一、真题回忆
Passage One：health in the wild
主要讲了科学家们对动物自我疗伤的研究，包括了对该研究的发展变化以及不同科学家的不同发现
主要题型有：
1. 判断题
2. 填表题
3. Summary
Passage Two： amateur naturalists
文章主要介绍了业余的自然爱好者自发地纪录自然现象的发展历史，同时涉及了他们的纪录对于专业研究者的帮助以及不同研究者们对这种现象的态度和未来的举措
主要题型有：
1. 段落信息配对题
2. 句子填空题
3. 单选题
Passage Three: Grimm’s Fairy Tales
文章主要阐述了格林童话的出版历史，格林兄弟写下这些童话的灵感来源，不同时期外界对于格林童话的反应以及格林童话第一版和再版的变化
主要题型有：
1. 判断题
2. 单选题
3. 段落信息配对题
二、阅读解析
这次阅读考试难度不大，首先从题材上来看，本次考试三篇均为旧题，没有出现特别晦涩的学科类文章，不会造成理解上的重大障碍;其次从题型上来看，大量出现了比较规则的填空题和判断题，考生在这两类题型中好好发挥相信能够获得一个合理的分数，尤其是第一篇文章，出现了以年份定位的表格填空题，对于考生来说是一个不错的得分突破口。段落配对题数量依然居高不下，但是大家在做题的时候记得把这个题型放在每篇文章的最后做就会有惊喜;最后，从文章的写作顺序上来说，这次考试的三篇文章逻辑清楚，条理清晰，按照事情先后发展顺序来定位就好，这也就给段落信息配对题提供了便利。
三、真题还原
本次考试3旧，现提供passage 1的一篇原文给大家参考。
For the past decade Dr. Engel, a lecturer in environmental sciences at Britain's Open University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behavior in wild animals. She recently published a book on the subject. In a talk at the Edinburgh Science Festival earlier this month, she explained that the idea that animals can treat themselves has been regarded with some skepticism by her colleagues in the past. But a growing number of animal behaviourists now think that wild animals can and do deal with their own medical needs.
One example of self-medication was discovered in 1987. Michael Huffman and Mohamedi Seifu, working in the Mahale, National Park in Tanzania, noticed that local chimpanzees suffering from intestinal worms would dose themselves with the pith of a plant called Veronia. This plant produces poisonous chemicals called terpenes. Its pith contains a strong enough concentration to kill gut parasites, but not so strong as to kill chimps (nor people, for that matter; locals use the pith for the same purpose). Given that the plant is known locally as "goat-killer", however, it seems that not all animals are as smart as chimps and humans. Some consume it indiscriminately and succumb.
Since the Veronia-eating chimps were discovered, more evidence has emerged suggesting that animals often eat things for medical rather than nutritional reasons. Many species, for example, consume dirt-a behaviour known as geophagy. Historically, the preferred explanation was that soil supplies minerals such as salt. But geophagy occurs in areas where the earth is not a useful source of minerals, and also in places where minerals can be more easily obtained from certain plants that are known to be rich in them. Clearly, the animals must be getting something else out of eating earth.
The current belief is that soil-and particularly the clay in it helps to detoxify the defensive poisons that some plants produce in an attempt to prevent themselves from being eaten. Evidence for the detoxifying nature of clay came in 1999, from an experiment carried out on macaws by James Gilardi and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis. Macaws eat seeds containing allcaloids, a group of chemicals that has some notoriously toxic members, such as strychnine. In the wild, the birds are frequently seen perched on eroding riverbanks eating clay. Dr Gilardi fed one group of macaws a mixture of a harmless alkaloid and clay, and a second group just the alkaloid. Several hours later, the macaws that had eaten the clay had 60% less alkaloid in their bloodstreams than those that had not, suggesting that the hypothesis is correct.
Other observations also support the idea that clay is detoxifying. Towards the tropics the amount of toxic compounds in plants increases-and so does the amount of earth eaten by herbivores. Elephants lick clay from mud holes all year round, except in September when they are bingeing on fruit which, because it has evolved to be eaten, is not toxic. And the addition of clay to the diets of domestic cattle increases the amount of nutrients that they can absorb from their food by 10-20%.
A third instance of animal self-medication is the use of mechanical scours to get rid of gut parasites. In 1972 Richard Wrangham, a researcher at the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania, noticed that chimpanzees were eating the leaves of a tree called Aspilia. The chimps chose the leaves carefully by testing them in their mouths. Having chosen a leaf, a chimp would fold it into a fan and swallow it. Some of the chimps were noticed wrinkling their noses as they swallowed these leaves, suggesting the experience was unpleasant. Later, undigested leaves were found on the forest floor.
Dr. Wrangham rightly guessed that the leaves indeed, one of the earliest interpretations of a had a medicinal purpose-this was. However, he guessed wrong about what the behavior mechanism pattern as self-medication was. His (and everybody else's) assumption was that Aspilia contained a drug, and this sparked more than two decades of phytochemical research to try to find out what chemical the chimps were after. But by the 1990s, chimps across Africa had been seen swallowing the leaves of 19 different species that seemed to have few suitable chemicals in common. The drug hypothesis was looking more and more dubious.
It was Dr. Huffman who got to the bottom of the problem He did so by watching what came out of the chimps, rather than concentrating on what went in. He found that the egested leaves were full of intestinal worms. The factor common to all 19 species of leaves swallowed by the chimps was that they were covered with microscopic hooks. These caught the worms and dragged them from their lodgings.
Following that observation, Dr. Engel is now particularly excited about how knowledge of the way that animals look after themselves could be used to improve the health of livestock. People might also be able to learn a thing or two-and may, indeed, already have done so. Geophagy, for example, is a common behaviour in many parts of the world. The medical stalls in African markets frequently sell tablets made of different sorts of clays, appropriate to different medical conditions.
Africans brought to the Americas as slaves continued this tradition, which gave their owners one more excuse to affect to despise them. Yet, as Dr. Engel points out, Rwandan mountain gorillas eat a type of clay rather similar to kaolinite-the main ingredient of many patent medicines sold over the counter in the West for digestive complaints. Dirt can sometimes be good for you, and to be "as sick as a parrot" may, after all, be a state to be desired.
