23.【题干】Paragraph1_____

　　A.Dry steam plants

　　B.Binary plants

　　C.Origin of geothermal energy

　　D.Generation of electricity

　　E.Flash steam plants

　　F.Recyclable water and steam

　　24【题干】Paragraph2_____

　　A.Dry steam plants

　　B.Binary plants

　　C.Origin of geothermal energy

　　D.Generation of electricity

　　E.Flash steam plants

　　F.Recyclable water and steam

　　25【题干】Paragraph3_____

　　A.Dry steam plants

　　B.Binary plants

　　C.Origin of geothermal energy

　　D.Generation of electricity

　　E.Flash steam plants

　　F.Recyclable water and steam

　　26【题干】Paragraph4_____

　　A.Dry steam plants

　　B.Binary plants

　　C.Origin of geothermal energy

　　D.Generation of electricity

　　E.Flash steam plants

　　F.Recyclable water and steam

　　27.【题干】A geothermal reservoir is formed when hot water is trapped under _____.

　　A.the energy to turn a turbine

　　B.impermeable rock

　　C.one or two separators

　　D.turbine operator

　　E.little or no water

　　F.hot springs

　　28.【题干】A dry-steam reservoir produces steam with _____.

　　A.the energy to turn a turbine

　　B.impermeable rock

　　C.one or two separators

　　D.turbine operator

　　E.little or no water

　　F.hot springs

　　29.【题干】Flash plants produce hot water through _____.

　　A.the energy to turn a turbine

　　B.impermeable rock

　　C.one or two separators

　　D.turbine operator

　　E.little or no water

　　F.hot springs

　　30.【题干】In a binary plant, the heat of the geothermal water can be converted into _____.

　　A.the energy to turn a turbine

　　B.impermeable rock

　　C.one or two separators

　　D.turbine operator

　　E.little or no water

　　F.hot springs

　　参考答案：

　　EFCBBCEF

　　阅读理解

　　Sports star Yao Ming 【运动明星姚明】

　　If Yao Ming is not the biggest sports star in the world, he is almost certainly the tallest. At 2.26m, he is the tallest player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and holds the record as the most towering Olympian ever to compete in the Games.

　　But what really stands out about the giant center is his celebrity(名气). Few, if any, Chinese athletes are as well-known as Yao around the world. People across the globe are fascinated with Yao, not only for his basketball prowess(杰出的才能)also for being a symbol of international commerce.

　　When Yao joined the Houston Rockets as the No.1 pick in the 2002 NBA draft(选抜)， he was the first international player ever to be selected first. His assets on the court are clear enough—no NBA player of his size has ever possessed his mobility, so he is a handful(难对付的人)for opponents on either end of the court. But what makes Yao invaluable to the Rockets organization is his role as a global citizen and as a bridge to millions of potential basketball fans in China.

　　When it was announced in February that Yao would miss the rest of the NBA season and possibly the Olympics with a stress fracture(骨折)in his left foot, a collective shudder(震动)spread across China. After considerable debate and discussion, Yao opted to get his foot surgically treated in an operation that placed several tiny screws across the bone, to offer his overburdened foot more support. The surgery was a success, and though the estimated four-month recovery period will leave him little time to prepare with Team China, Yao has vowed to be ready for the Beijing Olympics.

　　Yao wrapped up a 10-day trip to China, where he underwent a series of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatments, hoping to accelerate his recovery process Western experts are generally skeptical of TCM's benefits although new research from the University of Rochester suggests that a certain compound derived from shellfish may indeed stimulate bone repair.

　　"There is no reason to dismiss TCM," Yao told a press conference in Beijing." It's been used in our country for thousands of years. I don't think that it's short on science."

　　36.【题干】The word "towering" in Paragraph 1 means_____

　　A.large.

　　B.fat.

　　C.tall.

　　D.great.

　　37.【题干】Opponents find it very difficult to control Yao Ming because of his_____

　　A.mobility.

　　B.assault.

　　C.defense.

　　D.celebrity.

　　38.【题干】Yao Ming had to undergo a series of TCM treatments because_____

　　A.his right foot had been hurting.

　　B.he wanted to make a more rapid recovery.

　　C.the surgical operation had been a failure.

　　D.he couldn't afford all the medical expenses.

　　39.【题干】Which statement about Yao Ming is NOT true?

　　A.He missed the Athens Olympics.

　　B.He is an NBA player.

　　C.He fractured his left foot.

　　D.He is an international figure.

　　40.【题干】In general, the Western experts' attitude towards TCM is_____.

　　A.indifferent.

　　B.positive.

　　C.negative.

　　D.doubtful.

　　The Sahara【撒哈拉沙漠】

　　The name Sahara derives from the Arabic word for “desert” or “steppe”. At 3. 5 million square miles, an area roughly the size of the United States, the Sahara Desert in northern Africa is the largest desert in the world. It spans the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. Daytime temperatures can reach as high as 130°F. The humidity sometimes gets into the teens. But it can also be as low as 2.5 percent, the lowest in the world. Most of the Sahara receives less than five inches of rain per year, while large areas sometimes have no rainfall at all for years.

　　At the heart of the Sahara is the landlocked north African country of Niger. Here the sand dunes can be 100 feet tall and several miles long. Here sand plains stretch over an area larger than Germany where there is neither water nor towns. Yet sitting in the midst of the surrounding desert is the town of Bilma. Suddenly there are pools of clear water. Surprisingly, there are groves of date palms. Underground water resources, or oases, sufficient to support irrigated agriculture are found in dry stream beds and depressions. Irrigation ditches run off a creek to water fields. Corn, cassava, tea, peanuts, hot peppers, and orange, lime, and grapefruit trees grow in these fields. Donkeys and goats graze on green grass.

