【每日阅读训练——速度3系列】【速度3-4】&【越障3-4】 [LSAT03]

superbat28

kid没值班？~哈哈。。还好昨晚我就查了查~我先跟上~

速度3-4
计时1
Louis Kahn, 1901-1974: He Helped Define Modern Architecture
Today, we tell about Louis Kahn. He is considered one of the most important American building designers of the twentieth century.
STEVE EMBER: Louis Kahn helped define modern architecture. Architecture is the art and science of designing and building structures such as houses, museums, and office buildings. Kahn's architecture has several defining qualities.
For example, Kahn was very interested in the look and feel of the materials he used. He used brick and concrete in new and special ways. Kahn also paid careful attention to the use of sunlight. He liked natural light to enter his buildings through interesting kinds of windows and openings. Kahn's work can also be identified by his creative use of geometric shapes. Many of his buildings use squares, circles and three sided shapes called triangles.
BARBARA KLEIN: Louis Kahn was born in Estonia in nineteen-oh-one. When he was five years old his family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even as a child, Louis Kahn showed excellence as an artist. When he was in school his pictures won several competitions organized by the city. In high school, Kahn studied architecture briefly. He later went to the University of Pennsylvania and studied architecture full time. He graduated in nineteen twenty-four.
Louis Kahn's buildings have many influences. Some experts say his trip to Rome, Italy in nineteen fifty-one influenced him the most. Kahn spent a few months as an architect with the American Academy in Rome. He also traveled through other parts of Italy, Greece and Egypt. There, he saw the ancient Greek and Roman ruins that also would influence his works. He was very affected by the size and design of these ruins. They helped influence him to develop an architecture that combines both modern and ancient designs.            (290)

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Other experts believe Kahn was also influenced by the part of Philadelphia where he grew up. There were many factory buildings with large windows. These brick structures were very solid. This industrial design is apparent in several of Kahn's early works.
STEVE EMBER: Kahn's first projects involved building housing in Philadelphia. He later received government jobs to design housing during World War Two. In nineteen forty-two, he became a head architect of the Public Building Administration. Kahn's first important project was the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut in the early nineteen fifties. The outside of the building is very simple. The surface is made of brick and limestone.
The inside of the gallery shows Kahn's great artistic sense. For example, he created a triangle-shaped walkway of steps that sits inside a rounded concrete shell. This building was very popular. Its completion represented an important step in Kahn's professional life. He was now a famous architect.
BARBARA KLEIN: One of Kahn's other important buildings is the Salk Institute, a research center in La Jolla, California. It was built in the nineteen sixties. This structure further shows how Kahn was able to unite form and function. This means his buildings were beautiful and also useful.
The Salk Institute has two structures that surround a marble garden area or courtyard. This outdoor marble area is almost completely bare. The only detail is a small stream of water running through the middle of the square towards the Pacific Ocean. This simple design is very striking. Inside the building are many rooms for laboratories. Kahn was very careful to make sure they all received natural light and a view of the ocean. He linked the indoor and outdoor spaces in a very beautiful way.            (291)

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STEVE EMBER: The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas is another famous building by Louis Kahn. Some say it is his best. Kahn built this museum in the early nineteen seventies. This large museum has long rooms with curved or vaulted ceilings. Inside, all of the walls can be moved to best fit the art collection. Kahn was able to make the concrete material of the building look both solid and airy. He used sunlight and bodies of water to create a truly special building.
Kahn once said this about the Kimbell Art Museum: "The building feels...that I had nothing to do with it...that some other hand did it." The architect seems to say that he was helped by some higher influence. Many people feel that his architecture has a very spiritual and timeless quality.
Kahn mostly created public buildings such as museums and libraries. However, he also designed a few houses. His most famous home is the Fisher house near Philadelphia. It is made of several box-shaped buildings. The house is made out of glass, wood and stone. Many windows provide a view of the nearby trees.
BARBARA KLEIN: Louis Kahn also designed buildings in other countries, including India and Bangladesh. His largest project was a series of buildings that would become the government center of Dhaka, Bangladesh. This structure includes the parliament, meeting rooms, offices, eating places and even a religious center.                (235)

