2011英语六级模拟试卷及解析之四(1)

会计考友

Part I Writing (30 minutes)
- X9 h# R* v/ T7 I# c　　Directions: In this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled An Eye-witness Account of a Traffic Accident. You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below。
　　1.车祸发生的时间及地点；
　　2.你所见到的车祸情况；
; f6 q6 o) S4 ~: J6 u5 K$ G4 _　　3.你对车祸原因的分析。
Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
　　A Brief History of Clock
　　Clocks
0 T/ |4 m# g! r, K8 ]　　At best, historians know that 5,000-6,000 years ago, great civilizations in the Middle East and North Africa started to examine forms of clock-making instead of working with only the monthly and annual calendar. Little is known on exactly how these forms worked or indeed the actual deconstruction of the time, but it has been suggested that the intention was to maximize time available to achieve more as the size of the population grew. Perhaps such future periods of time were intended to benefit the community by allotting specific lengths of time to tasks. Was this the beginning of the working week?
　　Sun Clocks
9 K  Y- }  G3 @8 b! V　　With the disappearance of any ancient civilization, such as the Sumerian culture, knowledge is also lost. Whilst we can only hypothesize on the reasons of why the equivalent to the modern wristwatch was never completed, we know that the ancient Egyptians were next to layout a system of dividing the day into parts, similar to hours。
　　"Obelisks" (tall four-sided tapered monuments) were carefully constructed and even purposefully geographically located around 3500 BC. A shadow was east as the Sun moved across the sky by the obelisk, which it appears was then marked out in sections, allowing people to clearly see the two halves of the day. Some of the sections have also been found to indicate the "year"s longest and shortest days, which it is thought were developments added later to allow identification of other important time subdivisions。
6 _1 ]8 H4 Y( w3 H　　Another ancient Egyptian "shadow clock" or "sundial" has been discovered to have been in use around 1500 BC, which allowed the measuring of the passage of "hours". The sections were divided into ten parts, With two "twilight hours" indicated, occurring in the morning and the evening. For it to work successfully then at midday or noon, the device had to be turned 180 degrees to measure the afternoon hours。
* `# l7 Q7 S$ i　　Water Clocks
* j) _' X8 z* y　　"Water clocks" were among the earliest time keeping devices that didn't use the observation of the celestial bodies to calculate the passage of time. The ancient Greeks, it is believed, began using water clocks around 325 BC. Most of these clocks were used to determine the hours of the night, but may have also been used during daylight. An inherent problem with the water clock was that they were not totally accurate, as the system of measurement was based on the flow of water either into, or out of, a container which had markers around the sides. Another very similar form was that of a bowl that sank during a period as it was filled of water from a regulated flow. It is known that water clocks were common across the Middle East, and that these were still being used in North Africa during the early part of the twentieth-century。