今天前程百利小编为大家分享的是托福听力的背景学习。备考托福听力就要把听力文本吃透分析彻底。这样不仅能积累背景材料，还能把听力的专业词汇积累起来一块背诵，为托福听力打下坚实的基础。下面跟小编一起看一下木乃伊是如何保存下来的?
In 1994 researchers made a mummy. Now scientists have reverse engineered the process to figure out how it's done, with the mummy makers still around to tell them how they did. Cynthia Graber reports
Mummies. They’re the stuff of horror movies and happy archaeologists. Now the American Association of Anatomists have turned their attention to mummies—they’ve devoted the entire latest issue of their journal, The Anatomical Record, to the subject.
Papers in the edition cover topics such as the bog bodies of northern Europe, the intestinal contents of a Korean mummy, a case study for an Egyptian mummy with a prosthetic toe, and a code of ethics for research with ancient human remains.
Most mummy research is done on actual discovered remains, but some investigations try to reconstruct mummification techniques to figure out just how ancient peoples did it. For example, in 1994 researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore attempted to recreate Egyptian mummification, using a donated cadaver. In a paper in the new mummy issue, scientists conducted a variety of scans on that cadaver to see if they could figure out the process without asking the researchers who did the 1994 work.
They determined that the body was male, likely elderly, and probably a modern professional in the “middle or elite social class.” The authors also describe the incisions and the embalming materials that they could ascertain from the scans. They then took the results to the original embalmers, who deemed their findings to be largely correct. These kinds of comparisons provide a method to test the accuracy of our evaluation of mummies. Because many of the secrets of the ancient Egyptian embalmers are, as has been said, lost in the sands of time.
疑难词汇：
Mummy n. 妈妈;木乃伊;干瘪的人
Intestinal adj. 肠的
Prosthetic adj. 假体的;非朊基的
Mummification n. [医] 木乃伊化
Cadaver n. [医] 尸体;死尸
Incision n. 切口;雕刻，切割;切开
Embalming v. 以香料或药材为尸体防腐;使不被遗忘;使充满香气(embalm的ing形式
Ascertain vt. 确定;查明;探知
长难句解析：
1. In a paper in the new mummy issue, scientists conducted a variety of scans on that cadaver to see if they could figure out the process without asking the researchers who did the 1994 work.
难句类型：
If引导的宾语从句
句子主干：
scientists conducted a variety of scans
难句拆分：
see if they could figure out the process without asking the researchers who did the 1994 work，if引导的宾语从句，意思是“是否”
2. They determined that the body was male, likely elderly, and probably a modern professional in the “middle or elite social class.”
难句类型：
That引导的宾语从句
句子主干：
They determined that
难句拆分：
that the body was male, that引导的宾语从句，作determined宾语。
文本结构特点：
本篇文章主要讲的是木乃伊的保存方法。现在，一些科学家把保存好的木乃伊反向而行，研究木乃伊是如何保存下来的。
好了，以上就是前程百利小编为大家整理的备考托福听力背景材料以及专业词汇的学习。大家学会了吗?希望能在备考托福的路上助大家一臂之力。预祝大家取得好成绩。
