河北高考英语阅读理解专项训练.docxVIP

阅读理解 Scientists have learned more about the inner workings of the Earth by studying the way waves from earthquakes travel through the planet’s center. The results suggest that the Earth’s inner core may be starting to spin more slowly than the Earth. The Earth’s core has two parts: the outer core and the inner core. Both of these are made mainly of the metals iron and nickel. The outer core is liquid. But the inner core is a solid ball held in this liquid almost like the yolk(蛋黄) in an egg. Scientists suspected for a long time that the inner core might be spinning slightly differently from the way the Earth spins. In the 1990s, two scientists, Paul Richards and Xiaodong Song, studied the inner core by looking at the waves from earthquakes that travel through the center of the Earth. They focused on groups and pairs of waves from earthquakes that naturally repeat. If the inner core was spinning exactly with the Earth, each wave of the pair should have taken the same time to pass through the Earth. Instead, some moved faster than others. This was because they were hitting different parts of the inner core as it spun. Their studies revealed that the inner core was spinning in the same direction as the Earth, but slightly faster. Now Dr. Song and Yi Yang—another scientist who studies the Earth—say they’ve used the same method to learn that the Earth’s inner core may be starting to spin slower than the Earth. The researchers studied earthquake wave pairs from Alaska, going all the way back to 1964. They noticed that the inner core’s spin also seemed to change speed in the early 1970s. The scientists say that the inner core may have a pattern of speeding up and slowing down every 70 years or so. Not everyone agrees. Many scientists who study the Earth say more information needed to figure out what is really going on. 1．Why is an egg mentioned in the second paragraph? A．To explain how the Earth’s core moves. B．To show the importance of the inner core. C．To illustrate the c