| Reading Passage 2 | |
| Title: | Perfume hunting（重复2009年5月16日雅思考题） |
| Question types: | Which paragraph contains the following information? TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN 填空 |
| 文章内容回顾 | 讲香水的制作，科学家去马达加斯加发现新的香味，用于香水制造业。 |
| 英文原文阅读 | The Perfume Hunters Sniffing out new smells for use in cosmetics and household products involves blood, sweat and plenty of insect repellent. Tired, scratched and soaked in sweat, the hunters begin to think of turning back. Time is running out. Dusk is falling and they still haven't caught sight of their quarry. Suddenly they stop. One of the men lifts his head and sniffs. He knows they are close. He scans the undergrowth in the deepening gloom--and suddenly he spots what they have been looking for. There, hidden beneath some leaves at nose height is a tiny spike of flowers, the whole bunch no bigger than a thumbnail. Within minutes, the hunters have set their trap. All they have to do now is wait. The hard work was worth it. The next morning, there in the trap is a rare catch--a new sort of smell. For the men in the Madagascan forest are perfume hunters. And instead of rifles, they are armed with nothing more sinister than a few glass jars, a couple of pumps and some tubing which they will use to capture new and exciting fragrances to make our lives smell sweeter. Ever since the unguentari plied their trade in ancient Rome, perfumers have had to keep abreast of changing fashions. These days they have several thousand ingredients to choose from when creating new scents, but there is always a demand for new combinations. The bigger the "palette" of smells, the better the perfumer's chance of creating something new and fashionable. Even with everyday products such as shampoo and soap, consumers are becoming increasingly fussy. Cheap, synthetic smells are out. Fresh, natural smells are in. And many of today's fragrances have to survive tougher treatment than ever before, resisting the destructive power of bleach or a high temperature wash cycle. Chemists can now create new smells from synthetic molecules, but nature has been in the business far longer. Plants produce countless fragrant chemicals. Many are intended to attract pollinators. Others are produced for quite different purposes. The fragrant resins that ooze from wounds in a tree, for example, defend it against infection. The island of Madagascar is an evolutionary hot spot; 85% of its plants are unique, making it an ideal source for novel fragrances. So last October an expedition, including Robin Clery, a chemist, and Claude Dir, a perfume company director, explored two contrasting landscapes in northern Madagascar. Their first stop was a remnant of rainforest in the national park of Montaigne d'Ambre. The second was the tiny uninhabited island of Nosy Hara off the northwest coast. With some simple technology, borrowed from the pollution monitoring industry, and a fair amount of ingenuity, the perfume hunters bagged 20 promising new aromas in the Madagascan rainforest. Each day the team set out from their "hotel"--a wooden hut lit by kerosene lamps, and trailed up and down paths and animal tracks, exploring the thick vegetation up to 10 meters on either side of the trail. Some smells came from obvious places, often big showy flowers within easy reach. Others were harder to pin down. "Often it was the very small flowers that were much more interesting," says Clery. In fact, some of the most promising fragrances were given off by resins that oozed from the bark of trees. Resins are the source of many traditional perfumes such as frankincense and myrrh. The most exciting resin that the team found came from a Calophyllum tree, a relative of the Asian beauty leaf, which produces a strongly scented medicinal oil. The sap smelt rich and aromatic, but it also smelt of something the fragrance industry has had to learn to live without-castoretum, a substance extracted from the musk glands of beavers and once a key ingredient in many perfumes. "We don't use animal products any longer," says Dir, "so to find a tree with an animal smell is extremely precious." After the