龙驾马的托福备考日记 Long Gamma

龙驾马

Day 27

2月1日

TPO15 听力

校园对话

求职做记者 错1对4
学习要劳逸结合 错2对3
对话这次做的还是不理想。其中第二篇也出现了开头和正文内容不一致的情况。虽然在脑中较快进行了主题切换，但后面出现的相对专业的讨论，以及比喻，还是听的不理想。

学术讲座

海底生物 错2对4
古代书籍 错1对5
沉积物 错3对2
大脑专注 错2对4

讲座这次做的也不太好。长句子多，要命的是长句子里的内容，很多都非常抽象，甚至连续出现了若干不同的意群，若干不同的子内容。目前还难以在听力里面连续处理这些陌生的信息。

要复习的句子：

I was so impressed with the way you handle the microscope and the samples of onion cells, and with how carefully you observed and diagrammed and interpreted each stage of cell division.

You know that studying six consecutive hours is not equivalent to studying one hour a day for six days

Your brain's ability to absorb information starts to decline after about the first hour.

So if you are dealing with a lot of new concepts and vocabulary, anyway, if you just reviewed your notes, even 20 minutes a day, it'd be much better than waiting until the night before an exam to try and absorb all those details.

If you didn't practice regularly with your track team, and then tried to squeeze in three weeks' worth of running practice just the day before a track meet, how well do you think you'd perform in your races?

For decades, psychologists have been looking at our ability to perform tasks while other things are going on, how we are able to keep from being distracted and what the conditions for good concentration are.

So it's no surprise that someone attempted to design an objective way to measure distraction

The second hypothesis is that, yes, we do perceive everything, but the brain categorizes the information, and whatever is not relevant to what we are concentrating on gets treated as low priority.

This time the distraction was a moving star field in the background, you know, where it looks like you are moving through space, passing stars.

Now that maybe the correct conclusion for visual distractions, but more research is needed to tell us how the brain deals with, say, the distractions of solving a math problem when we are hungry or when someone is singing in the next room.

We've been talking till now about the two basic needs of a biological community - an energy source to produce organic materials, you know ah, food for the organism, and the waste recycling or breakdown of materials back into inorganic molecules, and about how all this requires photosynthesis when green plants or microbes convert sunlight into energy and also requires microorganisms, bacteria, to secrete chemicals that break down or recycle the organic material to complete the cycle.

As we said, these hydro thermal vents are releasing into the ocean depth this intensely hot water and here is the thing, this hot water contains a chemical called hydrogen sulfide, and also a gas, carbon dioxide.

Now these bacteria actually combine the hydrogen sulfide with the carbon dioxide and this chemical reaction is what produces organic material which is the food for larger organisms.

Then in the 10th century, a scribe made a copy on parchment of some of his texts and diagrams including, as it turns out, The Method.

It wasn't until 1906 that a scholar came across the prayer book in a library and realized it was a palimpsest, and that the underlying layer of texts could only have come from Archimedes.

To avoid further damage to the manual script, the research team at the art museum has had to be extremely selective in their techniques they used to see the original writing.

He realized that the iron in the ancient ink would display if exposed to a certain X-ray imaging method, and except for small portions of the text that couldn't be deciphered, this technique's been very helpful in seeing Archimedes' texts and drawings through the medieval over writing.

Ah sediment as you know is material like sand, gravel, fossil fragments that is transported by natural processes like wind, water flow or the movement of glaciers.

During this epic, sediment was made by the kind of erosion and we atheling that happens when the climate is colder, and part of those sediments are fossils of plants and animals that lived at that time.

Now there is growing evidence that the presence of humans has altered the earth so much that a new epic of geologic history has begun-the Anthropocene epic, a new human-influenced epic.

The idea that around the year 1800 CE the human population became large enough, around a billion people, that its activities started altering the environment.

