张登 雅思（IELTS）、托福TOEFL、SAT全科培训师，11年备考类英语教学经验。教育专业世界第一的UCL大学教育研究院（Institute of Education）教育学硕士，美国哥伦比亚大学师范学院（Teachers
College, Columbia University）研修学者，剑桥大学成人英语教师资格证CELTA持有者。美国教育考试服务中心（Educational Testing Service）托福官方认证培训师。英国大使馆教育文化处（British
Council）雅思官方认证培训师。对雅思阅读多年深入研究，掌握大量雅思阅读语料库及数据分析结果，对考试脉络、题库内容极为了解。
目錄：
本书所收集文章及对应考试日期一览
Test
1
The Impact of the
Potato 2014年6月28日
Ancient Chinese
Chariots 2014年3月15日 2012年6月30日
Stealth Forces in
Weight Loss 2014年5月24日
Test 2
Andrea Palladio:
Italian Architect 2013年5月16日
Corporate Social
Responsibility 2015年3月21日 2014年5月15日
The Significant Role
of Mother Tongue in Education 2012年5月26日
Test 3
Voyage of Going: Beyond the Blue
Line 22012年5月26日
Does IQ Test Prove Creativity? 2009年12月5日
Monkeys and Forests 2012年10月11日
Test 4
T-rex: Hunter or Scavenger? 2013年11月16日 2012年4月12日
Leaf-cutting Ants and Fungus 2013年5月18日 2012年4月28日
Honey Bees in Trouble 2015年5月30日
Test 5
Ants Could Teach Ants 2014年7月19日
The Development of Plastics 2014年7月26日
Global Warming in New Zealand 2014年7月12日
Test 6
Computer Games for Preschoolers: Nintendo’s Research and Design Process
2014年7月19日
The History of Pencil 2014年8月2日
Motivating
Drives 2014年8月21日
內容試閱：
Test 4 Passage 3 2015.5.30雅思阅读真题
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Honey
Bees in Trouble
Can
native pollinators fill the gap?
Recently, ominous
headlines have described a mysterious ailment, colony collapse disorder CCD,
which is wiping out the honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees,
the story goes, fields will be sterile, economies will collapse, and food will
be scarce.
But what few
accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of
affairs. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and
has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a native species. Pollination
in modern agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s industry. The total number of hives
involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been somewhere between 2.5
million and 3 million in recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers began using
large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop
monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed native
vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices killed many native
bees outright — they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as any agricultural pest
— and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained.
Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new, in
her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect
pollinators.
If
that ‘Fruitless Fall’ has not — yet — occurred, it may be largely thanks to the
honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service
crops declined. The honeybee has been semi-domesticated since the time of the
ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that determined this choice:
the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural system
that was emerging. For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out
of the way when pesticides are applied to a field. The bees are generalist
pollinators, so they can be used to pollinate many different crops. And
although they are not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees
have strength in numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive.
“Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be
the honeybee,” says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The
honeybee, in other words, has become a crucial cog in the modern system of
industrial agriculture. That system delivers more food, and more kinds of it,
to more places, more cheaply than ever before. But that system is also
vulnerable, because making a farm field into the photosynthetic equivalent of a
factory floor, and pollination into a series of continent-long assembly lines,
also leaches out some of the resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems.
Breno Freitas, an
agronomist in Brazil, pointed out that in nature such a high degree of
specialisation usually is a very dangerous game: it works well while all the
rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction at the least disbalance.
In effect, by developing an agricultural system that is heavily reliant on a
single pollinator species, we humans have become riskily overspecialised. And
when the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it has been by colony
collapse disorder, the vulnerability of that agricultural system begins to
become clear.
In fact, a few wild
bees are already being successfully managed for crop pollination. “The problem
is trying to provide native bees in adequate numbers on a reliable basis in a
fairly short number of years in order to service the crop,” Jim Cane says.
“You’re talking millions of flowers per acre in a two-to three-week time frame,
or less, for a lot of crops.” On the other hand, native bees can be much more
efficient pollinators of certain crops than honeybees, so you don’t need as
many to do the job. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees Osmia lignaria
can pollinate a hectare of apples or almonds, a task that would require roughly
50,000 to 150,000 honeybees. There are bee tinkerers engaged in similar work in
many corners of the world. In Brazil, Breno Freitas has found that Centris
tarsata, the native pollinator of wild cashew, can survive in commercial cashew
orchards if growers provide a source of floral oils, such as by interplanting
their cashew trees with Caribbean cherry.
In certain places,
native bees may already be doing more than they’re getting credit for.
Ecologist Rachael Winfree recently led a team that looked at pollination of
four summer crops tomato, watermelon, peppers, and muskmelon at 29 farms in
the region of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Winfree’s team identified 54 species
of wild bees that visited these crops, and found that wild bees were the most
important pollinators in the system: even though managed honeybees were present
on many of the farms, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent of flower
visits in the study. In another study focusing specifically on watermelon,
Winfree and her colleagues calculated that native bees alone could provide
sufficient pollination at 90 percent of the 23 farms studied. By contrast,
honeybees alone could provide sufficient pollination at only 78 percent of
farms.
“The region I work
in is not typical of the way most food is produced,” Winfree admits. In the
Delaware Valley, most farms and farm fields are relatively small, each farmer
typically grows a variety of crops, and farms are interspersed with suburbs and
other types of land use which means there are opportunities for homeowners to
get involved in bee conservation, too. The landscape is a bee-friendly
patchwork that provides a variety of nesting habitat and floral resources
distributed among different kinds of crops, weedy field margins, fallow fields,
suburban neighborhoods, and semi natural habitat like old woodlots, all at a
relatively small scale. In other words, “pollinator-friendly” farming practices
would not only aid pollination of agricultural crops, but also serve as a key
element in the over all conservation strategy for wild pollinators, and often
aid other wild species as well.
Of course, not all
farmers will be able to implement all of these practices. And researchers are
suggesting a shift to a kind of polyglot agricultural system. For some
small-scale farms, native bees may indeed be all that’s needed. For larger
operations, a suite of managed bees — with honeybees filling the generalist
role and other, native bees pollinating specific crops — could be augmented by
free pollination services from resurgent wild pollinators. In other words,
they’re saying, we still have an opportunity to replace a risky monoculture
with something diverse, resilient, and robust.
Questions 27-30
Do the following statements agree with the claims
of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 27-30 on your answer
sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the
claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
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