The planet is so close to its star that any water would be turned to _____ （蒸汽).

Until the very latest moment of his existence, man has been

Bound to the planet on which he originated and developed.

Now he had the capability to leave that planet and move 【S1】______

out into the universe to those worlds which he has known

previously only directly. Men have exploited parts of the moon, 【S2】______

put spaceships in orbit around another planet and possibly within

the decade will land into another planet and explore it. Can we be 【S3】______

too bold as to suggest that we may be able to colonize other 【S4】______

planet within the no-too-distant future？ Some have advocated 【S5】______

such a procedure as a solution to the population problem: ship the

excess people off to the moon. But we must keep in head the 【S6】______

billions of dollars we might spend in carrying out the project. To

maintain the earth't population at its present level, we could have

to blast off into space 7,500 people every hour of every day of the

year.

Why are we spending so little money on space 【S7】______

exploration？ Consider the great need for improving many aspects 【S8】______

of the global environment, one is surely justified in his

concern for the money and resources that they are poured into 【S9】______

the space exploration efforts. But perhaps we should look at

both side of the coin before arriving hasty conclusions. 【S10】______

【S1】

ndreds of years and is the most deadly enemy we have ever had to face. This is the enemy you people have known since the day you were brought into this world. You are face to face with this enemy every day, unknowing that every step you take, every move you make, and every decision you face is contributing somehow to this army's strength.

In case you haven't noticed yet, ladies and gentlemen, this enemy is ourselves. Slowly and surely we are destroying animals, ourselves and most importantly the only planet we have, Earth. You have probably all heard this speech a thousand times before, and well if this has to be the 1001 before we get off our lazy, self-destructing asses and do something to fix it, so be it!

I admit I'm no better than the rest of you at the simple things in everyday life that are destroying this planet, but the whole issue pisses me off. Our whole existence revolves around money, and our personal benefit. We have forgotten how to do things for others, how to help the planet and, in turn, how to benefit the species.

The fact is simple, people, we're killing ourselves. Many, however, don't notice it. They believe what they're doing is either beneficial, or that they are too small to do anything about it. Well, most of them are right, most of us fall under some sort of higher power, which means that the root of the problems are mainly the governments. Don't think that this is leading into one of those conspiracy-theory-type lectures, however if you'd like to call it that, I won't be one to judge. I do believe the governments know how to prevent and stop much of the problems in our world today. For example, it's a widely known fact that we have the technology to use water instead of gas for cars, but the government won't allow production because they get money off gas, and to them it's more important than a clean environment, more important than contaminating the water, or killing off animals because of the pollution even when the money they get from the gas ends up being put back into trying to control these problems anyway. And who was the guy who thought that burning fossil fuels would be a good source of energy anyway？ Did they take the first suggestion that came up or what？ Fossil fuels are not everlasting guys, HELLO! Is our species so narrow-minded that we can't see into the future and realize that one day it will run out. Or did we know that in the beginning and not care because it was the only resource we could use？ Did we then become so lazy that we couldn't spend the time and money to figure out some other sort of fuel or energy source？! This is nuts!

So go ahead try and hide. Protect yourselves with your fancy guns and munitions, run away with your trains, planes, and automobiles or go about as if nothing's happening. None of those will help you much because the only way we can shelter ourselves from what's to come is if we stop it from ever happening. Now are you all able to get off your couches, stop watching your TV and do something about it？ Didn't think so but it was worth a try anyway.

From Para.1 we can infer that ______.

A．certain general is delivering a speech to his soldiers

B．the army is going to fight against the most deadly enemies

C．more and more people are needed to join the army

D．the author is trying to arouse people's awareness about the upcoming threat

Questions are based on the following passage．

Gravity is one of those things we take completely for granted. And there are twothings about it that we take for granted: the fact that it is always there， and the fact thatit never changes. If the Earth"s gravity were ever to change significantly， it would have ahuge effect on nearly everything because so many things are designed around the currentstate of gravity.

Gravity is an attractive force between any two atoms. Let"s say you take two golfballs and place them on a table. There will be an incredibly slight gravitational attractionbetween the atoms in those two golf balls. If you use two massive pieces of lead andsome amazingly precise instruments， you can actually measure an infinitesimal attractionbetween them. It is only when you get a gigantic number of atoms together， that the forceof gravitational attraction is significant.

The reason why gravity on Earth never changes is because the mass of the Earthnever changes. A change in mass great enough to result in a change in gravity isn"t goingto happen anytime soon.