Also, things like the damming of rivers, has caused increased sediment production, not to mention the addition of more carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

Geologists in the far future will be able to examine the sediment being laid down today, whereas right now we can say that yes, human impact on the Earth is clear: It'll be future researchers who have a better perspective and will be able to really draw a line between the Holocene and the Anthropocene epics.

要复习的单词或词组：

soccer season

ring off the hook

fresh in sb's mind

consecutive

decline

squeeze

subjective questionnaire

perceive

cortex

distraction

up to a point

hydrogen

sulfide

bacteria

turn out

decipher

parchment

palimpsest

predominant

monastery

perspective

characterize

erosion

龙驾马

Day 28

2月2日

TPO14 阅读

儿童广告 错1对9
玛雅水源 错3对7
古欧农牧 错2对8

这次其实文章还好，玛雅那篇题目（选项）没有仔细看，导致错误偏多。

需复习的长难句：

When broken open, Allende stones are revealed to contain an assortment of small, distinctive objects, spherical or irregular in shape and embedded in a dark gray matrix (binding material), which were once constituents of the solar nebula—the interstellar cloud of gas and dust out of which our solar system was formed.

Since practically all the solar system's mass resides in the Sun, this similarity in chemistry means that chondrites have average solar system composition, except for the most volatile elements; they are truly lumps of nebular matter, probably similar in composition to the matter from which planets were assembled.

The images produced by the camera obscura, a boxlike device that used a pinhole or lens to throw an image onto a ground-glass screen or a piece of white paper, were already familiar—the device had been much employed by topographical artists like the Italian painter Canaletto in his detailed views of the city of Venice.

The new candid photography—unposed pictures that were made when the subjects were unaware that their pictures were being taken—confirmed these scientific results, and at the same time, thanks to the radical cropping (trimming) of images that the camera often imposed, suggested new compositional formats.

As the seaweed and marsh grass leaves die, bacteria break down the plant material, and insects, small shrimplike organisms, fiddler crabs, and marsh snails eat the decaying plant tissue, digest it, and excrete wastes high in nutrients.

Even with a massive effort, it is doubtful that complete eradication of Spartina from nonnative habitats is possible, for it has become an integral part of these shorelines and estuaries during the last 100 to 200 years.

Leaving its insect predators behind, the cordgrass has been spreading slowly and steadily along Washington’s tidal estuaries on the west coast, crowding out the native plants and drastically altering the landscape by trapping sediment.

Along the east coast Spartina is considered valuable for its ability to prevent erosion and marshland deterioration; it is also used for coastal restoration projects and the creation of new wetland sites.




需复习的单词：
perennial
cordgrass
tidal
gravel
salinity
cobble
mudflat
estuary
meteorite
lump
volatile
compositional
chondrite
chondrule
sulfide
calotype
daguerreotype
reluctantly

龙驾马

Day 29

2月3日

TPO14 听力

图书馆找书 错1对4
校刊报道 错0对5

这两篇对话有些意思，都有各自的讨论点，分别是找书和报道的内容，可聊着聊着又有切换，变成了找工作和学习规划。还好题目比较简单，没有出现太大问题。

心理认识 错3对3
生物体温调节 错1对5
天文导航 错3对3
古代建筑 错0对6

这次比较极端，两篇做的不错，两篇错的厉害。差的两篇，还是相关知识不熟悉，内容没听懂，包括里面的举例，比方，听的很差。还是要多复习这类题材。

需要复习的长句：

She needs people to watch various new TV programs that haven't been broadcast yet, then indicate on a survey whether they liked it, why, if they'd watch another episode.

Over the next couple hundreds years, a lot of hypotheses were tossed around, the spots were mountains or holes in the solar atmosphere through which the dark surface of the Sun could be seen.

Anyway, Wolf went through all records from various observatories in Europe, and put together a history of sunspot observations going back about 100 years.

That's because magnetic fields reduce the pressure exerted on the gases inside of them, making the spots cooler than the rest of the Sun's surface.

