专八英语写作精讲精练：表达要有“份量”专四专八考试

文章作者 100test 发表时间 2010:07:25 20:54:12
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网

　　Context-based study:
　　Passage 1:
　　It is common knowledge that forecasting is an attempt by meteorologists to determine what weather will be like in the future. Hindcasting is the opposite of forecasting, an attempt to determine what weather was like in the past. Meteorologists wish that records of weather had been kept in full for at least a few millennia, but it has been only in the last century that detailed records of the weather have been kept. Thus, meteorologists need to hindcast the weather, and they do so by using all sorts of information from other fields as diverse as archeology, botany, geology, literature, and art. These pieces of information from other fields that are used as a basis for drawing conclusions about what the weather must have been like at some point in the past are called proxies.
　　Passage 2:
　　The Sahara is a massive desert, the world’s largest, in fact. It is approximately equal in size to the United States and covers more than 9 million square kilometers. It is more than 5,500 kilometers from east to west and 2,000 kilometers from north to south.
　　The Sahara has a very dry climate. The average annual rainfall is not even 10 centimeters, and may areas receive less that 2 centimeters per year. In the very driest places, it rains only about once a century.
　　There is little surface water in the Sahara. The Nile River does run through the Sahara, and there are some oases there, but otherwise the surface is dry. Of the oases in the Sahara, about 90 are large enough to support tiny villages.
　　Passage 3:
　　It is very common in English for one word to have many different meanings. This condition, where one word has different meanings, is known as polysemy. (This term comes from poly- meaning “many” and sem- meaning “meaning”.)
　　Sound is one such polysemic word. As a noun, it refers to a noise (as in a loud sound) or a body of water (as in Puget Sound). As an adjective, it can refer to a state of health (as in sound mind and body). It can also be an intransitive verb (as in sound angry), a transitive verb (as in sound the alarm), or part of a verb phrase as an outburst (as in sound off) and an inquiry (as in sound out).
　　You may think that the word sound is a truly wondrous polysemic word. After all, its definitions cover seven pages in one major dictionary and include 19 meanings as a noun, 12 meanings as an adjective, 12 meanings as a verb (some transitive and some intransitive ), 4 meanings in verb phrases, and 2 meanings as an adverb.
　　But what about the extraordinary word set? It looks like such a short, simple word, only three little letters in all. However, if you look it up in an unabridged dictionary, you will find at least 57 meanings for set when it is used as a noun and over 120 meanings when it is used as a verb.
　　Passage 4：
　　1.Paper is different from other waste produce because it comes from a sustainable resource: trees. Unlike the minerals and oil used to make plastics and metals, trees are replaceable. Paper is also biodegradable, so it does not pose as much threat to the environment when it is discarded. While 45 out of every 100 tonnes of wood fibre used to make paper in Australia comes from waste paper, the rest comes directly from virgin fibre from forests and plantations. By world standards, this is a good performance since the world-wide average is 33% waste paper. Governments have encouraged waste paper collection and sorting schemes and at the same time, the paper industry has responded by developing new recycling technologies that have paved the way for even greater utilization of used fibre. As a result, industry’s use of recycled fibres is expected to increase at twice the rate of virgin fibre over the coming years.
　　2.Already, waste paper constitutes 70% of paper used for packaging and advances in the technology required to remove ink from the paper have allowed a higher recycled content in newsprint and writing paper. To achieve the benefits of recycling, the community must also contribute. We need to accept a change in the quality of paper products. for example stationery may be less white and of a rougher texture. There also needs to be support from the community for waste paper collection programs. Not only do we need to make the paper available to collectors but it also needs to be separated into different types and sorted from contaminants such as staples, paperclips, string and other miscellaneous items.