　　The Sahara of Niger is still a region where you can see a camel caravan of 500 camels tied together in loose lines as long as a mile, traveling toward such oasis towns. There a caravan will collect life-sustaining salt, which is mined from watery basins, and transport it up to 400 miles back to settlements on the edges of the desert. The round trip across the vast sands takes one month.

　　1. This passage is mostly about________.

　　A) life in the Sahara B) the deserts of Africa

　　C) Bilma 　　 D) how camels travel in the desert

　　2. Rainfall in most of the Sahara is________.

　　A) less than five inches per year

　　B) less than ten inches per year

　　C) less than twenty inches per year

　　D) zero

　　3. The Sahara can be described as______

　　A) a place of contrasts

　　B) a place where no one lives

　　C) an area where the winters are cold

　　D) an area that appeals to many tourists

　　4. The phrase “an area roughly the size of the United States” gives an indication of the size of________.

　　A) northern Africa 　　 B) Niger

　　C) the Sahara D) all of Africa

　　5. In this passage caravan means________.

　　A) traveling circus

　　B) group traveling together through difficult country

　　C) railroad train

　　D) a small, fast sailing ship

　　Older volcanic eruption

　　Volcanoes were more destructive in ancient history, not because they were bigger, but because the carbon dioxide they released wiped out life with greater ease.

　　Paul Wignall from the University of Leeds was investigating the link between volcanic eruptions and mass extinctions. Not all volcanic eruptions killed off large numbers of animals, but all the mass extinctions over the past 300 million years coincided with huge formations of volcanic rock. To his surprise, the older the massive volcanic eruptions were, the more damage they seemed to do. He calculated the "killing efficiency" for these volcanoes by comparing the proportion of life they killed off with the volume of lava that they produced. He found that size for size, older eruptions were at least 10 times as effective at wiping out life as their more recent rivals.

　　The Permian extinction, for example, which happened 250 million years ago, is marked by floods of volcanic rock in Siberia that cover an area roughly the size of western Europe. Those volcanoes are thought to have pumped out about 10 gigatonnes of carbon as carbon dioxide. The global warming that followed wiped out 80 per cent of all marine genera at the time, and it took 5 million years for the planet to recover. Yet 60 million years ago, there was another huge amount of volcanic activity and global warming but no mass extinction. Some animals did disappear but things returned to normal within ten thousands of years. "The most recent ones hardly have an effect at all," Wignall says. He ignored the extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, because many scientists believe it was primarily caused by the impact of an asteroid. He thinks that older volcanoes had more killing power because more recent life forms were better adapted to dealing with increased levels of CO2.

　　Vincent Courtillot, director of the Paris Geophysical. Institute in France, says that Wignall’s idea is provocative. But he says it is incredibly hard to do these sorts of calculations. He points out that the killing power of volcanic eruptions depends on how long they lasted. And it is impossible to tell whether the huge blasts lasted for thousands or millions of years. He also adds that it is difficult to estimate how much lava prehistoric volcanoes produced, and that lava volume may not necessarily correspond to carbon dioxide emissions.

　　参考答案：

　　CBACC ABDBB DCCDC

　　补全短文

　　Researchers Discover Why Human Began Walking Upright

　　Most of us walk and carry items in our hands every day. These are seemingly simple activities that the majority of us don’t question. But an international team of researchers, including Dr. Richmond from GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences，have discovered that human walking upright, may have originated millions of years ago as an adaptation to carrying scarce, high- quality resources. The team of researchers from the U. S., England, Japan and Portugal investigated the behavior of modern-day chimpanzees as they competed for food resources，in an effort to understand what ecological settings would lead a large ape — one that resembles the 6 million-year old ancestor we shared in common with living chimpanzees — to walk on two legs.

　　“These chimpanzees provide a model of the ecological conditions under which our earliest ancestors might have begun walking on two legs, "，said Dr. Richmond.

　　The research findings suggest that chimpanzees switch to moving on two limbs instead of four in situations where they need to monopolize a resource. Standing on two legs allows them to carry much more at one time because it frees up their hands. Over time，intense bursts of bipedal activity may have led to anatomical changes that in turn became the subject of natural selection where competition for food or other resources was strong.

　　Two studies were conducted by the team in Guinea. The first study was conducted by the team in Kyoto University’s “ outdoor laboratory ” in a natural clearing in Bossou Forest. Researchers allowed the wild chimpanzees access to different combinations of two different types of nut — the oil palm nut，which is naturally widely available, and the coula nut, which is not. The chimpanzees’ behavior was monitored in three situations:(a) when only oil palm nuts were available,(b)when a small number of coula nuts were available，and(c) when coula nuts were the majority available resource.

　　When the rare coula nuts were available only in small numbers, the chimpanzees transported more at one time. Similarly, when coula nuts were the majority resource, the chimpanzees ignored the oil palm nuts altogether. The chimpanzees regarded the coula nuts as a more highly-prized resource and competed for them more intensely.

　　In such high-competition settings，the frequency of cases in which the chimpanzees started moving on two legs increased by a factor of four. Not only was it obvious that bipedal movement allowed them to carry more of this precious resource, but also that they were actively trying to move as much as they could in one go by using everything available 一 even their mouths.

　　The second study, by Kimberley Hockings of Oxford Brookes University, was a 14-month study of Bossou chimpanzees crop-raiding, a situation in which they have to compete for rare and unpredictable Resources. Here, 35 percent of the chimpanzees activity involved some sort of bipedal movement, and once again, this behavior appeared to be linked to a clear attempt to carry as much as possible at one time.