单选题   SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
    PASSAGE ONE
    'There is very little in my life that is more personal and more important to me than comets.' The amateur astronomer David H. Levy told Terence Dickinson in an interview. 'Not just discovering them but watching them, learning about them, writing about them, understanding what they do. It makes observing the sky intensely personal. I feel when I find a new comet that a door has been opened and I have seen a slightly new aspect of nature. There is this object in the solar system that—for a few minutes or a few hours—only I know about. It is like trying to pry a secret out of nature. It is a very special feeling.'
    Ever since he was a child, David Levy has been fascinated by the night sky and the wonders it reveals to devoted watchman. He developed a special feeling for comets before he reached his teens, though it was not until 1984—after nineteen years and more than nine hundred hours of combing the sky in search of them—that he discovered his first one, from a small observatory that he had built in his backyard.
    Since then, he has discovered or co-discovered twenty more, making him one of the world's most important comet hunters. His most celebrated find is periodic comet Shoemaker Levy 9, which he made with the husband-and-wife comet and asteroid hunting team Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker. The comet's dramatic collision with Jupiter in July 1994, which constituted 'the greatest planetary show in recorded history', to quote Malcolm W. Browne of the New York Times, captivated not only professional astronomers, but many amateurs. Although he is 'only' an amateur astronomer, he earns his living by lecturing and writing books and by working with project artists. They're projects devoted to introducing astronomy to elementary school children. He has won tremendous respect from his professional colleagues for his success in tracking comets. 'David Levy is one of those rare individuals blessed with the gift of discovery,' David Hartsel, who serves on the board of directors of the Richland Astronomical Society, in Ohio, has said. 'Even rarer is his ability to let others share in the excitement and wonder of those discoveries through his writing and lectures.'
    PASSAGE TWO
    Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.
    There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today—everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring—means that natural selection has lost 80 percent of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.
    For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years—even the past 100 years—our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: They 'look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension'. No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.
    PASSAGE THREE
    By far the most common difficulty in study is simple failure to get down to regular concentrated work. This difficulty is much greater for those who do not work for a plan and have no regular routine of study. Many students muddle along, doing a bit of this subject or that, as the mood takes them, or letting their set work pile up until the last possible moment.
    Few students work to a set timetable. They say that if they did construct a timetable for themselves they would not keep to it, or would have to alter it constantly, since they can never predict from one day to the next what their activities will be.
    No doubt some temperaments take much more kindly to a regular routine than others. There are many who shy away from the self-regimentation of a weekly timetable, and dislike being tied down to a definite program of work. Many able students claim that they work in cycles. When they become interested in a topic they work on it intensively for three or four days at a time. On other days, they avoid work completely. It has to be confessed that we do not fully understand the complexities of the motivation to work. Most people over 25 years of age have become conditioned to a work routine, and the majority of really productive workers set aside regular hours for the more important aspects of their work. The 'tough-minded' school of workers is usually very contemptuous of the idea that good work can only be done spontaneously, under the influence of inspiration.
    Those who believe that they need only work and study as the fit takes them have a mistaken belief either in their own talent or in the value of 'freedom'. Freedom from restraint and discipline leads to unhappiness rather than to 'self-expression' or 'personality development'. Our society insists on regular habits, time keeping and punctuality, and whether we like it or not, if we mean to make our way in society we have to comply with its demands.
    PASSAGE FOUR
    Even just a degree or two of greenhouse warming will have a dramatic impact on water resources across western North America. Teams who have modeled the climate in the area are warning of greatly reduced snow packs and more intense flooding as temperatures inch up during the 21st century.
    It's the first time that global climate modelers have worked so closely with teams running detailed regional models of snowfall, rain and stream flows to predict exactly what warming will do to the area. The researchers, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and elsewhere, were surprised by the size of the effect generated by only a small rise in temperature.
    Assuming business as usual emissions, greenhouse gases will warm the west coast of North America by just one or two degrees Celsius over the next century, and average precipitation won't change much. But in the model, warmer winters raised the snowline, drastically reducing the crucial mountain snow pack, the researchers told the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. 'We realized that huge areas of the snow pack in the Sierra went down to 15 percent of today's values,' says Michael Dettinger, a research hydrologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. That caught everyone's attention.
    The researchers also predict that by the middle of the century, melting snow will cause streams to reach their annual peak flow up to a month earlier. And with warm rains melting snow or drenching already saturated ground, the risk of extreme floods will rise dramatically. We have to believe in these very warm, very wet storms, says Andrew Wood, a water resources modeler at the University of Washington, Seattle.
    'Since dams can't be filled until the risk of flooding is past, the models predict they will trap just 70 to 85 percent as much run-off as they do now. This is a particular problem for California, where agriculture, industry, a burgeoning population and environmental needs already clash over limited water supplies. We are taking this extremely seriously,' says Jonas Minton, deputy director of the California Department of Water Resources.
    And observations certainly back up the models. Minton points out that an increasing percentage of California's precipitation over recent decades is falling as rain rather than snow. And Iris Stewart, a climate researcher at the University of California, San Diego, has found that in the last 50 years, run-off peaks in the western US and Canada have been happening earlier and earlier. The cause seems to be a region-wide trend towards warmer winters and springs.
    Dettinger has little doubt that the models point to a real and immediate problem. 'It's upon us,' he says, 'and it's not clear what the fix is.'

单选题     The primary purpose of this passage is to ______.(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题     All of the following are suggested in this passage as reasons for Levy's success EXCEPT that ______.(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题     David Hartsel most appreciates Levy's ______.(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题     What does the example of India illustrate?(PASSAGE TWO)

单选题     The author argues that our bodies have stopped evolving because ______.(PASSAGE TWO)

单选题     Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?(PASSAGE TWO)

单选题     The following are reasons to explain why many students do not work to a fixed schedule EXCEPT that ______.(PASSAGE THREE)

单选题     Which of the following statements is true according to Paragraph 3 of the passage?(PASSAGE THREE)

单选题     Researchers predict all of the following EXCEPT that ______.(PASSAGE FOUR)

单选题     What kind of phenomenon caught everyone's attention?(PASSAGE FOUR)

单选题     SECTION B SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS
    In this section there are five short answer questions based on the passages in SECTION A. Answer the questions with NO MORE THAN TEN words in the space provided on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
According to the passage, when did Levy achieve his fame?(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题     What used to be the danger of being a man according to the first paragraph?(PASSAGE TWO)

单选题     What is the author's opinion on freedom without discipline?(PASSAGE THREE)

单选题     What is the meaning of the word 'burgeoning' in the fifth paragraph?(PASSAGE FOUR)

单选题     What does the passage mainly tell us?(PASSAGE FOUR)