山西农大英语四期末考试 选择题和阅读理解.docx

Part II Reading Comprehension (35 minutes)Passage OneQuestions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage:The growing importance of airpower in World War II, combined with its sensitivity to weather, led to an ever greater military reliance on accurate forecasts. Knowing the weather was of vital concern to combat commanders of that war. As much an art as it is science, predicting the weather is dependent on the accurate tracking of weather phenomena, particularly storm fronts, from the areas where they originate. Though meteorologists (气象学家) of the 1940s had none of the weather tracking satellites which make that job so much simpler today, they were still able to generate usably accurate forecasts as much as 72 hours in advance -- as long as they could get the data they needed. The need for that data gave birth to one of the most interesting and unique campaigns of the Second World War, the so-called Weather War. Although it was not a war of major commands and large numbers of troops, ships, or aircraft, it had an important impact on the fighting in the Atlantic and European Theatres. It was the weather data secured by this campaign which enabled the planning and execution of such critical operations as the Allied landings at Normandy and the entire strategic bombing campaign against Hitlers empire. The Weather War began with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940. Prior to that, those nations allowed their arctic weather stations to report the weather in the clear so all countries could use the information. Germanys occupation of much of Scandinavia gave Berlin a monopoly (垄断) over arctic weather data -- a development the Allies could not allow. The British, in fact, began planning to seize the weather stations even as the campaign for Norway progressed. Of course, the Germans had plans for those same stations too, but Allied dominance over the sea, coupled with the unexpectedly high German naval losses in the Norwegian invasion, allowed Britain t