随着PTE考生对PTE口语和PTE听力的重视，大家口语和听力的分数得到极大提高，但是PTE阅读渐渐成为考生们新的难题。
墨尔本悉尼文波PTE特别为PTE考生们挑选了适合练习PTE阅读的文章，主题，内容，长度都与PTE阅读题中的文章相似。激活学过的词汇，更新新的词汇，提高阅读速度，全面提升自己的阅读能力。
Residents in northern California, where most of the state’s 500,000 people lived, were contending with devastation and suffering of their own. In early December, the Sierra Nevada experienced a series of cold arctic storms that dumped 10 to 15 feet of snow, and these were soon followed by warm atmospheric rivers storms. The series of warm storms swelled the rivers in the Sierra Nevada range so that they became raging torrents, sweeping away entire communities and mining settlements in the foothills—California’s famous “Gold Country.”
This enormous pulse of water from the rain flowed down the slopes and across the landscape, overwhelming streams and rivers, creating a huge inland sea in California’s enormous Central Valley—a region at least 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Water covered farmlands and towns, drowning people, horses and cattle, and washing away houses, buildings, barns, fences and bridges. The water reached depths up to 30 feet, completely submerging telegraph poles that had just been installed between San Francisco and New York, causing transportation and communications to completely break down over much of the state for a month. William Brewer wrote a series of letters to his brother on the east coast describing the surreal scenes of tragedy that he witnessed during his travels in the region that winter and spring.
Brewer describes a great sheet of brown rippling water extending from the Coast Range to the Sierra Nevada. One-quarter of the state’s estimated 800,000 cattle drowned in the flood, marking the beginning of the end of the cattle-based ranchero society in California. One-third of the state’s property was destroyed, and one home in eight was destroyed completely or carried away by the floodwaters.
devastation: n. 毁灭;破坏
swell: v. 使膨胀
raging: adj. 愤怒的，狂暴的
torrent: n. 奔流；
submerge: vt. 完全掩盖, 遮掩
rippling: adj. 起涟漪的,潺潺流水般声音的
ranchero: n. 牧场工人
