12月16日托福阅读机经预测及解析.docxVIP

Word文档下载后（可任意编辑） 第 第 PAGE 1 页 共 NUMPAGES 1 页 12月16日托福阅读机经预测及解析 托福考试：12月16日托福阅读机经预测及解析 托福考试精品课程辅导  Title：The Cambrian Explosion  The earliest fossil evidence for eukaryotes complex organisms whose cells contain a distinct nucleus dates to only about 1.2 billion years ago. The fossil record suggests that animal evolution progressed slowly, with relatively little change seen between fossils from 1.2 billion years ago and those from a half-billion years later. But then something quite dramatic happened as can be judged by the many different animal groups that suddenly appear in the fossil record.  Biologists classify animals according to their basic body plans. For example, the basic body plan shared by mammals and reptiles is fundamentally different from that of insects.Animals are grouped by body plan into what biologists call phyla. Mammals and reptiles both belong to the single phylum Chordata, which includes animals with internal skeletons. Insects, crabs, and spiders belong to the phylum Arthropoda, which contains animals with body features such as jointed legs, an external skeleton, and segmented bodies. Classifying animals into phyla is an ongoing project for biologists, but modern animals appear to comprise about 30 different phyla, each representing a different body plan.  Remarkably, nearly all of these different body plans, plus a few others that have gone extinct, make their first known appearance in the geological record during a period spanning only about 40 million years less than about 1 percent of Earths history. This remarkable flowering of animal diversity appears to have begun about 545 million years ago, which corresponds to the start of the Cambrian period. Hence it is called the Cambrian explosion.  The fact that the Cambrian explosion marks the only major diversification of body plans in the geological record presents us with two important and related questions: Why, so long after the origin of eukaryotes, did