2013届高中新课标英语二轮总复习（湖南用）限时训练讲义：第20讲 主旨大意题.docVIP

PAGE  第二十讲　主旨大意题 (1)(8 min.) Its hardly surprising that weather is a favorite topic for so many people around the world — it affects where we choose to live, what we wear, our moods, and perhaps even our national characteristics. Studies have shown that changeable weather can make it difficult to concentrate, cloudy skies slow down reaction, and high humidity with hot, dry winds makes many people bad-tempered. If you live in a place like Britain, where the weather seems to change daily if not hourly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the weather is random. In fact, the weather is controlled by systems which move around areas of the globe. In the UK the weather depends on depressions, often called lows, and anticyclones, also known as highs. These systems start in the Atlantic Ocean, and make their way across the British Isles from the west to the east. Highs bring sunny weather, while lows bring rain and wind. In modern times, human activities seem to be altering weather patterns. Gases produced by heavy industry change the temperature of the Earths surface, and affect cloud formation. Some researchers say that factories in Europe and North America may have been one of the causes of the droughts in Africa in the 1980s. The human race has always tried to guess the weather, especially in areas of the world where there are frequent changes. Traditional rhymes point to early attempts to identify weather patterns, popular poems include： Red sky at night, shepherds delight; red sky in the morning, shepherds warning. Flies will swarm(云集) before a storm. Rain before 7, clear by 11. While folk wisdom can still provide a guide to help forecast weather, todays methods of prediction increasingly rely on technology. Satellites, balloons, ships, aircrafts and weather centers with sensitive monitoring equipment, send data to computers. The data is then processed, and the weather is predicted. However, even this system cannot predict weather for longer than about a week.