托福TPO56听力原文+题目+答案解析：listening L3

发布时间：2020-12-18 14:59

1托福TPO56听力原文：L3

Listen to part of a lecture in an archaeology class.

Professor: We've been talking about techniques for locating and dating archaeological_______. Now,in some places, archaeological investigations are difficult, and we have to use some special techniques. In the country of Iceland, for example.Now, um, Iceland is a _______ island located in the North-Atlantic Ocean, and about ten percent of it is covered by glaciers.

Student: So is it too cold to work there? Or maybe everything is under the ice?

Professor: Uh, no, that's not the problem. It's that Iceland has virtually no trees to hold down soil.And so there's been a lot erosion, especially erosion of soil from the highlands to lower coastal areas.And this erosion has buried much of Iceland under deep_______ of soil. And remember what I said about few trees? Well, with so little wood available, the earliest _______ in Iceland were built mainly from compressed peat.

Student: Did you say peat?

Professor: Yes, peat. That's a light kind of airy soil that comes from _______ and wetlands and contains a high proportion of decayed _______ matter. Anyway, the peat can be compressed and dried and made into big, thick blocks. And that's what the walls of the early Icelandic houses were made of mostly.Now, since the walls of these old houses were made basically of a kind of soil, they're really hard to locate underground, cause the material these buried structures are made of doesn't differ very much from the soil that surrounds them.

Student: So how do you find these peat walls buried in all that other soil?

Professor: Well, one way is to borrow a modern technique used by geophysics.

Student: Ah, sorry, if you said this already, but what are they looking for in Iceland anyway?

Professor: Ah, yes, good question. Iceland, and stories about it. Um, Icelandic sagas have _______ people for centuries. The sagas seem to be historical _______ of actual north explorers and settlers.But since we're always lacked hard evidence to support the truth of the stories, they seem to be more like legends. There's always been a _______, though, almost like a calling for some of us to verify the truth of these stories. Historians, astronomers, navigators, they've all tried to find proof that people settled where the stories indicate. And we archaeologists have too, by trying to locate dwellings, evidence of animal _______ or farming iron smelting. Any signs of early settlement?

Student: Cool. Are you talking about like the time of the Vikings?

Professor: Yes, that's exactly it. One of these Icelandic sagas tells of some Viking explorers who were probably the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic and live in North America,

Student: North America? But I thought you were talking about Iceland.

Professor: I am. See the story tells of a Viking family from Iceland calledThorfinnson, who settled in north America for a few years, but then moved back to Iceland, which is not that far away. So there is a great interest in investigating Viking era sites in Iceland, especially in the place where the saga says this family finally settled.But back to my point, one team of archaeologists working there decided to use an electromagnetic remote sensing tool to try to locate buried structures. Now, this remote sensing tool, which as I mentioned before, is usually used by geophysics. Um…. this tool can distinguish between different materials that look the same to the eye, but have different _______.Here's how it works. Regular soil conducts electricity well, but walls made of peat do not conduct electricity well. So the tool sends down _______ currents of electricity, and then measures how well the electric current travels through the ground in different places. Then you look at all of your data,look for patterns of electrical resistance, and this reveals where walls are located. So anyway, the team wanted to investigate a site in Iceland that looks like the place where the old saga says that the Thorfinnson built their home. And so they use this technique and found the remains of a large farmhouse there that they think probably did belong to that Thorfinnson family.Because when they dated the building, it _______ exactly to win that the Thorfinnson family should have been there according to the sagas. Now the team is working to find other evidence, especially personal artifacts, to show that it really was that family who lived there. Everyone had always thought that Thorfinnson house might be in that area, though, probably right underneath a nearby museum, where it might have been damaged during museum construction. But in fact, this Viking era structure was located in a field behind the museum, buried just below the surface. Thank goodness for the remote sensing tool, or this house might never have been found.