luxuriance of the rainforest, the little-known island of Nosy Hara was a stark, dry place--geologically and biologically very different from the mainland. "Apart from two beaches, the rest of the island is impenetrable, except by hacking through the bush," says Clery. One of the biggest prizes here was a sweet-smelling sap weeping from the gnarled branches of some ancient shrubby trees in the parched interior. So far no one has been able to identify the plant. The group also set out from the island to capture the smell of coral reefs. Odors that conjure up sunkissed seas are highly sought after by the perfume industry. "From the ocean, the only thing we have is seaweed, and that has a dark and heavy aroma. We hope to find something unique among the corals," says Dir. The challenge for the hunters was to extract a smell from water rather than air. This was an opportunity to try Clery's new "aquaspace" apparatus--a set of filters that work underwater. On Nosy Hara, jars were fixed over knobs of coral about 2 meters down and water pumped out over the absorbent filters. So what does coral smell like? "It's a bit like lobster and crab," says Clery. The team's task now is to recreate the best of their captured smells. First they must identify the molecules that make up each fragrance. Some ingredients may be quite common chemicals. But some may be completely novel, or they may be too complex or expensive to make in the lab. The challenge then is to conjure up the fragrances with more readily available materials. "We can avoid the need to import plants from the rainforest by creating the smell with a different set of chemicals from those in the original material," says Clery. "If we get it right, you can sniff the sample and it will transport you straight back to the moment you smelt it in the rainforest." Summary The perfume trade has a long history, dating back to (14) _____________. Today, perfumers can choose from a wider range of chemicals, and many of these are synthetic. However, fresh, natural fragrances are more (15) _____________ and perfumers continue to hunt for new smells from nature. Plants are a major source of perfumes, producing smells for many reasons, such as to encourage useful insects and to prevent (16) _________. Last October, perfume hunters traveled to Madagascar, a promising site for new smells because of the (17) _____________ of its trees and flowers. In a rainforest, the group collected an extremely valuable smell which resembled a chemical called castoretum. This new smell was considered very useful because today perfumers have stopped employing (18) _____________. At a small island, the fragrances of (19) _____________ were collected by the same team using equipment that works underwater. On returning to the laboratory, the group will attempt to reproduce the new smells using chemicals that are (20) _____________. |
| 题型难度分析 | 这篇文章应该算是本次考试中难度较大的一个，信息段落配对题，乱序，在做题中，会占据考生大量的时间。连续两道的5选2题，会给学生审题造成压力，致使本文在做题中时间耗费太长。 |
| 题型技巧分析 | 细节配对是雅思考试中比较难的题型，我们来分析一下这类题目的做题技巧： 首先，让我们来了解一下这种题目的出题特点。 1. 彻底同义转换 和其它题型不同的是，这种题型是对原文一句话或者一段话进行的彻底同义转换，个别甚至是高度概括，因此几乎不存在任何定位词，因此不能根据定位词到原文中定位答案。考生必须具备非常强的语言理解能力，才能快速识别出文章信息和段落信息的相似之处，从而找到答案。 2. 完全乱序 由于这种题型是要求把细节信息与所在的段落进行配对，因此是绝对打乱顺序出题的。 3. 部分题目存在重复选项 在雅思阅读中，段落细节配对题以两种形式出现，一种是每个选项只能用一次，另外一种题型，在Instruction的最后一句往往有这样的提示： NB You may use any letter more than once. 如果出现这样的提示，则说明某些段落可以重复选用。剑桥真题集中的真题以及笔者、考生的实际考试经历证明，这种指令往往意味着有且仅有一个选项可以使用两次。 4. 从题量上来看，存在着以下两种可能： 1) 题量=段落数+1（肯定带NB） 2) 题量小于段落数两个以上 由于每个选项只能重复使用一次，因此第一种题型就意味着每个段落都会有至少一个答案，而第二种题型则不能保证每段都有。 5. 永远是第一个题型 不管在A类考试还是G类的考试中，我们发现，这种题目永远是出现在第一个题型，而且这种题型与段落标题配对题型List of headings属于“相克题型”，即这两者不可能同时出现。 6. 有部分题目与其后的题目有关联 由于这种题型一般都是跨全文出的，因此跟后面的题目不可避免地出现交叉，因此有可能根据后面的题目来推断出细节所在的位置。 题量=段落数+1, 且带NB的题型： 前面讲过，由于段落细节配对题的出题特点，这种题型往往暗示了每段都会有至少一个答案，那么这种题目适合用“通篇浏览”的方法来做。具体步骤如下： 1. 阅读所有题目，划出关键词 关键词就是能最大限度上概括整个句子的单词或短语，第一步划出关键词，在短时间内将所有的题目进行高度的浓缩，符合人类短期记忆的规律。 2. 通读所有段落，依次寻找答案 因为每段都会有答案，因此现在所需要做的事情就是到每段去找答案。要注意在选出信息后，要在选出的段落上做上记号，以免浪费时间。 多选 1. 题目说明： Questions 11-13: 11.__A___ 12___F___ 13___B____ Question 11: 11___AFB______（错一个就全错） 2. 选项在原文中的顺序：无特定顺序 3. 题目一般只考文中的部分信息 |
| 剑桥雅思推荐原文练习 | 剑6 Test 1 剑7 Test 1 |
