2009年职称英语教材阅读理解新增部分(综合类)

　　答案与题解：

　　1.B 问题问的是：2006年初在美国许多移民涌入街道，他们要求受到怎样的对待?答案可以从第一段的第二句话中找到。这句话说的是：许多移民举着标语和美国国旗，要求按公民二不是罪犯对待。

　　2.C 问题问的是：一些加拿大官员想把门开着的原因是什么?答案可以从第二段中找到。前三句话是这么说的：加拿大官员说移民申请继续高涨。一些官员想把门开着。他们需要劳动力。

　　3.D 问题问的是：西班牙政府决定做什么?答案可以从第三段中找到。第一句话是这么说的：随着大批的无证非洲移民来到加里那群岛并且没有表明有减弱的迹象，西班牙政府决定采取严厉的措施。

　　4.C问题问的是：法国的新的移民和融入法案生效后，会发生什么情况?答案可以从最后一段的最后一句中找到。这句话是这么说的：但是有些人担心，这个法案会导致发展中国家的人才流失。

　　5.A 问题问的是：第一段中的短语“rounding up”由哪个词替换最合适?在注释1中我们已经讲述了“round up”的意思了。“capturing”(捕捉)是对的。

　　Older Volcanic Eruptions

　　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.

　　词汇：

　　dioxide n. 二氧化物

　　lava n. 熔岩

　　Permian adj. 二叠纪

　　gigaton n. 十亿吨梯恩梯

　　genera n. 种类

　　dinosaurs n. 恐龙

　　asteroid n. 小行星

　　注释：

　　The Permian extinction 二叠纪物种灭绝

　　练习：

　　1. Why did older volcanic eruptions do more damage than more recent ones?

　　A) Because they killed off life more easily.

　　B) Because they were brighter.

　　C) Because they were larger.

　　D) Because they were hotter.