That first of all starts drawing water away from the center of its body, so the middle part of the frog, its internal organs, its heart, lungs, livers, these start getting drier and drier while the water that's being pulled away is forming a puddle around the organs just underneath the skin.

But wherever they live, once the weather starts to turn cold and the temperature starts to drop below freezing, as soon as the frog even touches an ice crystal or a bit of frozen ground, well, it begins to freeze.

After months without heartbeat, spring time comes around again, the earth starts to warm up, and suddenly one day, ping, a pulse, followed by another one, then another until maybe ten, twelve hours later, the animal is fully recovered.

We've already looked at portrait sculpture which are busts created to commemorate people who had died, and we've looked at relief sculpture, or sculpting on walls.

Now, actually some Roman sculptures were original but others were exact copies of Greek statues and some Roman sculptures were combinations of some sort.

Now the dominant view in traditional art history is that Roman artists lacked creativity and skill, especially compared to the Greek artists who came before them.

The mother language, is the line on the top of this diagram, over time, it branches off into new daughter languages, which branch into daughter languages of their own, and languages that have the same source, the same mother, are called sisters.

需要复习的单词：

redid
taken aback
magnetic
lopsided
pulse
bust
contemporary
idealization
imperial
inhabitants
syntax
semantics
correspond

龙驾马

Day 30

2月4日

TPO13 阅读

婴儿认知 错2对14
生物钟 错3对11
社会群组 错6对8

这次的三篇文章单词都还好，长难句还是有一些的。话题方面，都比较抽象，做起来有些吃力。尤其是社会群组哪一篇，都是很抽象的概念和说理，都买来得及看完，做的效果很差。

需要复习的长难句：

Similarly, changes in the infant's general level of motor activity —turning the head, blinking the eyes, crying, and so forth — have been used by researchers as visual indicators of the infant's perceptual abilities.

Therefore, when observational assessment is used as a technique for studying infant perceptual abilities, care must be taken not to overgeneralize from the data or to rely on one or two studies as conclusive evidence of a particular perceptual ability of the infant.

With these sophisticated observational assessment and electro-physiological measures, we know that the neonate of only a few days is far more perceptive than previously suspected.

The relations between animal activity and these periods, particularly for the daily rhythms, have been of such interest and importance that a huge amount of work has been done on them and the special research field of chronobiology has emerged.

Normally, the constantly changing levels of an animal's activity sleeping, feeding, moving, reproducing, metabolizing, and producing enzymes and hormones, for example are well coordinated with environmental rhythms, but the key question is whether the animal's schedule is driven by external cues, such as sunrise or sunset, or is instead dependent somehow on internal timers that themselves generate the observed biological rhythms.

For instance, apparently normal daily periods of biological activity were maintained for about a week by the fungus Neurospora when it was intentionally isolated from all geophysical timing cues while orbiting in a space shuttle.

Indeed, stability of the biological clock's period is one of its major features, even when the organism's environment is subjected to considerable changes in factors, such as temperature, that would be expected to affect biological activity strongly.

The disorienting effects of this mismatch between external time cues and internal schedules may persist, like our jet lag, for several days or weeks until certain cues such as the daylight/darkness cycle reset the organism's clock to synchronize with the daily rhythm of the new environment.

For instance, some social groups employ shunning (a person can remain in the community, but others are forbidden to interact with the person) as a device to bring into line individuals whose behavior goes beyond that allowed by the particular group.

