99考研英语真题.docVIP

1989年全国硕士研究生入学统一考试英语试题 Section I Close Test For each numbered blank in the following passage there are four choices labeled ［A］, ［B］, ［C］ and ［D］. Choose the best one and put your choice in the ANSWER SHEET. Read the whole passage before making your choice. (10 points) ①One day drought may be a thing of the past at least in coastal cities. ②Vast areas of desert throughout the world may for the first time 1 and provide millions of hectares of land where now nothing grows. ③By the end of this century this may not be mere 2 . ④Scientists are already looking into the possibility of using some of the available ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. ⑤In these regions there are vast ice-caps formed by snow that has fallen over the past 50,000 years. ⑥Layer 3 layer of deep snow means that, when melted, the snow water would be pure, not salty as sea-ice would be. ⑦There is so much 4 pure water here that it would need only a fraction of it to turn much of the desert or poorly irrigated parts of the world into rich farmland. ⑧And what useful packages it would come in! ⑨It should be possible to cut off a bit of ice and transport it! ⑩Alternatively perhaps a passing iceberg could be 5 . They are always breaking away from the main caps and floating around, pushed by currents, until they eventually melt and are wasted. Many icebergs are, of course, far too small to be towed 6 distance, and would melt before they reached a country that needed them anywhere. It would be necessary to locate one that was 7 and that was big enough to provide a good supply of ice when it reached us. Engineers think that an iceberg up to seven miles long and one and a half miles wide could be transported if the tug pulling it was as big as a supertanker! Even then they would cover only twenty miles every day. However, 8 the iceberg was at its destination, more that 7,000 million cubic metres of water could be taken from it! That would probably be more than enough for any medi