托福阅读科学类机经背景深海生物如何生存.pdfVIP

官方网站： 托福阅读科学类机经背景:深海生物如何生存 摘要：托福阅读机经虽然没有口语写作机经使用频率高，但托福阅读却是整个托福考试的重要部分。 适当地掌握一些托福阅读技巧和背景材料对于我们备考托福阅读也是有所帮助的。免费咨询电话： 400-0123-267 Once it seemed that the ocean floor was a desert of darkness. As everyone knew, sunlight was what made life possible by fueling photosynthesis, and sunlight can penetrate only the first few hundred yards of the ocean’s great depths. Lower, a few creatures might still eke out a living by scrounging the organic detritus that drifts down from the surface of the sea. But thousands of feet down, in the utter blackness at the ocean’s bottom, there could be practically nothing. Then, in 1977, underwater explorers discovered that there was in fact something, and quite a lot of it. At mid-ocean ridges, where new ocean floor rises up as molten rock from Earth’s interior, where cold seawater mixes with the rising magma and, heated to 650 degrees, spews back up through chimney-shaped hydrothermal vents, researchers stumbled across bustling ecosystems. Clinging to the sides of the chimneys were thick white mats of bacteria; around them were eight-foot-long stalk-shaped worms, rocking in the water, while eyeless shrimp seethed around the chimneys like maggots. All were thriving on the energy bound up in the vents’ sulfur compounds. The seafloor might still be dark, but now it was known to be dotted with gardens. In just the past eight years, however, underwater explorers have discovered that this picture is still incomplete: there is light at the bottom of the sea. Hydrothermal vents glow, and while the light is too faint to be perceived by the human eye, that hardly means it is without significance. Physicists maintain that although some of the light may be created by the intense heat, much of it must be attributed to some as-yet- unknown process. Biologists, meanwhile, say there is sufficient light at these vents for photosynth