【正文】 supreme achievements. At least a dozen large stone houses took shape below the bluffs of Chiaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico. They were built with masonry walls more than a meter thick and adjoining apartments to acmodate dozens, even hundreds, of famili。 nevertheless, because of the variety of tone possible to it, many posers found the clavichord a sympathetic instrument for concert use, but the character of the tone could not be varied save by mechanical or structural devices. The piano was perfected in the early eighteenth century by a harpsichord maker in Italy (though musicologists point out several previous instances of the instrument). This instrument was called a piano e forte(soft and loud), to indicate its dynamic versatility。s secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, had been instructed to explore the Missouri River, and such principal streams of it as, by its course and munication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean …may offer her most direct and practicable water munication across the continent, for the purposes of merce. Captain William Clark, the younger brother of famed Gee Rogers Clerk, was invited to share the mand of the exploring party. Amid rumors that there were prehistoric mammoths wandering around the unknown region and that somewhere in its wilds was a mountain of rock salt 80 by 45 miles in extent, the two captains set out. The date was May 14, 1804. Their point of departure was the mouth of the Wood River, just across the Mississippi from the entrance of the Missouri River. After toiling up the Missouri all summer, the group wintered near the Mandan villages in the center of what is now North Dakota. Resuming their journey in the spring of 1805, the men worked their way along the Missouri to its source and then crossed the mountains of western Montana and Idaho. Picking up a tributary of the Columbia River, they continued westward until they reached the Pacific Ocean, where they stayed until the following spring. Lewis and Clark brought back much new information, including the knowledge that the continent was wider than originally supposed. More specifically, they learned a good deal about river drainages and mountain TOEFL9505閱讀真題 7 barriers. They ended speculation that an easy coasttocoast route existed via the MissouriColumbia River systems, and their reports of the climate, the animals and birds, the trees and plants, and the Indians of the West – though not immediately published – were made available to scientists. Questions 4250 For a century and a half the piano has been one of the most popular solo instruments for Western music. Unlike string and wind instrument, the piano is pletely selfsufficient, as it is able to play both the melody and its acpanying harmony at the same time. For this reason, it became the favorite household instrument of the nieenth century. The ancestry of the piano can be traced to the early keyboard instruments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – the spi, the dulcimer, and the virginal. In the seventeenth century the an, the clavichord, and the harpsichord became the chief instruments of the keyboard group, a supremacy they maintained until the piano supplanted them at the end of the eighteenth century. The clavichord39。 there was always a huge surplus of subdivided, but vacant, land around Chicago and other cities. These excesses underscore a feature of residential expansion related to the growth of mass transportation: urban sprawl was essentially unplanned. It was carried out by thousands of small investors who paid little heed to coordinated land use or to future land users. Those who purchased and TOEFL9505閱讀真題 6 prepared land for residential purposes, particularly land near or outside city borders where transit lines and middleclass inhabitants were anticipated, did so to create demand as much as to respond to it. Chicago is a prime example of this process. Real estate subdivision there proceeded much faster than population growth. Question 2333 The preservation of embryos and juveniles is rare occurrence in the fossil record. The tiny, delicate skeletons are usually scattered by scavengers or destroyed by weathering before they can be fossilized. Ichthyosaurs had a higher chance of being preserved than did terrestrial creatures because, as marine animals, they tended to live in environments less subject to erosion. Still, their fossilization required a suite of factors: a slow rate of decay of soft tissues, little scavenging by other animals, a lack if swift currents and waves to jumble and carry away small bones, and fairly rapid burial. Given these factors, some areas have bee a treasury of wellpreserved ichthyosaur fossils. The deposits at Holzmaden, Germany, present an interesting case for analysis. The ichthyosaur remains are found in black, bituminous marine shales deposited about 190 million years ago. Over the years, thousands of specimens of marine reptiles, fish, and invertebrates have been recovered from these rocks. The quality of preservation is outstanding, but what is even more impressive is the number of ichthyosaur fossils containing preserved embryos. Ichthyosaurs with embryos have been reported from 6 different levels of the shale in a small area around Holzmaden, suggesting that a specific site was used by large numbers of ichthyosaurs repeatedly over time. The embryos are quite advanced in their physical development。s origin from the human interest in storytelling. According to this view, tales (about the hunt, war, or other feats) are gradually elaborated, at first through the use of impersonation, action, and dialogue by a narrator and then through the assumption of each of the roles by a different person. A cl