But let"s ignore the physics and imagine that， suddenly there was no force of gravityon planet Earth. This would turn out to be a pretty bad day. We depend on gravity to .holdso many things down——cars， people， furniture， pencils and papers on your desk， and soon. Everything would start to float. What"s more， two of the more important things heldon the ground by gravity are the atmosphere and the water in the oceans， lakes and rivers.

Without gravity， the air in the atmosphere would immediately leap into space. This is theproblem the moon has——the moon doesn"t have enough gravity to keep an atmospherearound it， so it"s in a near vacuum. Without an atmosphere， any living thing would dieimmediately and anything liquid would boil away into space.

In other words， no one would last long if the planet didn"t have gravity.

If gravity were to suddenly double， it would be almost as bad， because everythingwould be twice as heavy. There would be big problems with anything structural. Houses，bridges， skyscrapers， table legs and so on are all sized for normal gravity. Most structureswould collapse fairly quickly if you doubled the load on them.

What this answer shows you is just how integral gravity is to our world. We can"tlive without it. It is one of the true constants in our lives.

What do we tend to think of gravity？ 查看材料

A.It will never change significantly.

B.It will change some time in the future.

C.It has nothing to do with our daily life.

D.It is always there on Earth.

听力原文： A team of scientists recently began a project to measure the effects of loud noises on sea animals. If the sounds don't harm the animals, then the researchers can go ahead with a plan to transmit sound waves through the Pacific Ocean to take the earth's temperature. Sound travels faster through warm water than cold water. By analyzing the speed of sound through the ocean over time, the scientists will be able to determine if cur planet is warming up. The experiment was nearly cancelled more than a year ago because environmental groups fear that the sound will confuse or harm sea-animals. So scientists are conducting tests on the animals first. The researchers lowered a loud speaker that emits low frequency sound about 1,000 meters beneath the ocean. Scientists at the site transmit sound waves into the ocean. Radio transmitters attached to some of the sea animals help the researchers keep track of the animals' movements. If sea-animals are distressed by the sounds, they would swim away from the speakers. So far, there aren't any signs that the animals are being harmed. Researchers at the site noticed that large numbers of sea-animals swim near the speaker whether it was turned on or off, but it is still too soon to know for sure, the scientists admit. The test will continue through September. "If all goes well," they say, "we can begin measuring temperature changes on our planet."

(33)

A．To determine whether the Earth's temperature is going up.

B．To study the behavior. of some sea animals.

C．To measure the depths of the ocean.

D．To measure the movement of the ocean.

art of it, they may cheer themselves by remembering that life need not resemble closely the life that exists on Earth. Mars looks like the only planet where life like ours could exist, and even this is doubtful. But there may be other kinds of life based on other kinds of chemistry, and they may multiply on Venus or Jupiter. At least we cannot prove at present that they do not.

Even more interesting is the possibility that life on their planets may be in a more advanced stage of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man's societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power and effectiveness

than the individuals have.

It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand year's from now man's societies may have become so close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organism and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and nerve cells that set them in motion.

The explorers of space should be prepared for some' such situation. If they arrive on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism composed of many closely cooperating units.

The units may be "secondary"-machines created millions of years ago by a previous form. of life and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built entirely of metals and other durable materials. If this is the case, they may be much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the familiar car bon cycle.

Such creatures might be relics of a past age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet.

Humans on Earth today are characterized by______.

A．their existence as free and separate beings

B．their capability of living under favorable conditions

C．their great power and effectiveness

D．their strong desire for living in a close-knit society

If pollution continues to increase at the present rate, formation of aerosols (悬浮微粒) in the atmosphere will cause the onset (开始) of an ice age in about fifty years' time. This conclusion, reached by Dr. S. Rasool and Dr. H. Schneider of the United States Goddard Space Flight Centre, answers the apparently conflicting questions of whether an increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will cause the Earth to warm up or increasing the aerosol content will cause it to cool down. The Americans have shown conclusively that the aerosol question is dominant.

Two specters haunting conservationists have been the prospect that environmental pollution might lead to the planet's becoming unbearably hot or cold. One of these ghosts has now been laid, because it seems that even an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to eight times its present value will produce an increase in temperature of only 2℃. which would take place over several thousand years. But the other problem now looms larger than ever.

