江浙沪招生考试网

[A] people in favor of the trend of democracy

[B] advocates of migration between states

[C] scientists engaged in the study of population

[D] conservatives clinging to old patterns of life

Text 5

Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world’s volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth’s surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.

That the plates are moving is now beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth’s interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot-spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years.

The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate come to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops seed fissures (cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability (inconstancy).

67.   The author believes that ________.

[A] the motion of the plates corresponds to that of the earth’s interior

[B] the geological theory about drifting plates has been proved to be true

[C] the hot spots and the plates move slowly in opposite directions

[D] the movement of hot spots proves the continents are moving apart

68.   That Africa and South America were once joined can be deduced from the fact that ________.

[A] the two continents are still moving in opposite directions

[B] they have been found to share certain geological features

[C] the African plates has been stable for 30 million years

[D] over 100 hot spots are scattered all around the globe

69.   The hot spot theory may prove useful in explaining ________.

[A] the structure of the African plates

[B] the revival of dead volcanoes

[C] the mobility of the continents

[D] the formation of new oceans

70.   The passage is mainly about ________.

[A] the features of volcanic activities

[B] the importance of the theory about drifting plates

[C] the significance of hot spots in geophysical studies

[D] the process of the formation of volcanoes

Section IV: English-Chinese Translation

Directions:

Read the following passage carefully and then translate the underlined sentences into Chinese. Your translation must be written clearly on the ANSWER SHEET 2. (15 points)

They were, by far, the largest and most distant objects that scientists had ever detected: a strip of enormous cosmic clouds some 15 billion light years from earth. 71) But even more important, it was the farthest that scientists had been able to look into the past, for what they were seeing were the patterns and structures that existed 15 billion years ago. That was just about the moment that the universe was born. What the researchers found was at once both amazing and expected; the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite -- Cobe -- had discovered landmark evidence that the universe did in fact begin with the primeval explosion that has become known as the Big Bang (the theory that the universe originated in an explosion from a single mass of energy).

72) The existence of the giant clouds was virtually required for the Big Bang, first put forward in the 1920s, to maintain its reign as the dominant explanation of the cosmos. According the theory, the universe burst into being as a submicroscopic, unimaginable dense knot of pure energy that flew outward in all directions, emitting radiation as it went, condensing into particles and then into atoms of gas. Over billions of years, the gas was compressed by gravity into galaxies, stars, plants and eventually, even humans.

Cobe is designed to see just the biggest structures, but astronomers would like to see much smaller hot spots as well, the seeds of local objects like clusters and superclusters of galaxies. They shouldn’t have long to wait. 73) Astrophysicists working with ground based detectors at the South Pole and balloon borne instruments are closing in on such structures, and may report their findings soon.

74) If the small hot spots look as expected, that will be a triumph for yet another scientific idea, a refinement of the Big Bang called the inflationary universe theory. Inflation says that very early on, the universe expanded in size by more than a trillion trillion trillion trillion fold in much less than a second, propelled by a sort of antigravity. 75) Odd though it sounds, cosmic inflation is a scientifically plausible consequence of some respected ideas in elementary particle physics, and many astrophysicists have been convinced for the better part of a decade that it is true.

71.   ________

72.

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