阅读理解Passage 4 Life moves oneven in Tucson

阅读理解Passage 1 Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the 21st century, butregardless of whether it is or isntwe wont do much about it

阅读理解Stratford-on-Avon, as we all know, has only one industryWilliam Shakespearebut there are two distinctly separate and increasingly hostile branches

阅读理解Passage 1 Wild Bill Donovan would have loved the Internet, the American spymaster who built the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later laid the roots for the CIA was fascinated with information

阅读理解Passage 4 Read the following passages carefully and then explain in your own English the exact meaning of the numbered and underlined parts

阅读理解Directions: There are 4 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should deicide the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.Passage FourThe discovery of planets around distant stars has become—like space-shuttle launches—newsworthy but just barely. With some 50 extrasolar planets under their belt, astronomers have to announce something really strange to get anyone’s attention.Last week they did just that. Standing in front of colleagues and reporters at the American Astronomical Society’s semiannual meeting in San Diego, the world’s premier planet-hunting team— astronomer Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues-presented not one but two remarkable finds. The first is a pair of planets, each about the mass of Jupiter, that whirl around their home star 15 light-years from Earth in perfect lockstep. One takes 30 days to complete an orbit, the other exactly twice as long. Nobody has ever seen such a configuration. But the second discovery is far stranger—a solar system 123 light-years away in the constellation Serpens, that harbors one “ordinary” planet and another so huge—17 times as massive as Jupiter—that nobody can quite figure out what it can be. It is, says Marcy, “a bit frightening”.What’s frightening is that these discoveries make it clear how little astronomers know about planets, and they add to the dawning realization that our solar system—and by implication Planet Earth—may be a cosmic oddball. For years theorists figured that other stars would have planets more or less like the ones going around the sun. But starting with the 1995 discovery of the first extrasolar planet-a gassy monster like Jupiter but orbiting seven times as close to its star as Mercury orbits around our sun—each new find has seemed stranger than the last. Searchers have found more “hot Jupiters” like that first discovery. These include huge planets that career around their stars not in circular orbits but in elongated ones; their gravity would send any Earthlike neighbors flying off into space. Says Princeton astronomer Scott Tremaine: “Not a single prediction for what we’d find in other systems has turned out to correct.”Last week’s giant was the most unexpected discovery yet. Conventional theory suggests that it must have formed like a star, from a collapsing cloud of interstellar gas. Its smaller companion, only seven times Jupiter’s mass, is almost certainly a planet, formed by the buildup of gas and dust left over from a star’s formation. Yet the fact that these two orbs are so close together suggests to some theorists that they must have formed together—so maybe the bigger one is a planet after all. Or maybe astronomers will have to rethink their definition of “planet”. Just because we put heavenly objects into categories doesn’t mean the distinctions are necessarily valid. And as Tremaine puts it, “When your classification schemes start breaking down, you know you’re learning something exciting. This is wonderful stuff.”

阅读理解Passage 2 Space flight and air travel would astound time travelers from the mid-19th century

阅读理解Picture-taking is a technique both for annexing the objective world and for expressing the singular self

阅读理解Passage 2 On a frigid afternoon in May, I slipped through a crack in the sea ice and dropped into the Arctic Ocean

阅读理解Passage 3 As I write, a gentle, much needed rain is falling this morning

阅读理解The vast majority of books on the English language take British English as their starting point

阅读理解The National Day holiday is round the comer and, if things go like last year， this fallsGolden Weektoo will be agolden mess

阅读理解The bees knees The bee is one of the worlds busiest creatures: no wonder that in English we have expressions like as busy as a bee and hes the bees knees (meaning he is a very impressive person)

阅读理解(3) Potential AIDS victims who refuse to be tested for the disease and then defend their right to remain ignorant about whether they carry the virus are entitled to that right

阅读理解It makes little sense for prospective students to choose to go to a university simply because it has an excellent reputation

阅读理解Passage 7 I dated a woman for a whilea literary type, well-read, lots of books in her placewhom I admired a bit too extravagantly, and one Christmas I decided to give her something unusually nice and, Im afraid, unusually expensive

阅读理解Educators are seriously concerned about the high rate of dropouts among the doctor of philosophy candidates andthe consequent loss of talent to a nation in need of Ph

阅读理解Passage 1 Racket, din clamor, noise, whatever you want to call it, unwanted sound is Americas most widespread nuisance

阅读理解Buck was a tall, weathered man in a red hunting shirt and khaki pants

阅读理解Wrong choices and unwise options can daze our lives