Aerosols are collections of small liquid or solid particles dispersed in air or some other medium. The particles are all so tiny that each is composed of only a few hundred atoms. Because of this they can float in the air for a very long time. Perhaps the most commonly experienced aerosol is industrial smog of the kind that plagued London in the 1950s and is an even greater problem in Los Angeles today. These collections of aerosols reflect the Sun's heat and thereby cause the Earth to cool.

Dr. Rasool and Dr. Schneider have calculated the exact effect of a dust aerosol layer just above the Earth's surface in the temperature of the planet. As the layer builds up, the present delicate balance between the amount of heat absorbed from the Sun and the amount radiated from the Earth is disturbed. The aerosol layer not only reflects much of the Sun's light but also transmits the infrared radiation from below. So, while the heat input to the surface drops, the loss of heat remains high until the planet cools to a new balanced state.

Within fifty years, if no steps are taken to stop the spread of aerosols in the atmosphere, a cooling of the Earth by as much as 3.5℃ seems inevitable. If that lasts for only a few years it would start another ice age, and because the growing ice caps at each pole would themselves reflect much of the Sun's radiation it would probably continue to develop even if the aerosol layer were destroyed.

The only bright spot in this gloomy forecast lies in the hope expressed by Dr. Rasool and Dr. Schneider that nuclear power may replace fossil fuels in time to prevent the aerosol content of the atmosphere from becoming critical.

The author's main purpose in writing the article is to warn of ______.

A．warm weather

B．hot weather

C．a new ice age

D．a new iceberg

an help save the environment. Good evening, Carol.

W: Good evening, I'm glad to be here.

M: So, Carol, how can we save the environment？

W: By saving water.

M: Well, how can we do that？

W: By not using too much water when we wash dishes, take a bath, and when we do other things, like watering the plants outside.

M: Oh, I think I can do that. What else？

W: We should try to make our environment tidy.

M: What can we do？

W: When drinking or eating something outside, you should keep the garbage until you find a trashcan to put it in because littering makes our planet dirty. Do you like seeing trash all over the ground？

M: No, I don't. Do you have any final suggestions？

W: Yes. We shouldn't waste paper because trees are being cut down to make the paper. By recycling paper, we save the forests where animals live.

M: So, how can children recycle paper, I mean, everyday？

W: Well, for example, when I was in kindergarten, I used to save the newspapers so that I could make things out of them, like paper trees, instead of just throwing them away.

M: Good idea! What do you do now？

W: Now, the children in our neighbourhood collect newspapers once a month to take them to a recycling centre.

M: That's great. Well, thanks Carol for your ideas.

W: You're welcome.

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A．The girl's father

B．The girl's teacher.

C．The girl's friend.

D．An interviewer.

Passage 2

When you think about the growth of human population over the last century or so, it is all too easy to imagine it merely as an increase in the number of humans. But as we _1_, so do all the things associated with us, including our livestock. At present, there are about 1.5 billion _2_ and domestic buffalo and about 1.7 billion sheep and goats. With pigs and poultry, they form. a _3_ part of our enormous biological footprint upon this planet. Just how enormous was not really _4_ until the publication of a new report, called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Consider these numbers. Global livestock grazing and feed production use “30 percent of the land surface of the planet.” Livestock—which consume more food than they _5_—also compete directly with humans for water. And the drive to expand grazing land destroys more biologically sensitive land, rain forests _6_, than anything else. But what is even more striking, and _7_, is that livestock are responsible for about 18 percent of the global warming effect, more than transportation’s _8_. Greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrogen，are resulted from their digestion. Grazing land, which destroys forests, adds to the effect. There are no easy trade-offs when it comes to global warming—such as cutting back on livestock to make room for care. The human _9_ for meat is certainly not about to end anytime soon. As “Livestock’s Long Shadow” makes clear, our health and the health of the planet depend on pushing livestock production in more _10_ directions.

A)yield

B)contribution

C)stain

D)ideally

E)apparent

F)multiply

G)cattle

H)passion

I)scrape

J)critical

K)liable

L)sustainable

M)deposit

N)alarming

O)especially

第1空答案是：

er the questions on Answer Sheet 1.

For questions 1-4, mark

Y (for YES) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;

N (for NO) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage;

NG (for NOT GIVEN) if the information is not given in the passage.

For questions 5-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.

Earth's Beginnings: The Origins of Life

Earth is the only planet we know of that can support life. This is an amazing fact considering that it is made out of the same matter as other planets in our solar system, was formed at the same time and through the same processes as every other planet, and gets its energy from the sun.

