2019年00596英语阅读（二）自考模拟试题（九）

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2019年00596英语阅读（二）自考模拟试题（九）

Scan the following passage and find the words which have roughly the same meanings as those given below. The number in the bracket after each word definition refers to the number of paragraph in which the target word is. Write the word you choose on the ANSWER SHEET.

About three hundred years ago, there were approximately half a billion people in the world. In the two centuries that followed the population doubled, and, by 1850, there were more than a billion people in the world. It took only 75 years for the figure to double once more, so that now the population figure stands at approximately six and one half billion. Each day the population of the world increases by about 150,000.

In former centuries the population grew slowly. Famines, wars, and epidemics, such as the plague and cholera, killed many people. Today, although the birth rate has not changed significantly, the death rate has been lowered considerably by various kinds of progress.

Machinery has made it possible to produce more and more food in vast areas, such as the plains of America and Russia. Crops have increased almost everywhere and people are growing more and more food. New forms of food preservation have also been developed so that food need not be eaten as soon as it has grown. Meat, fish, fruit and vegetables can be dried, tinned or frozen, then stored for later use.

Improvement in communications and transportation has made it possible to send more food from the place where it is produced to other places where it is needed. This has helped reduced the number of famines.

Generally speaking, people live in conditions of greater security. Practices such as the slave trade, which caused many useless deaths, have been stopped.

1. one hundred years (Para. 1)

2. symbol for a number (Para. 1)

3. an extreme scarcity of food (Para 2)

4. an outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads rapidly and widely (Para.2)

5. importantly (Para.2)

6. much; a great deal (Para. 2)

7. preparation of food to resist decay (Para. 3)

8. to reserve or put away for future use (Para.3)

9. a means or system of carrying passengers or goods from one place to another (Para. 4)

10. the state of being safe (Para. 5) 

II. Reading Comprehension. (50 points, 2 points for each)

In this part of the test, there are five passages. Following each passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET.

Passage One

Q. There’s a lot of talk about putting up manned orbital stations. What does this mean, concretely?

A. It is very important to have scientific stations in space. A space telescope with a mirror slightly over six and a half feet in diameter will be placed in orbit, and there will be more and more of these. A few years ago, our group at Saclay, in collaboration with a number of other European Laboratories, orbited a telescope that revolutionized our knowledge of gamma-ray emissions by celestial objects.

Life aboard manned space stations won’t be as exciting as we might suppose. It will probably be comparable to the life people lead aboard deep-sea oil rigs.

Q. What scientific interest will these stations offer?

A. Observation is much more precise beyond the atmosphere, because the sky is darker. You see many more stars and objects that are concealed by the earth’s luminescence.

Q. What objects?

A. We know pretty well how stars are born because we can observe them. Two or three new stars appear in our galaxy every year. But nearly all the galaxies were born at the same time, when the universe was constituted 15 billion (light) years ago. No new ones are thought to exist.

To observe the birth of a galaxy that happened so long ago, you have to see a very long way. At present we can go back 10 to 12 billion years. We have to go a bit farther back still, and maybe catch them in the act of birth. Distant objects are necessarily very dim, so ideal conditions are needed to observe them. Orbital stations provide such conditions.

Q. Would orbital stations be choice places from which to try to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences?

A. Not particularly through radio communication, except on certain wave lengths that are absorbed by the atmosphere. But as points of departure for exploration they’ll be very useful.

Q. How far would such exploration go?

A. In 1989 the satellite Voyager II will reach Neptune after a journey of three and a half years. In addition, five probes were sent to rendezvous with Halley’s comet. So exploration of the solar system is more or less under way. We’ve put people on the moon, sent probes to Mars and Venus, lofted satellites near the sun (within a few tens of millions of miles), and one satellite even left the solar system a few years ago.

But visiting the stars is something else again. Light takes four years to reach the nearest stars, so you can see that it would take a satellite hundreds of thousands of years.

Of course, if the earth were to become overpopulated, we can imagine sending families in space vessels to colonize the nearest stars. But it’s their great-great-great-grandchildren who would finally reach those stars. And they wouldn’t even know where to stop. 

Questions 11-15 are based on Passage One. 

11. A space station is a _____.

A. telescope in orbit

B. laboratory in space

C. celestial object

D. collaboration of labs

12. The writer compares the life on a space station to the one on a deep-sea oil rig in order to show____.

A. dull environment

B. excitement in the wild

C. hard living conditions

D. the sameness in operation

13. In Para.7 the sentence “No new ones are thought to exist” means ____.

A. nobody believes that any new galaxy exists now

B. nobody believes that there is any new galaxy to be found soon

C. people believe that the galaxies are very old now

D. people are wrong to believe that new galaxies will appear

14. Orbital stations provide an ideal condition to observe a galaxy because ____.

A. we are closer to it in space

B. we can go back 10 to 12 billion years

C. a galaxy appears dimmer in that environment than on earth

D. a galaxy appears brighter in that environment than on earth.

15. We may draw a conclusion from Para.14 that ____.

A. human habitation on other stars is a pure imagination

B. even later generations won’t know which star to land on

C. colonizing other stars is a solution to overpopulation

D. reaching other stars by present technology is still unrealistic 

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