D. to show that Venetian reliance on round ships rather than galleys proved to be weakness Paragraph 6:
11. Which of the following can be inferred from paragraph 6 about the Venetian Council’s decision concerning the use of round ships?
A. It resulted in a return to profitable in luxury goods for Venetian merchants.
B. Ultimately it did not restore the superiority in the spice trade that Venice had enjoyed earlier. C. It eventually enabled Venetian merchants to increase the quantity and price of the spices they sold in Europe.
D. It means a long-awaited improvement in the fortunes of the shipbuilding industry in Venice. 12. According to paragraphs 6, in the sixteenth century the price of spices declined because A. France and Germany established monopolies and dictated prices
B. Venetian merchant galleys competed with Venetian round ships for the spice trade
C. More spices were available because both the Venetians and the Portuguese were importing them
D. Increased demand for silk, dyes, cotton and gold meant that people had less money to spend on spices.
Paragraph 7:
13. Look at the four squares [█] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage.
The increase in reward still did not attract young people to this hard life, and convicted criminals and slaves were pressed into services.
Where would the sentence best fit? Click on a square to add the sentence to the passage.
14. Directions: An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some sentences do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points.
The loss of power and prestige of Italian cities by the sixteenth century is clearly seen in the decline of Venetian shipping. ● ● ●
Answer choices
A. Venetian ships were famous for carrying large cargoes of spices and luxury goods around the world in fast, oar-driven galleys.
B. A shortage of timber for building the traditional galleys and a lack of sailors to row them meant a loss of Venetian shipping business.
C. The Venetian Council made sure that Venetian-built and –owned ships kept special privileges in transporting luxury goods in and out of Venice.
D. Venetian round ships bringing spices and silk from the East helped drive prices down so that ordinary people could afford to buy them
E. Venice failed to keep up with improvement in ship design, and the cost of shipbuilding rose a quality and efficiency declined.
F. The Portuguese direct sea route to the East adversely affected Venetian trade, and Venice fell
behind the Dutch and the British in the quality of their ships and sailing skills.
The Evolutionary Origin of Plants
The evolutionary history of plants has been marked by a series of adaptations. The ancestors of plants were photosynthetic single-celled organisms that gave rise to plants presumably lacked true roots, stems, leaves, and complex reproductive structures such as flowers. All of these features appeared later in the evolutionary history of plants. Of today’s different groups of algae, green algae are probably the most similar to ancestral plants. This supposition stems from the close phylogenetic (natural evolutionary) relationship between the two groups. DNA comparisons have shown that green algae are plants’ closest living relatives. In addition, other lines of evidence support the hypothesis that land plants evolved from ancestral green algae used the same type of chlorophyll and accessory pigments in photosynthesis as do land plants. This would not be true of red and brown algae. Green algae store food as starch, as do land plants and have cell walls made of cellulose, similar in composition to those of land plants. Again, the good storage and cell wall molecules of red and brown algae are different.
植物的进化历史是有一系列的适应过程组成。植物的祖先是能够光合作用的单细胞有机体，大约并没有真正的根茎叶和复杂的生殖器官，例如花。这些特征都是在后来的进化过程中慢慢出现的。和今天的大多种类的藻类不同，绿藻可能是最像植物祖先的物种了。这个假说根植于两种物种的亲缘系统发育（自然进化论）。通过对比DNA可以发现，绿藻是现在没有灭绝的物种中与植物血缘最近的。此外，还有一系列的证据可以支持陆生植物进化于原始绿藻，因为两种物种有相同的叶绿素和辅助色素用于光合作用。这个特征在红藻和褐藻中并没有。绿藻储存淀粉当作食物而且有纤维素作为细胞壁，和陆生植物一样。同样的，这些结构在红藻和褐藻中并不相同。
Today green algae live mainly in freshwater, suggesting that their early evolutionary history may have occurred in freshwater habitats. If so, the green algae would have been subjected to environmental pressures that resulted in adaptations that enhanced their potential to give rise to land-dwelling or organisms.
█The environmental conditions of freshwater habitats, unlike those of ocean habitats, are highly variable. █Water temperature can fluctuate seasonally or even daily and changing level of rainfall can lead to fluctuations in the concentration of chemical in the water or even to period in which the aquatic habitat dries up. █Ancient fresh water green algae must have evolved features that enable them to withstand extremes of temperature and periods of dryness. █These adaptations served their descendant well as they invaded land.
淡水生境的环境和海洋生境不同，水温会随着季节乃至每天的降雨情况而有所浮动，这个导致水中的化学物质浓度，甚至，有些时期，水生环境会因为干涸而完全消失。古生的淡水绿藻必须进化以使自己能够抵抗突变的温度和度过干涸期。这些适应力使它们的后代在进化成陆生生物时能更好生活。
The terrestrial world is green now, but it did not start out that way. When plants first made the transition ash ore more than 400 million years ago, the land was barren and desolate, inhospitable to life. From a plant’s evolutionary view point, however, it was also a land of opportunity, free of competitors and predators and full of carbon dioxide and sunlight (the raw materials for photosynthesis, which are present in far higher concentrations in air than in water).So once natural selection had shaped the adaptations that helped plants overcome the
obstacles to terrestrial living, plants prospered and diversified.
