高考英语阅读理解训练六
Passage 1
Juanito Estrella has been a houkeeping manager on the US-bad large pasnger ship Carnival Spirit for 18 months and feels he has found the suitable position in his career （职业）. He has always wanted to travel. “I guess I am a really restless spirit. I like traveling, so when the chance came, I jumped at it,” he says.
The chance came in the form of a newspaper advertiment for work on crui ships （游船）. At the time Estrella was the houkeeping manager at a Melbourne hotel. He applied and, after two interviews, a medical check and police clearance, the job was his.
Estrella is responsible （负责的） for the cleanliness of the ship, making sure that 160 crew work properly. “I enjoy it becau there is no other work—you wake up each day in a different place and a different culture. It's exciting when you go to the next country and you don't understand the language,” he says.
Estrella likes being busy and getting to know people from all over the world. The 1,000 crew come from 94 countries, and Estrella has learnt Spanish and a little Croatian.
But there is a downside. “You cannot get becau you have safety responsibilities to yourlf and others,” he says. “You don't really think about home. You start to think about home only when you get clor to your vacation and wonder what you'll be doing.”
Life on the ship is anything but cruising. Estrella and his fellows work at least 10 hours a day, ven days a week. He warns the job is not for everybody. “You have to love being busy and be prepared to work every day—and to give up drinking too much alcohol.” In his spare time, if the ship sails into a port, Estrella explores it, otherwi he works out in the crew's gym, goes on the Internet or calls home.
1. What do we know about Estrella?
A. He is very fond of traveling.
自强不息的名人事例B. He doesn't drink wine now.
C. He cannot speak a foreign language.
D. He ud to be a houkeeping manager.
2. The underlined word “downside” in paragraph 5 probably means ______.
A. disappointment B. disadvantage a3图纸C. failure D. loss
3. Which of the following is true?
A. Estrella doesn't often feel homesick becau of his work.
B. The work on the ship is not suitable for a married person.
北京隔离 C. Estrella can find no other job except the one on the ship.
D. The people on the ship are from 94 countries.
4. In the last paragraph, the writer thinks that life on the ship is ______.
登高板
A. not a tiring journey at all B. just an interesting voyage
C. far from a voyage for pleasure D. more than a pleasant travel by a
Passage 2
How does an ecosystem （生态系统）work? What makes the populations of different species the way they are? Why are there so many flies and so few wolves? To find an answer鼎湖, scientists have built mathematical models of food webs, noting who eats whom and how much each one eats.
With such models, scientists have found out some key principles operating in food webs. Most food webs, for instance, consist of many weak links rather than a few strong ones. When a predator （掠食动物）always eats huge numbers of a single prey （猎物），the two species are strongly linked； when a predator lives on various species, they are weakly linked. Food webs may be dominated by many weak links becau that arrangement is more stable over the long term. If a predator can eat veral species, it ca
n survive the extinction （灭绝）of one of them. 养老院活动内容And if a predator can move on to another species that is easier to find when a prey species becomes rare, 清凉的反义词the switch allows the original prey to recover. The weak links may thus keep species from driving one another to extinction.
Mathematical models have also revealed that food webs may be unstable, where small changes of top predators can lead to big effects throughout entire ecosystems. In the 1960s, scientists propod that predators at the top of a food web had a surprising amount of control over the size of populations of other species﹣including species they did not directly attack.
佛塔
And unplanned human activities have proved the idea of top﹣down control by top predators to be true. In the ocean, we fished for top predators such as cod on an industrial scale, while on land, we killed off large predators such as wolves. The actions have greatly affected the ecological balance.
Scientists have built an early﹣warning system bad on mathematical models. Ideally,
the system would tell us when to adapt human activities that are pushing an ecosystem toward a breakdown or would even allow us to pull an ecosystem back from the borderline. Prevention is key, scientists say, becau once ecosystems pass their tipping point （临界点），it is remarkably difficult for them to return.
1. What have scientists discovered with the help of mathematical models of food webs？
A. The living habits of species in food webs.
