《IBT托福真题》共13部分，第07部分.docVIP

《IBT托福真题》 共13部分，此为第007部分 Paragraph 1: There is increasing evidence that the impacts of meteorites have had important effects on Earth, particularly in the field of biological evolution. Such impacts continue to pose a natural hazard to life on Earth. Twice in the twentieth century, large meteorite objects are known to have collided with Earth. 1. The word pose in the passage is closest in the meaning to ○Claim ○Model ○Assume ○Present Paragraph 2: If an impact is large enough, it can disturb the environment of the entire Earth and cause an ecological catastrophe. The best-documented such impact took place 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period of geological history. This break in Earths history is marked by a mass extinction, when as many as half the species on the planet became extinct. While there are a dozen or more mass extinctions in the geological record, the Cretaceous mass extinction has always intrigued paleontologists because it marks the end of the age of the dinosaurs. For tens of millions of years, those great creatures had flourished. Then, suddenly, they disappeared. 2. In paragraph 2, why does the author include the information that dinosaurs had flourished for tens of millions of years and then suddenly disappeared? ○To support the claim that the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous is the best-documented of the dozen or so mass extinctions in the geological record ○To explain why as many as half of the species on Earth at the time are believed to have become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous ○To explain why paleontologists have always been intrigued by the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous ○To provide evidence that an impact can be large enough to disturb the environment of the entire planet and cause an ecological disaster Paragraph 3: The body that impacted Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period was a meteorite with a mass of more than a trillion tons and a diameter of at least 10 kilometers. Scientists