托福考场真题 | 综合写作范文
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托福综合写作
Testing Format 考试形式
1. Read the passage and take notes (3 min)
2. Listen to the lecture and take notes (only play once)
3. Summarize the relationship between 1 & 2 (20 min)
The Reading Passage:
According to extensive scientific evidence and fossil records scientists have noticed a dramatic decrease in the size and volume of the human brain over the course of 200,000 years. Decreased cranial volume has in turn resulted in decreases in brain mass, irrespective of gender and race. Scientists are still puzzled as to what may have caused this trend but there are three prevailing theories as to the shrinking mechanism.
It is thought that climate change has played a significant role in the decrease in human brain size. Because larger bodies are better at conserving heat, a larger physique would have been tremendously beneficial in the colder climates of the past. As global temperatures rose, natural selection might have favored humans with slighter and smaller frames. Following this logic, as bodies, skeletons, and skulls shrank, the brain also followed suit.
A second popular theory correlates the decreased brain size to widespread transitions to agricultural civilizations. Geographically disparate civilizations adopted technologies and practices that made agriculture more viable than hunting and gathering. Paradoxically, the agricultural revolution resulted in diminished nutrition consumption because grain diets lacked sufficient vitamins and proteins vital to the growth of the body and brain. In response to chronic malnutrition, our brain might have shrunk to conserve energy.
A third theory postulates that as human muscle mass decreased, so did our brains. Comparison of remains of millennia-old skeletons, distant ancestors of the modern human, indicate a considerable loss of muscle mass as time went on. This decrease in mass may be attributed to an overall decrease in aggression in humans. Simply put, the stronger and larger we are, the more gray matter we need to control massive muscle blocks. As humans dropped muscle mass, there was less need of large brains to control the remaining muscles. In the end, we have a brain that has decreased both in absolute terms and relative to our stature.
Question:
Directions: You have 20 minutes to plan and write your response. Your response will be judged on the basis of the quality of your writing and on how well you response presents the points in the lecture and their relationship to the reading passage. Typically, an effective response will be 150 to 225 words.
Summarize the points made in the lecture, being sure to explain how they challenge the specific arguments presented in the reading passage.
Sample Response:
参考范文：
The reading passage and lecture both talk about the reasons that caused the shrinking of human brain size. The author gives three possible explanations, yet the professor is not convinced by any of them.
The passage suggests that the rising temperature could be used to explain the shrunk brain size. However, the professor points out that temperature did not keep going up throughout history, and instead, it fluctuated from time to time. Since no matter how the climate changed, human brain continued to shrink, attributing the shrinking to the rising temperature does not stand up too much scrutiny.
The author believes that human brain shrank due to the transitions to agricultural civilization. Nevertheless, the professor argues that the adoption of agricultural technologies did not happen simultaneously everywhere in the world. Some people on the African continent, for example, made that transition much later than others on the planet, but they too experienced the shrinking of brain size like the rest of the world, which indicates that the transition to agricultural society has nothing to do with the shrinking brain size.
The last explanation made by the author is that human brains shank because their muscle mass decreased, and as a result, a larger brain was no longer needed for muscle controlling. The professor, on the other hand, points out that the decreases of human brain size and muscle mass were not proportional. Actually, while our brain size shank about 10%, the decrease of muscle mass was much less than that (only about 2% loss). That makes it hard to believe that the loss of muscle mass caused the shrinking of our brains.
听力原文：
The human brain has, without a doubt, diminished in size over the millennium. However, the notions listed in the reading passage do not stand up to scrutiny.
To begin with, the size of the human brain has nothing to do with changing temperatures. Fluctuating temperatures have been recorded throughout history, and nowhere in the skeletal remains or fossil records. Is there any indication of a corresponding fluctuation and the volume of human skulls. Instead, brain size has only continued to decrease despite temperature fluctuations.
The notion that adoption of agricultural technologies and the shifting of societies to focus on farming had a role in the shrinking of the brain is very suspect. If there was a direct correlation between adoption of agriculture and a shrinking brain, then we would expect to see this in every part of the globe that made the shift agriculture. However, scientists have noted that many areas of the African continent made the transition to agriculture much later than other civilizations. What was observed was that even though they did not adopt agriculture, there was still a shrinking of brain size. Clearly, this is evidence that agriculture and brain size are not interrelated.
Finally, let me address the relationship between muscle mass and brain size. Examining the available skeletal and fossil remains indicates that although both muscle mass and brain size did decrease, the decrease was not proportional. The human brain has shrunk roughly ten percent, while the decrease in muscle mass was insignificant, less than two percent. In most cases, if a true relationship between muscle mass and brain size existed, we would expect there to be, if not equal decrease in body mass, then a more dramatic decrease than what has been observed.
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