactions tend to be weak when a colony is first forming, but true colonies provide extra benefits. Synchronized nesting, for example, produces a sudden abundance of eggs and chicks that exceeds the daily needs of local predators. Additionally, colonial neighbors can improve their foraging by watching others. This behavior is especially valuable when the off-site food supplies are restricted or variable in location, as are swarms of aerial insects harvested by swallows. The colonies of American cliff swallows, for example, serve as information centers from which unsuccessful individual birds follow successful neighbors to good feeding sites. Cliff swallows that are unable to find food return to their colony, locate a neighbor that has been successful, and then follow that neighbor to its food source. All birds in the colony are equally likely to follow or to be followed and thus contribute to the sharing of information that helps to ensure their reproductive success. As a result of their enhanced foraging efficiency, parent swallows in large colonies return with food for their nestlings more often and bring more food each trip than do parents in small colonies.
To support large congregations of birds, suitable colony sites must be near rich, clumped food supplies. Colonies of pinyon jays and red crossbills settle near seed-rich conifer forests, and wattled starlings nest in large colonies near locust outbreaks. The huge colonies of guanay cormorants and other seabirds that nest on the coast of Peru depend on the productive cold waters of the Humboldt Current. The combination of abundant food in the Humboldt Current and the vastness of oceanic habitat can support enormous populations of seabirds, which concentrate at the few available nesting locations. The populations crash when their food supplies decline during El Nino years.
Among the costs, colonial nesting leads to increased competition for nest sites and mates, the stealing of nest materials, and increased physical interference among other effects. In spite of food abundance, large colonies sometimes exhaust their local food supplies and abandon their nests. Large groups also attract predators, especially raptors, and facilitate the spread of parasites and diseases. The globular mud nests in large colonies of the American cliff swallow, for example, are more likely to be infested by fleas or other bloodsucking parasites than are nests in small colonies. Experiments in which some burrows were fumigated to kill the parasites showed that these parasites lowered survivorship by as much as 50 percent in large colonies but not significantly in small ones. The swallows inspect and then select parasite-free nests in large colonies, they tend to build new nests rather than use old, infested ones. On balance, the advantages of colonial nesting clearly outweigh the disadvantages, given the many times at which colonial nesting has evolved independently among different groups of birds. Still lacking, however, is a general framework for testing different hypothesis for the evolution of coloniality.
预测词汇12
vicinity=region
contribute to=add to
exhaust=use up
on balance=overall