需要复习的单词：

verbalize
habituation
olfactory
eliciting
neonate
electro
chronobiology
continuation
synchronize
hatch
humanness
endow
predominate
gripe
ostracize
conform

龙驾马

Day 31
2月5日
TPO13 听力

校园对话
讨论论文 错0对5
实验室使用 错1对4

讲座
城市规划 错1对5
欧洲生态 错1对5
中世纪诗歌 错2对4
太阳系陨石 错3对3
这次错误率几乎和文章难度，或者说听懂程度完全成正比。两篇对话最容易，规划那篇和生态那篇仔细听其实还好，基本能听懂。这几篇做题时选项就觉得不太难了，大部分可以快速搞定，少数就是排除掉两个不靠谱的答案后，二选一即可。但古代诗歌和陨石两篇，本身内容就有些陌生，听的时候就是连蒙带猜，昨题就比较差了。看来题材方面，艺术天文还是需要重点关注的。

需要复习的长难句：
Is it better for the environment to buy locally grown produce that is not certified as organic or is it better to get organically grown fruits and vegetables that must be trucked in from California, three thousand miles away.

When photons and light waves hit objects in our atmosphere, water droplets oxygen and nitrogen molecules, dust particles and so on, these objects are illuminated, they are lit up, and those things are also being lit by all our street lights, by the Moon, all these ambient light.

Cecilia Beaux was born in 1855, and after learning to paint and studying with several important artists of the time, Beaux became known as one of the best portrait painters in the United States.

Now, the undefined background also shows how Cecilia Beaux was influenced by the French Impressionists, who believed, like Beaux, in a personal rather than conventional approach to their subject matter.

Rhizomes from one plant grow through the muddy soil and interlock with those of other nearby plants, the plants form a kind of colony, a community that will thrive and Rhizomes from one plant grow through the muddy soil and interlock with those of other nearby plants, the plants form a kind of colony, a community that will thrive and perish together. together.

By adjusting the osmotic pressure so that the cells are always fully inflated, the plant is able to withstand great pressure before snapping, so Spartinas may look like simple marsh grass, but they are really a wonder of chemistry, physics and structural engineering that allows them to survive and even thrive in an environment in which most plants will wilt and die within hours.

需要复习的单词：
literature
circumstance
atmosphere
gadget
interpretation
impressionist
portraiture
perish
saline
interlock

龙驾马

Day 32
2月6日
TPO12 阅读

电影有声化 错2对12
古人用哪只手 错3对11
沙漠水资源 错2对12
这次的题目相对简单些，生词少了，结构复杂的长句子也不多。但有些抽象内容还是读起来费力些。错误主要还是来自对细节的理解出现偏差。

需要复习的长难句：

Much of the evidence about right-hand versus left-hand dominance comes from stencils and prints found in rock shelters in Australia and elsewhere, and in many Ice Age caves in France, Spain, and Tasmania.

Most engravings, for example, are best lit from the left, as befits the work of right-handed artists, who generally prefer to have the light source on the left so that the shadow of their hand does not fall on the tip of the engraving tool or brush.

Right-handers tend to have longer, stronger, and more muscular bones on the right side, and Marcellin Boule as long ago as 1911 noted the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal skeleton had a right upper arm bone that was noticeably stronger than the left.

Occasionally one can determine whether stone tools were used in the right hand or the left, and it is even possible to assess how far back this feature can be traced. In stone toolmaking experiments, Nick Toth, a right-hander, held the core (the stone that would become the tool) in his left hand and the hammer stone in his right.

The part of the brain responsible for fine control and movement is located in the left cerebral hemisphere, and the findings above suggest that the human brain was already asymmetrical in its structure and function not long after 2 million years ago.

Despite all the highly visible technological developments in theatrical and home delivery of the moving image that have occurred over the decades since then, no single innovation has come close to being regarded as a similar kind of watershed.

In many instances, spectators in the era before recorded sound experienced elaborate aural presentations alongside movies' visual images, from the Japanese benshi (narrators) crafting multivoiced dialogue narratives to original musical compositions performed by symphony-size orchestras in Europe and the United States.


In Berlin, for the premiere performance outside the Soviet Union of The Battleship Potemkin, film director Sergei Eisenstein worked with Austrian composer Edmund Meisel (1874-1930) on a musical score matching sound to image; the Berlin screenings with live music helped to bring the film its wide international fame.