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This series of buildings looks like an ancient home for kings. Huge rounded and box-like buildings have windows in the shape of circles and triangles. The structure is surrounded by water. From a distance, it appears to float on a lake. Kahn spent the last twelve years of his life on the project. It was completed in nineteen eighty-three, nine years after his death. Because of Kahn, experts say, one of the poorest countries in the world has one of the most beautiful public buildings on Earth.
All of Kahn's buildings share a common solidity and heaviness. Experts say they are very different from the works of other famous architects of the period. These architects preferred light and airy buildings. Their weightless-looking structures were mostly made of glass and metal. Kahn used stone and concrete to make monumental buildings. Many of his structures look more ancient than modern.
STEVE EMBER: Louis Kahn was an artist who created beautiful works. But he was not a very good businessman. He would change his designs many times. This would make each project take a great deal of time and cost more money. The majority of the projects he designed were never built. Also, he did not like to compromise his design ideas to satisfy a buyer's wishes. For this reason and others, Kahn did not make many buildings. His design company did not always have many jobs or much money. In fact, when Kahn died, he was in great debt. This is especially unusual since he was considered one of the most important architects in the world.    (264)


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BARBARA KLEIN: In two thousand four, Mister Kahn's son, Nathaniel Kahn, made a film about his father's life. The film is called "My Architect." It is interesting for many reasons. "My Architect" gives a history of Kahn's life. The film presents the architect and his buildings. You can see Kahn working at his desk and talking with his builders. You can also see him teaching university students. You can tell that he had great energy.
The film also shows a great deal about Kahn's private life. Kahn had a wife and daughter. But he also had two other families. Kahn had a child with each of two other women that he was not married to. In the film, Nathaniel Kahn describes visits from his father.
He says that as a child he did not understand why his father did not live with him and his mother all of the time.
NATHANIEL KAHN IN "MY ARCHITECT": "I didn't know my father very well. He never married my mother and he never lived with us. I needed to know him. I needed to find out who he really was. So I set out on a journey to see his buildings and to find whatever was left of him out there."
STEVE EMBER: Many questions are left unanswered about Kahn. Yet, the film helps tell a very interesting story about a very important man. Louis Kahn died in nineteen seventy-four. Yet his influence lives on. While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he trained many future builders. Some students have become important architects. And Kahn's architecture has remained fresh and timeless.    (268)



难度3-4

Dawn's early light
LAST week all eyes were on the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, as NASA’s space shuttle blasted off on its final mission. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of kilometers away, another NASA spacecraft was approaching its destination. If all goes to plan, then on July 16th Dawn, the largest robotic probe ever launched by America’s space agency, will drop into orbit around Vesta, the second-largest member of the asteroid belt.

Though a mission to the asteroids may lack the glamour of sending probes to Mars and the moons of Saturn, these tiny planetlets have long fascinated astronomers, for they offer a window on the earliest years of the solar system.

When the sun formed, some 4.5 billion years ago, it was surrounded by a disk of gas and dust. During the next few million years, lumps of that disk stuck together to form the familiar eight planets of the modern solar system. Some lumps, however, were left over. And a lot of them are concentrated in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, where the combined gravities of Jupiter and Saturn seem to have gathered them from other parts of the solar system. There, they have crashed repeatedly into one another to form fragments of various sizes.
Small asteroids (a few of which have been visited already by space probes) are often little more than piles of dust and chondrules, the spherical pebbles of rock that formed from dust which melted in the heat of the young sun. Larger bodies such as Vesta, though, are more interesting. Vesta’s size (it is around 520km in diameter) and density make it massive enough for its gravity to keep it roughly spherical, like a proper planet. Another thing that makes Vesta planetlike is that it is split into distinct layers. The evidence suggests it has a nickel-iron core like the Earth’s, overlain by a rocky mantle.

Part of that evidence comes from its density and part from hundreds of chunks of rock, in the form of meteorites,  that have been examined by Earth-bound scientists. These rocks are believed to be the result of an asteroidal prang that happened many millions of years ago and left a crater 460km across, which dominates Vesta’s southern hemisphere. The reason they are thought to come from Vesta is that the asteroid has an unusual and characteristic spectrum. It shares this with a number of smaller asteroids whose orbits suggest they were spalled off in the collision, and with about 5% of the meteorites which fall to Earth. Such meteorites look like igneous rocks from Earth—hence the belief that Vesta has a mantle.

