2012年考研英语阅读基础训练及答案(二)

Test 2

At the bottom of the world lies a mighty continent still wrapped in the Ice Age and, until recent times, unknown to man. It is a great land mass with mountain ranges whose extent and elevation are still uncertain. Much of the continent is a complete blank on our maps. Man has explored, on foot, less than one per cent of its area. Antarctica differs fundamentally from the Arctic regions. The Arctic is an ocean, covered with drifting packed ice and hemmed in by the land masses of Europe, Asia, and North America. The Antarctic is a continent almost as large as Europe and Australia combined, centered roughly on the South Pole and surrounded by the most unobstructed water areas of the world -- the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

The continental ice sheet is more than two miles high in its centre, thus, the air over the Antarctic is far more refrigerated than it is over the Arctic regions. This cold air current from the land is so forceful that it makes the nearby seas the stormiest in the world and renders unlivable those regions whose counterparts at the opposite end of the globe are inhabited. Thus, more than a million persons live within 2,000 miles of the North Pole in an area that includes most of Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia -- a region rich in forest and mining industries. Apart from a handful of weather stations, within the same distance of the South Pole there is not a single tree, industry, or settlement.

31. The best title for this selection would be ________.

[A] Iceland

[B] Land of Opportunity

[C] The Unknown Continent(C)

[D] Utopia at Last

32. At the time this article was written, our knowledge of Antarctica was ________.

[A] very limited

[B] vast

[C] fairly rich(A)

[D] nonexistent

33. Antarctica is bordered by the ________.

[A] Pacific Ocean

[B] Indian Ocean

[C] Atlantic Ocean(D)

[D] All three

34. The Antarctic is made uninhabitable primarily by ________.

[A] cold air

[B] calm seas

[C] ice(A)

[D] lack of knowledge about the continent

35. According to this article ________.

[A] 2,000 people live on the Antarctic Continent

[B] a million people live within 2,000 miles of the South Pole

[C] weather conditions within a 2,000 mile radius of the South Pole make settlements impractical(C)

[D] only a handful of natives inhabit Antarctica

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