Though it may be difficult to imagine from a later perspective, a strain of critical opinion in the 1920s predicted that sound film would be a technical novelty that would soon fade from sight, just as had many previous attempts, dating well back before the First World War, to link images with recorded sound.

With financial assets considerably greater than those in the motion picture industry, and perhaps a wider vision of the relationships among entertainment and communications media, they revitalized research into recording sound for motion pictures.

The United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank have funded attempts to survey the groundwater resources of arid lands and to develop appropriate extraction techniques.

This is useful for irrigation, but the high temperatures, low humidities, and different day lengths of the dry season, compared to the normal growing season, can present difficulties with some crops.

In Europe it took a little longer, mainly because there were more small producers for whom the costs of sound were prohibitive, and in other parts of the world problems with rights or access to equipment delayed the shift to sound production for a few more years (though cinemas in major cities may have been wired in order to play foreign sound films).

Groundwater is stored in the pore spaces and joints of rocks and unconsolidated (unsolidified) sediments or in the openings widened through fractures and weathering.


The rate of movement may be very slow: in the Indus plain, the movement of saline (salty) groundwaters has still not reached equilibrium after 70 years of being tapped.

需要复习的单词：

stencil
predominant
depict
fracture
spiral
tress
periodization
paradox
aesthetic
retard
inadequacy
triumph
sustaining
extraction
aquifers
saline

龙驾马

Day 33
2月7日
TPO 12听力

讨论论文修改 错2对3
询问工资发放 错0对5

这次对话的场景其实很常见，但论文那篇做的不好。感觉还是讨论的内容，用的话语比较专业，比如“任何与自然意象的使用无关的内容都不要在论文中出现（anything unrelated to the use of nature imagery has no place in the paper）” 。听的时候就不是很懂，做题效果也不好。

细胞分裂 错3对3
商业调查 错1对5
歌剧演变 错2对4
清洁能源 错1对5

讲座方面，细胞那篇做的不好。信息量密集，内容专业，还有比喻，听起来比较吃力。歌剧那篇也是，有一些稍专业的词汇影响了对内容的理解，但好在那篇的整体结构比较容易把握，做题效果比预期的好些。其他两篇感觉中规中矩，做题也是正常发挥。


需要复习的句子：
I would just stick to the topic, anything unrelated to the use of nature imagery has no place in the paper.

All that tangential material just distract from the main argument.


Well, better a short, well-structured paper than a long paper that's poorly-structured and wanders off topic.

It may not help you tie your shoe but that little plastic tip keeps the rest of the shoelace, the shoe string from unraveling into weak and useless threads.

Well, the telomeres at the ends of Chromosomes seem to do about the same thing —protect the genes, the genetically functional parts of the Chromosome from being damaged.

And in the future we may have virtually immortal nerve cells and immortal skin cells of whatever, because this chemical, telomerase, can keep the telomeres on the ends of Chromosomes from getting any shorter.

Basically, um, the idea is that business owners or business managers just go out and actually talk to their customers, and learn more about how well the business is serving their needs, and try to see what the customer experiences.

With active systems, on the other hand, you collect the solar energy at one location, and then you use pumps and fans to move heat from the collectors through a plumbing system to a tank, where it can be used to heat a home or to just provide hot water.

It came to America late and was considered too elitist for the general public, but Broadway musicals fulfilled a similar function for a great long while.

And so the music was secondary, if you will, to the dramatic cadence of language, to the way the rhythm of language was used to express feeling and used to add drama, and of course as a result, instead of arias, or solos which would come to dominate Italian opera, the French relied on what the Italians called “recitativo” or “recitative” in English, the lyrics were spoken... frequently to the accompaniment of a harpsichord

And the themes again, the themes changed, and opera was no longer about teaching religion as it was about satire, and about expressing the ideas of society or government without committing yourself to writing and risking imprisonment or persecution or what have you.