To a universal traveler, Earth may seem to be a harmless little planet in the far reaches of one of billions of spiral galaxies in the universe. It has an average size star of average brightness and is joined by eight other planets—which support no known life forms—in its solar system.

However, Earth is a planet teeming with vitality and is home to billions of plants and animals that share a common evolutionary track. How and why did we get here？ What processes had to take place for this to happen？ And where do we go from here？ The fact is, no one has been able to come close to knowing exactly what led to the origins of life, and we may never know. After 4.5 billion years of Earth's formation and evolution, the evidence may have been lost. But scientists have made significant progress in understanding what chemical processes that may have led to the origins of life.

There are many theories, but most have the same general perspective of how things came to be the way they are. Following is an account of life's beginnings based on some of the leading research and theories related to the subject, and of course, fossil records dating back as far as 3.5 billion years ago.

Earth's Beginnings

Earth began to form. over 4.5 billion years ago from the same cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen and helium) and interstellar dust that formed our sun, the rest of the solar system and even our galaxy. In fact, Earth is still forming and cooling from the galactic implosion that created the other stars and planetary systems in our galaxy, a process which began about 16 billion years ago as the Milky Way began to form.

As our solar system began to come together some 6—7 billion years ago, the sun formed within a cloud of dust and gas that continued to shrink upon itself by its own gravitational forces. This caused it to undergo the fusion process and give off light, heat and other radiation. During this process, the remaining clouds of gas and dust that surrounded the sun began to form. into smaller lumps called planetesimals, which eventually formed into the planets we know today.

The Earth went through a period of catastrophic and intense formation during its earliest beginnings about 4.5—4.6 billion years ago. By 3.8 to 4.1 billion years ago, Earth had become a planet with an atmosphere (not like our atmosphere today!) and an ocean. This period of time of Earth's formation is referred to as the pre-Cambrian Period. The pre-Cambrian is divided into three parts: the Hadean, Archean and Proterozoic Periods.

Pre-Cambrian Period

The Earth formed under so much heat and pressure that it formed as a molten planet. For nearly the first billion years of its formation—called the Hadean Period (or "hellish" period)—Earth was bombarded continuously by the remnants of the dust and debris—like asteroids, meteors and comets—until it formed into a solid sphere, fell into an orb

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

f the timing is left to nature (or, if you prefer, to God) and humans hang on until the bloody end, the race's final exit will be ignoble (不光彩的). If future generations escape the saurian (蜥蜴类) agony of extinction by a wandering chunk of rock or ice, the sun's unavoidable growth to giant hood will still burn their last successors to ashes: only cinders and gases and dust will remain.

Far future generations might prolong the process by posting colonies beyond the earth's orbit, but these would be sad outposts at the end of the solar system's long day, clutching memories of a lost planet and of billions of sacrificed souls. The difficulties—fantastic difficulties—of interstellar (星性际的) travel might be overcome, but the mightiest of starships could do no more than defer the end of the world. An ignoble existence hopping from planet to planet—clinging to each clod until it, in its turn, was vaporized or frozen—might still be bearable were it not for the knowledge of its final uselessness. In the end, there is only death by gravity or entropy, the fiery quantum (量子) pit or the heatless grey soup.

The great violinist Jascha Heifetz was great not least because he quit the concert stage at his peak, before the show became stale or the audience drifted away. To exit gracefully is sublime (美妙的), as Heifetz understood. And only one species is capable of choosing a similarly graceful exit; all others march on like robots. To call time on the human race by choice, not necessity, would be the final victory of the human spirit over animal nature, an absolute emancipation from the command of DNA. Precisely because no other known life-form. could do or even conceive such a thing, humanity must.

Science has revealed only one place in the universe that is hospitable to intelligent life, and humans are the only intelligence that, as far as is known, has ever enjoyed the opportunity to occupy it. If people left the stage after a reasonable run, in the fullness of time intelligence could evolve again (dolphin-people？ Chimp--people？ orchid(兰花)—people？). And then, in due course, when this new species deciphered (译解) human books or reached the marker that might be left for them on the windless moon, they would know that man ended his dominion so that theirs might begin. Imagine, then, how they will regard us. It is, far and away, the greatest act of goodness ever contemplated, the ennoblement of a whole species; an act, almost, of angels.

According to the passage, what might be human being's best choice for the final exit？

A．Leaving the timing to nature.

B．The saurian-like elimination.

C．Being burned by the sun's heat.

D．An exit driven by man's rationality.