托福阅读：Los Ant-geles

人类自认为是地球上最聪明的生物，但却不能解决很多动物就能解决的问题，比如交通拥堵。今天的新托福考试阅读练习资料就来说说聪明的蚂蚁是怎样解决交通堵塞的。

If you’ve ever driven in LA, you know that people don’t cooperate terribly well. Traffic jams, folks cutting folks off, people shouting at you out their windows . . . it’s a real headache. We’d all do a lot better–at least, we’d all move through congestion a lot faster–if we were ants.

Why ants, you ask? That’s what Ian Couzin of Princeton University wanted to know. You may have seen films of huge numbers of South American Army Ants zooming across the grass on raids and coming back with all sorts of goodies to eat. So why don’t they crash into each other and suffer ant-gridlock the way humans do? One answer: Couzin found is that army ants follow a simple procedure: everybody coming home has the right-of-way.

Even a simple rule like that: if you going out, same-phrase side; if you coming home, don’t same-phrase side; works terrifically. It results in a stream of home-going ants passing unobstructed through the center of a crowd of out-going ants. Among other things, this means raiding parties can go any direction from the anthill, because nobody has to remember some complicated rule about turning left or turning right. Also, the guys bringing home the goodies will always be protected on both sides by out-going ants. Simple!

So, would this work in LA? Probably not. Thousands of human beings just can’t be made to follow a behavioral rule like that. Somebody would try to get a little bit ahead, then somebody else would see that and get angry, and pretty soon, you’re back to LA traffic. For better or worse, people just don’t think like ants.

以上就是这篇托福阅读材料，同学们可以积累其中的词汇及优美句式，找到托福阅读段的主题句，了解托福阅读的几个出题点。托福阅读训练是个长期的过程。大家如果每天做几篇阅读，坚持下来，一定会有不小的进步。预祝大家能有一个好的阅读成绩。