2002年六级英语考试最新模拟试题(八)
Passage 1
The slightest whiff of baking bread starts taste buds blossoming. Its siren scent has even driven men to acts of madness. Like a country's flag, bread signals nationality at the world's tables. America's corn bread; Ireland's soda bread; England's traditional cottage loaf and bread appears in as many shapes and sizes as there are nationalities. The French have created long, thin loaves with special flavour-lightly salted, slightly sour, finely textured. In all its marvellous variety, bread is such an essential part of life that it has also entered the language"bread winner", "break bread","bread(for money)", "know which side his bread is buttered","take the bread out of his mouth"are but a few examples.
Bread had its origins in a coarse, flat cake that may have been first baked by Swiss lake dwellers of the Stone Age, who more than 8,000 years ago discovered how to pound grain, mix it with water and bake it on heated stones. Historians trace leavened bread to between 2000 and 3000 BC in Egypt, where wild yeast probably invaded a baker's dough, producing the world's first light bread. The Egyptians subsequently invented the oven and turned breadmaking into an art, creating more than 50 varieties. The Romans further refined bread-making, inventing the domed and thick-walled peel oven. They also developed water-driven mills and the first mechanical dough-mixer, powered by horses and donkeys. Perhaps the most inspired innovation involving bread occurred in London in the eighteenth century, when a dissolute nobleman, John Montagu, asked that meat be served between sheets of bread so that he could eat while remaining at the gaming tables. That crude sandwich changed the eating habits of the world.
Whatever its shape or texture, a golden-crust loaf coming from the oven breathing and swelling goodnes
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