新托福阅读真题详解-Variations in the Climate.docx

智课网TOEFL备考资料新托福阅读真题详解:Variations in the Climate 摘要： 托福阅读提高不是一朝一夕的事情，同学们平时就要注意积累，以下是小编为大家整理的新托福阅读真题详解:Variations in the Climate，希望对大家托福阅读备考有帮助! 小马 机经APP新版福利上线了！绝对堪称 托福 学子备考必备利器，扫描左侧二维码下载DUANG的一下托福机经、录音、解析、答案参考、历年真题全部出来啦！光是独立口语机经就有60套重点题目，心动就赶快下载吧！ One of the most difficult aspects of deciding whether current climatic events reveal evidenceof the impact of human activities is that it is hard to get a measure of what constitutes thenatural variability of the climate. We know that over the past millennia the climate hasundergone major changes without any significant human intervention. We also know that theglobal climate system is immensely complicated and that everything is in some way connected,and so the system is capable of fluctuating in unexpected ways. We need therefore to knowhow much the climate can vary of its own accord in order to interpret with confidence theextent to which recent changes are natural as opposed to being the result of human activities. Instrumental records do not go back far enough to provide us with reliable measurements ofglobal climatic variability on timescales longer than a century. What we do know is that as weinclude longer time intervals, the record shows increasing evidence of slow swings in climatebetween different regimes. To build up a better picture of fluctuations appreciably further backin time requires us to use proxy records. Over long periods of time, substances whose physical and chemical properties change with theambient climate at the time can be deposited in a systematic way to provide a continuousrecord of changes in those properties overtime, sometimes for hundreds or thousands ofyears. Generally, the layering occurs on an annual basis, hence the observed changes in therecords can be dated. Information on temperature, rainfall, and other aspects of the climatethat can be inferred from the systematic changes in properties is usually referred to as proxydata. Proxy temperature records have been reconstruc