After spending a year in orbit around Vesta, Dawn will perform a trick rare in space travel—it will reignite its engines and head off to orbit another body. Ceres, at about 960km in diameter, is the largest asteroid. Dawn is due to arrive there in 2015.

Ceres, too, is spherical and probably divided into core and mantle, though the mantle seems to be wetter than that of Vesta. Indeed, Ceres may have ice caps and a thin atmosphere. But it has been luckier than Vesta—and almost every other asteroid-in avoiding collisions, and has thus not yielded a huge crop of meteorites for Earth-bound scientists to examine.

Dawn is able to perform the trick of moving from one asteroid to another thanks to its ion-rocket engines, pioneered on an earlier NASA mission called Deep Space One. Unlike conventional rockets, which use high-energy chemical reactions to force a stream of hot gas out of the engine, ion rockets employ electric fields to accelerate charged particles of fuel (in this case, xenon gas) out of the back of the spacecraft.

Ion engines give a pretty feeble kick. Dawn’s produce 92 millinewtons of thrust, something like a fiftieth of the amount in a smallish firework rocket. The exhaust velocity, though, is enormous—more than ten times that of a chemical rocket—and this makes ion propulsion extremely efficient. Though an ion engine could never lift a spacecraft out of Earth’s gravity well, once that craft is in deep space the futuristic-looking blue glow of its exhaust can take it to parts that chemical engines find much harder to reach. Dawn started off with 450kg of propellant, and even at maximum throttle its engines use only a quarter of a kilo a day.

The arrival of Dawn at Vesta also marks another significant achievement. If the craft does manage to go into orbit it will mean that working man-made satellites are circling and scrutinizing eight bodies in the solar system: the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, the moon, Mars and Saturn, as well as Vesta. That gives comfort to those who fear that the end of the shuttle program might mean a wider loss of interest in the exploration of space. Whether it does—and the new record proves to be the high-water mark of unmanned space exploration—or whether Dawn’s arrival proves merely a staging post on the road to greater things, remains to be seen.


哦了~等抓抓附赠LSAT~

kidvii

啥，不是今天晚上发么。。。抢我饭碗。

kidvii

晕。什么状况。。。   你咋这么心急嘞。好吧好吧。让你先发。

抓抓sandra

LSAT第03套 SECTION II——PASSAGE 1

The extent of a nation’s power over its coastal ecosystems and the natural resources in its coastal waters has been defined by two international law doctrines: freedom of the seas and adjacent state sovereignty. Until the mid-twentieth century, most nations favored application of broad open-seas freedoms and limited sovereign rights over coastal waters. A nation had the right to include within its territorial dominion only a very narrow band of coastal waters (generally extending three miles from the shoreline), within which it had the authority but not the responsibility, to regulate all activities. But, because this area of territorial dominion was so limited, most nations did not establish rules for management or protection of their territorial waters.


Regardless of whether or not nations enforced regulations in their territorial waters, large ocean areas remained free of controls or restrictions. The citizens of all nations had the right to use these unrestricted ocean areas for any innocent purpose, including navigation and fishing. Except for controls over its own citizens, no nation had the responsibility, let alone the unilateral authority, to control such activities in international waters. And, since there were few standards of conduct that applied on the “open seas”, there were few jurisdictional conflicts between nations.


The lack of standards is traceable to popular perceptions held before the middle of this century. By and large, marine pollution was not perceived as a significant problem, in part because the adverse effect of coastal activities on ocean ecosystems was not widely recognized, and pollution caused by human activities was generally believed to be limited to that caused by navigation. Moreover, the freedom to fish, or overfish, was an essential element of the traditional legal doctrine of freedom of the seas that no maritime country wished to see limited. And finally, the technology that later allowed exploitation of other ocean resources, such as oil, did not yet exist.


To date, controlling pollution and regulating ocean resources have still not been comprehensively addressed by law, but international law—established through the customs and practices of nations—does not preclude such efforts. And two recent developments may actually lead to future international rules providing for ecosystem management. First, the establishment of extensive fishery zones extending territorial authority as far as 200 miles out from a country’s coast, has provided the opportunity for nations individually to manage larger ecosystems. This opportunity, combined with national self-interest in maintaining fish populations, could lead nations to reevaluate policies for management of their fisheries and to address the problem of pollution in territorial waters. Second, the international community is beginning to understand the importance of preserving the resources and ecology of international waters and to show signs of accepting responsibility for doing so. As an international consensus regarding the need for comprehensive management of ocean resources develops, it will become more likely that international standards and policies for broader regulation of human activities that affect ocean ecosystems will be adopted and implemented.


