下面是北纬托福给考生整理的英文关于游戏素材，考生熟悉一下，希望可以帮助到考生。

 玩游戏是很多人度过闲暇时光的方式之一，也是与亲朋好友联络感情的重要活动。以下新托福考试阅读练习资料要说的就是游戏的古代历史。

　　Many of us have plenty of leisure time to devote to trying out the latest Wii game or even watching others play poker on TV. But this focus on play is nothing new, says a researcher at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.

　　For her doctoral thesis, Elke Rogersdotter studied a 4,000-year-old city called Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan. ["Gaming in Mohenjo-daro—an Archaeology of Unities"] It was the largest Bronze Age urban settlement in the region, thriving at the same time as the ancient Egyptian Middle Kingdom.

　　Play is not generally studied for its significance to ancient peoples. Rogersdotter says that archaeologists do often find game-related relics at dig sites, but they’re usually discounted as unimportant or considered a ritual object. But at this site, almost every tenth find was related to leisure—dice or gaming pieces.

　　And they’re not uniformly scattered. The artifacts are clustered together in what might have been ancient, say, gaming halls or courtyards. Rogersdotter says that these games may have had real social significance and might be used to give us a better view of the lives of these Bronze Age individuals. Who very well might have hoped to roll double-sixes four millennia ago.

　美国是一个让很多人向往的梦想实现之地，而说到“美国梦”是什么，每个人也会有不同的解答。在下面的新托福考试阅读练习资料中，我们可以看到现代版本的美国梦包括哪些内容。

　　For most Americans giving their children a better life or having a successful business or career is their version of the American Dream, according to a new poll released on Monday.

　　Their children's welfare was the top priority for 53 percent of Americans questioned about the American Dream in a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair survey.

　　It surpassed job prospects, getting rich overnight, owning a home, doing better than your parents, and becoming famous, which despite reality television was chosen by only three percent.

　　The telephone poll of nearly 11,000 people also showed that one in four Americans believe actor Charlie Sheen is the most likely person to fill Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's slippers when he is gone.

　　Thirty percent of people, when asked what they thought teenage Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber will be doing at age 30, said he will likely be in celebrity rehab, while 18 percent said that he'd be married and living quietly somewhere.

　　Only 20 percent of people said they thought he'd still be playing in front of packed stadiums.

　　Americans were evenly split on whether it is a good idea to have a prenuptial agreement before getting married. Not surprisingly 60 percent of separated or divorced couples said they thought it was a smart move.

　　And despite a steady stream of diet books, 56 percent of Americans said they never try to lose weight and 27 percent said they try to slim down once or twice a year.

　　A whopping 70 percent of Americans said that they would not feel safer if concealed weapons were allowed in classrooms to prevent shootings such as the one that occurred at Virginia Tech in August 2007.

　　(Read by Nelly Min. Nelly Min is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)