雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Learning Lessons from the past

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Learning Lessons from the past

Many past societies collapsed or vanished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that the poet Shelley imagined in his sonnet, Ozymandias. By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. By those standards, most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern US, the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Norse Greenland, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.

The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vacations in order to experience them at first hand. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders. Yet these builders vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing?

It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide (ecocide) has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased impact of people.

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雅思阅读真题题目：

Questions 1-3

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

1 When the writer describes the impact of monumental ruins today, he emphasises

A the income they generate from tourism.

B the area of land they occupy.

C their archaeological value.

D their romantic appeal.

2 Recent findings concerning vanished civilisations have

A overturned long-held beliefs.

B caused controversy amongst scientists.

C come from a variety of disciplines.

D identified one main cause of environmental damage.

3 What does the writer say about ways in which former societies collapsed?

A The pace of decline was usually similar.

B The likelihood of collapse would have been foreseeable.

C Deterioration invariably led to total collapse.

D Individual citizens could sometimes influence the course of events.

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