Understanding the TextChoose the best answer for each of the following questions according to the test.Life on the other Planets?1. Q. There’s a lot of talk about putting up manned orbital stations. What does this mean, concretely?2. 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.3. 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.4. Q. What scientific interest will these stations offer?5. 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.6. Q. What objects?7. 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 constituted15 billion (light) years ago. No new ones are thought to exist.8. 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.9. Q. Would orbital stations be choice places from which to try to communicate with extra-terrestrial intelligences?10. 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.11. Q. How far would such exploration go?12. A. In 1989 the satellite Voyager II will reach Neptune after a journey of three and ahalf 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.13. 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.14. Of course, if the earth were to become over populated,we can imagine sending families in space vessels to colonize the nearest stars. But it’s their great-great-great-grand children who would finally reach those stars. And they wouldn’t even know where to stop.15. Q. Do you think there are other inhabited planets?16. A. If you are asking me to state a belief, I’d say yes. Others in my profession do not believe this. So it’s a matter of opinion, Why do I believe there are? No matter how far back into the universe we look, we find the same elements: atoms, molecules stars, and galaxies. We can show that the laws of physics have remained unchanged through 15 billion light years.17. It is this homogeneity in the way the universe behaves that allows us to think that life is not an improbable phenomenon, but a normal property of matter at the highest levels of its organization, so we can suppose that life appears when conditions permit.18. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and over a billion yellow stars like our sun. We don’t know if they all have planets, but we have good reason to think that planetary systems are common. Suppose there were only one planet like the earth for every ten yellow stars; that alone makes 100 million worlds comparable to ours— just in our galaxy! And there are billions of galaxies.10. Which is more likely to be true about the author?( )
A、A. He is an astronaut.
B、B. He is a scientist.
C、C. He is an explorer.
D、D. He is a fiction writer.
【正确答案】：B
【题目解析】：P136