1.    According to the passage, until the mid-twentieth century there were few jurisdictional disputes over international waters because.
(A) the nearest coastal nation regulated activities
(B) few controls or restrictions applied to ocean areas
(C) the ocean areas were used for only innocent purposes
(D) the freedom of the seas doctrine settled all claims concerning navigation and fishing
(E) broad authority over international waters was shared equally among all nations


2.    According to the international law doctrines applicable before the mid-twentieth century, if commercial activity within a particular nation’s territorial waters threatened all marine life in those waters, the nation would have been
(A) formally censured by an international organization for not properly regulating marine activities
(B) called upon by other nations to establish rules to protect its territorial waters
(C) able but not required to place legal limits on such commercial activities
(D) allowed to resolve the problem at it own discretion providing it could contain the threat to its own territorial waters
(E) permitted to hold the commercial offenders liable only if they were citizens of that particular nation


3.    The author suggests that, before the mid-twentieth century, most nations’ actions with respect to territorial and international waters indicated that
(A) managing ecosystems in either territorial or international waters was given low priority
(B) unlimited resources in international waters resulted in little interest in territorial waters
(C) nations considered it their responsibility to protect territorial but not international waters
(D) a nation’s authority over its citizenry ended at territorial lines
(E) although nations could extend their territorial dominion beyond three miles from their shoreline, most chose not to do so


4.    The author cites which one of the following as an effect of the extension of territorial waters beyond the three-mile limit?
(A) increased political pressure on individual nations to establish comprehensive laws regulating ocean resources
(B) a greater number of jurisdictional disputes among nations over the regulation of fishing on the open seas
(C) the opportunity for some nations to manage large ocean ecosystems
(D) a new awareness of the need to minimize pollution caused by navigation
(E) a political incentive for smaller nations to solve the problems of pollution in their coastal waters


5.    According to the passage, before the middle of the twentieth century, nations failed to establish rules protecting their territorial waters because
(A) the waters appeared to be unpolluted and to contain unlimited resources
(B) the fishing industry would be adversely affected by such rules
(C) the size of the area that would be subject to such rules was insignificant
(D) the technology needed for pollution control and resource management did not exist
(E) there were few jurisdictional conflicts over nations’ territorial waters


6.    The passage as a whole can best be described as
(A) a chronology of the events that have led up to present-day crisis
(B) a legal inquiry into the abuse of existing laws and the likelihood of reform
(C) a political analysis of the problems inherent in directing national attention to an international issue
(D) a historical analysis of a problem that requires international attention
(E) a proposal for adopting and implementing international standards to solve an ecological problem




答案（此行选中可见）：BCACC D

抓抓sandra

to 傻傻的kid：我昨晚就在想你肿么木有发了~噗~让你溜号了一次~

抓抓sandra

【速度3-4】
56s
62s
44s
52s
49s
今天这篇题材看着很顺畅，吃饭去咯~~

lily0123

今天才認識這個增強閱讀實力的資源,請問系列123是按照難易排列嗎?9月初要三戰,閱讀最爛希望還來得及...600+

superbat28

晕。什么状况。。。   你咋这么心急嘞。好吧好吧。让你先发。

-- by 会员 kidvii (2011/7/29 18:02:39)

不是我心急啊……~~~~就是你忘了~有木有！~~~~哈哈

superbat28

晕。什么状况。。。   你咋这么心急嘞。好吧好吧。让你先发。

-- by 会员 kidvii (2011/7/29 18:02:39)

不过今天就交给你发了吼~~我没有找资源。。。

抓抓sandra

今天才認識這個增強閱讀實力的資源,請問系列123是按照難易排列嗎?9月初要三戰,閱讀最爛希望還來得及...600+

-- by 会员 lily0123 (2011/7/29 22:41:44)

不是哈，难度算是都差不多的，1 2 3只是为了搜索方便哦~^^我阅读也不稳，所以才用这个笨办法~