需要复习的单词：
imagery
swamped
tangential
payroll
definitely
shoelace
enzyme
telomerase
aspect
quote
harpsichord
melodious
imprisonment
persecution
aristocrat
migrate
cadence

龙驾马

Day 34
2月8日
TPO 11 阅读

埃及雕塑 错2对12
候鸟定位 错3对11
生物预警 错5对9

这次总体来说不难，内容还算容易理解，有一些长句，但大都不难理解。冷僻的单词也不多。只是这次做的有点慢，最后一篇赶时间，做的不太理想。

需要复习的句子

In fact, a lack of understanding concerning the purposes of Egyptian art has often led it to be compared unfavorably with the art of other cultures: Why did the Egyptians not develop sculpture in which the body turned and twisted through space like classical Greek statuary?

He then set up experiments with caged starlings and found that their orientation was, in fact, in the proper migratory direction except when the sky was overcast, at which times there was no clear direction to their restless movements.

If the artificial Sun remained stationary, the birds would shift their direction with respect to it at a rate of about 15 degrees per hour, the Sun's rate of movement across the sky.

In fact, when tapes of begging tree swallows were played at an artificial swallow nest containing an egg, the egg in that "noisy"nest was taken or destroyed by predators before the egg in a nearby quiet nest in 29 of 37 trials.

Further evidence for the costs of begging comes from a study of differences in the begging calls of warbler species that nest on the ground versus those that nest in the relative safety of trees.

These higher-frequency sounds do not travel as far, and so may better conceal the individuals producing them, who are especially vulnerable to predators in their ground nests.

The hypothesis that begging calls have evolved properties that reduce their potential for attracting predators yields a prediction: baby birds of species that experience high rates of nest predation should produce softer begging signals of higher frequency than nestlings of other species less often victimized by nest predators.

Other statues were designed to be placed within an architectural setting, for instance, in front of the monumental entrance gateways to temples known as pylons, or in pillared courts, where they would be placed against or between pillars: their frontality worked perfectly within the architectural context.

By contrast, wooden statues were carved from several pieces of wood that were pegged together to form the finished work, and metal statues were either made by wrapping sheet metal around a wooden core or cast by the lost wax process.

Apart from statues representing deities, kings, and named members of the elite that can be called formal, there is another group of three-dimensional representations that depicts generic figures, frequently servants, from the nonelite population.

Unlike formal statues that are limited to static poses of standing, sitting, and kneeling, these figures depict a wide range of actions, such as grinding grain, baking bread, producing pots, and making music, and they are shown in appropriate poses, bending and squatting as they carry out their tasks.

需要复习的单词：

static
pillar
compactness
architectural
decorative
imagination
stationary
predator
propagate
planetarium
preposterous
compensate

龙驾马

Day 35
2月9日
TPO 11 听力

对话

入馆证 错0对5

参与学术研讨 错1对4

讲座

鸟类哺育 错4对2

建筑设计 错1对5

农业与气候 错2对4

商业广告 错0对6

两篇对话都不难 错误还是发生在对题目的理解有偏差。4篇讲座，3篇都能大致听懂，做题结果也不错。但鸟类那篇比较难懂，其中专业领域的讨论，信息量密度很高，只有有两个以上的概念没听懂，后面的就更来不及去理解，更听不懂了。后来做题也是靠猜，做的不理想。

需要复习的句子

And as a part of this interview process we have to meet with the committee of the professors and students in our department.

That's why I feel necessary to point out that even though these applicants' research interests are similar to yours, we want you to tell us what you think about the teaching of all these applicants.

What they do is they save their best performances, their most conspicuous and most risky displays for the time just before the baby birds become able to take care of themselves.

Now what the purple sandpiper does is when a predator approaches, it drags its wings, but not to give it the impression that its wing is broken, but to create the illusion that it has a second pair of legs.