现在的陆地充满绿色植物，但在植物刚开始向陆地进发的时候，并非如此。当400百万年前，植物的生境向岸上过度的时候，大地是荒凉贫瘠的，不适宜生存。然而从植物的进化角度看，那时的大地也充满生存机会，因为没有竞争和捕食者，充满了二氧化碳和阳光（光合作用的原料，空气中比水中密度大得多），因此，一旦通过自然选择形成了这些适应特征时，植物就克服了对它们向陆生植物进化的障碍，因而植物物种越发多样和生机勃勃。
When plants pioneered the land, they faced a range of challenges posed by terrestrial environments. On land, the supportive buoyancy of water is missing, the plant is no longer bathed in a nutrient solution, and air tends to dry things out. These conditions favored the evolution of the structures that support the body, vessels that transport water and nutrients to all parts of plant, and structures that conserve water. The resulting adaptations to dry land include some structural features that arose early in plant evolution; now these features are common to virtually all land plant. They include roots or root like structures, a waxy cuticle that covers the surfaces of leaves and stems and limits the evaporation of water, and pores called stomata in leaves and stems that allow gas exchange but close when water is scarce, thus reducing water loss. Other adaptations occurred later in the transition to terrestrial life and now wide spread but not universal among plants. These include conducting vessels that transport water and minerals upward from the roots and that move the photosynthetic products from the leaves to the rest of the plant body and the stiffening substance lignin, which support the plant body, helping it expose maximum surface area to sunlight.
当植物先驱到陆地上，它们要面对一系列陆生环境带来的巨大挑战。在陆地上，水中的浮力消失，植物不能好像漂浮在营养液里，空气会风干水分。这些条件有助于促进进化生成一定的结构去支持它们的主体，运输营养和储存水分的结构。这些对干旱陆地的适应结果包括了出现一些早期植物进化中的结构特征。现在这些特征现在体现在所有陆生植物身上。包括根，根和其他根状结构，以及覆盖叶片和茎表面的角质层，这些角质层可以组织部分水分增发，而叶片和茎上用于气体交换的气孔会因为缺水而关闭，以减少水分流失。其他一些适应特征在植物后来向陆生过渡过程中出现，但并非广布于现在所有的陆生生物中。包括，从根部向上运输水和矿物质，由叶片向植物体其他部分运输光合作用产物，以及木质化以支持植物体本身的重量和尽可能最大表面积以接受阳光。
These adaptations allowed an increasing diversity of plant forms to exploit dry land. Life on land, however, also required new methods of transporting sperm to eggs. Unlike aquatic and marine forms, land plants cannot always rely on water currents to carry their sex cells and disperse their fertilized eggs. So the most successful groups of land plants are those that evolved methods of fertilized sex cell dispersal that are independent of water and structures that protest developing embryos from drying out. Protected embryos and waterless dispersal of sex cells were achieved with the origin of seed plans and the key evolutionary innovations that they introduced: pollen, seeds, and later, flowers and fruits.
这些特征增加植物的多样性，以便他们能利用干旱的陆地。然后，陆生植物必须要有新的方法来受精。和水生和海洋植物不同，陆生植物不能依靠水流携带它们的生殖细胞以传播受精卵。因此，绝大多数成功的物种进化形成了新的方法来完成生殖细胞的受精和传播，这些结构不依赖水而且可以进化胚胎，减少死亡率。进化到到种子植物时，保护胚胎和不依赖水的生殖细胞传播方式才完成，它们还带来新的进化产物：花粉，种子然后是，花和果。 Paragraph 1:
1.The word “presumably” in the passage is closest in meaning to A. originally B. supposedly C. obviously D. usually
2. According to paragraph 1, all of the following are true of ancestral plants EXCEPT A. They had cellulose-based cell walls. B. They were closely related to green algae C. They were able to store nutrients
D. They had a sophisticated multicellular structure. Paragraph 2:
3.The phrase “subjected to” in the passage is closest in A. restricted by B. distant from C. exposed to D. combined with Paragraph 3:
4.What can be inferred from paragraph 3 about ancient green algae? A. They lived in a generally wet environment that was sometimes day
B. They adapted better to changes in water temperature than did to other changes in the environment.
C. They inhabited areas that were close to the ocean. D. They had lived primarily on land Paragraph 4:
5. The word “desolate” in the passage is closest in meaning to A. dusty B. hardened C. deserted D. dried out
6.Which of the sentences below best expresses the essential information in the highlighted sentence in the passage? Incorrect choices change the meaning in important ways or leave out essential information.
A. Terrestrial plants had the advantages of not having rivals and having easy access to photosynthetic material
B. The abundance of photosynthetic material made life on land easier for pioneering plants C. Once plants had eliminated their competitors and their predators, their evolutionary process proceeded smoothly.
D. Plant evolution eliminated competitors and made the process of photosynthesis more efficient.
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