2017年9月9日雅思阅读考试回忆及解析

　　Passage 1：

　　题目：Ambergris

　　题型：分类题6 + 填空3 + 判断 4

　　题号：旧题

　　参考文章：

　　Ambergris

　　What is it and where does it come from?

　　Ambergris was used to perfume cosmetics in the days of ancient Mesopotamia and almost every civilization on the earth has a brush with ambergris. Before 1,000 AD, the Chinese names ambergris as lung sien hiang, “dragon`s spittle perfume,” as they think that it was produced from the drooling of dragons sleeping on rocks at the edge of a sea. The Arabs knew ambergris as anbar, believing that it is produced fro springs near seas. It also gets its name from here. For centuries, this substance has also been used as a flavouring for food.

　　During the Middle Ages, Europeans use ambergris as a remedy for headaches, colds, epilepsy, and other ailments. In the 1851 whaling novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville claimed that ambergris was “largely used in perfumery. ” But nobody ever knew where it really came from. Experts were still guessing its origin thousands of years later, until the long ages of guesswork ended in the 1720`s, when Nantucket whalers found gobs of the costly material inside the stomachs of sperm whales. Industrial whaling quickly burgeoned. By 20th century ambergris is mainly recovered from inside the carcasses of sperm whales.