Most of the time, when birds are engaging in distraction displays, they are going to be pretending either that they have an injury, or that they are ill, or that they are exhausted.

The wind was one reason, nothing sticking out that might blow away in the harsh weather, but there was probably another reason, not related to the climate, more, more reflection of a rural New England society back then.

So, so all these help to create an attitude of conformity in the community, and you can see why a modest, a very plain style would become so widely imitated through out rural New England.

Now you have some birds that are quite mature, are quite capable, almost as soon as they hatch, and in that case, the parent will put on the most conspicuous distraction displays just before the babies' hatch.

Wetlands are areas of marshy, swampy land, areas where water covers the soil, or is present either at or near the surface of the soil for a large part of the year.

If temperatures overnight are already very close to the freezing point, then this drop of just a few degrees can take the temperature below freezing.

And what I, another think is that the loss of the wetlands has created the situation where the local temperatures in the area are now slightly different, slightly colder than they were 100 years ago, before the wetlands were drained.

Now, in theory, that would seem a great time to advertise, but maybe research shows you're wrong, that the customers who buy sports equipment tend not to give it as a holiday gift, but want to use it themselves.

需要复习的单词

convince

distract

imitated

mild

susceptible

make some up

龙驾马

Day 36
2月10日
TPO 10 阅读

中国陶器 错2对12
中世纪欧洲人口 错3对11
气候变化 错5对9

这三篇难度感觉适中。长句还是比较多，难度还行。感觉还是阅读速度偏慢，导致最后一篇囫囵吞枣。具体原因还是阅读时候还无法做到又快又准，读的太快了，做题时还有反复看。读的慢了，做题来不及。还是基础不够吧。

需要复习的句子：

The function and status of ceramics in China varied from dynasty to dynasty, so they may be utilitarian, burial, trade-collectors', or even ritual objects, according to their quality and the era in which they were made.

The tradition of religious sculpture extends over most historical periods but is less clearly delineated than that of stonewares or porcelains, for it embraces the old custom of earthenware burial ceramics with later religious images and architectural ornament.

In the seventeenth century, the trading activities of the Dutch East India Company resulted in vast quantities of decorated Chinese porcelain being brought to Europe, which stimulated and influenced the work of a wide variety of wares, notably Delft. The Chinese themselves adapted many specific vessel forms from the West, such as bottles with long spouts, and designed a range of decorative patterns especially for the European market.

So admired were these pieces that they encouraged the development of earthenware made in imitation of porcelain and instigated research into the method of their manufacture.

Ceramic products also include lead-glazed tomb models of the Han dynasty, three-color lead-glazed vessels and figures of the Tang dynasty, and Ming three-color temple ornaments, in which the motifs were outlined in a raised trail of slip-as well as the many burial ceramics produced in imitation of vessels made in materials of higher intrinsic value.

Population growth generated an expansion of small-scale manufacturing, particularly of handicrafts, textiles, and metal production in England, Flanders, parts of northern Italy, the southwestern German states, and parts of Spain.

Unlike short-term financial cooperation between investors for a single commercial undertaking, joint-stock companies provided permanent funding of capital by drawing on the investments of merchants and other investors who purchased shares in the company.

Over long periods of time, substances whose physical and chemical properties change with the ambient climate at the time can be deposited in a systematic way to provide a continuous record of changes in those properties overtime, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years.

Information on temperature, rainfall, and other aspects of the climate that can be inferred from the systematic changes in properties is usually referred to as proxy data.

While these records provide broadly consistent indications that temperature variations can occur on a global scale, there are nonetheless some intriguing differences, which suggest that the pattern of temperature variations in regional climates can also differ significantly from each other.

Some current analyses conclude that volcanoes and solar activity explain quite a considerable amount of the observed variability in the period from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, but that they cannot be invoked to explain the rapid warming in recent decades.

需要复习的单词

remuneration
equivalent
porcelain
instigate
ceramics
utilitarian
burial
chaotic
volcano