托福考试考前必看阅读模拟题4.docxVIP

Word文档下载后（可任意编辑） 第 第 PAGE 1 页 共 NUMPAGES 1 页 托福考试考前必看阅读模拟题4 阅读试题对于大家来说并不是难点，但是想要在考试中获得高分也不是件容易的事，需要我们在平时勤加练习，今天就为大家整理了这篇阅读试题，在托福考试还有很多相关的试题和考试时间计时，现在我们就来看一下这篇考试试题吧！ The work of the railroad pioneers in America became the basis for a great surge of railroad building halfway through the nineteenth century that linked the nation together as never before. Railroads eventually became the nation’s number one transportation system, and remained so until the construction of the interstate highway system halfway through the twentieth century. They were of crucial importance in stimulating economic expansion, but their influence reached beyond the economy and was pervasive in American society at large.  By 1804, English as well as American inventors had experimented with steam engines for moving land vehicles. In 1920, John Stevens ran a locomotive and cars around in a circular track on his New Jersey estate, which the public saw as an amusing toy. And in 1825, after opening a short length of track, the Stockton to Darlington Railroad in England became the first line to carry general traffic. American businesspeople, especially those in the Atlantic coastal region who looked for better communication with the West, quickly became interested in the English experiment. The first company in America to begin actual operations was the Baltimore and Ohio, which opened a thirteen- mile length of track in 1830. It used a team of horses to pull a train of passenger carriages and freight wagons along the track. Steam locomotive power didn’t come into regular service until two years later.  However, for the first decade or more, there was not yet a true railroad system. Even the longest of the lines was relatively short in the 1830’s, and most of them served simply to connect water routes to each other, not to link one railroad to another. Even when two lines did connect, the tracks often differed in width, so cars from one line couldn’t fit onto tracks of the next