2012/09/1112:56关键词:雅思阅读真题背景材料集锦(10)
考生手头都会积攒一些雅思阅读注意事项方面的教材,但北京新航道雅思老师发现,考生并不能够充分的利用这些材料。进过调查发现,考生存在两个困惑:是不知道选择什么样的备考材料,第二就是不知道如何利用复习资料。所以就算你积攒再多资料,也是收效甚微。下面北京新航道学校雅思老师就为大家提供一些雅思阅读方面的材料,供大家参考学习。
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold
1 There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.
2 Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.
3 He took as his starting point the work of Attila Grandpierre of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Grandpierre and a collaborator, Gábor ágoston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature.
4 Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.
5 These two timescales are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Earth's ice ages: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.
6 Most scientists believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. One such cycle describes the way Earth's orbit gradually changes shape from a circle to a slight ellipse and back again roughly every 100,000 years. The theory says this alters the amount of solar radiation that Earth receives, triggering the ice ages. However, a persistent problem with this theory has been its inability to explain why the ice ages changed frequency a million years ago.
7 "In Milankovitch, there is certainly no good idea why the frequency should change from one to another," says Neil Edwards, a climatologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. Nor is the transition problem the only one the Milankovitch theory faces. Ehrlich and other critics claim that the temperature variations caused by Milankovitch cycles are simply not big enough to drive ice ages.
8 However, Edwards believes the small changes in solar heating produced by Milankovitch cycles are then amplified by feedback mechanisms on Earth. For example, if sea ice begins to form because of a slight cooling, carbon dioxide that would otherwise have found its way into the atmosphere as part of the carbon cycle is locked into the ice. That weakens the greenhouse effect and Earth grows even colder.
9 According to Edwards, there is no lack of such mechanisms. "If you add their effects together, there is more than enough feedback to make Milankovitch work," he says. "The problem now is identifying which mechanisms are at work." This is why scientists like Edwards are not yet ready to give up on the current theory. "Milankovitch cycles give us ice ages roughly when we observe them to happen. We can calculate where we are in the cycle and compare it with observation," he says. "I can't see any way of testing [Ehrlich's] idea to see where we are in the temperature oscillation."
10 Ehrlich concedes this. "If there is a way to test this theory on the sun, I can't think of one that is practical," he says. That's because variation over 41,000 to 100,000 years is too gradual to be observed. However, there may be a way to test it in other stars: red dwarfs. Their cores are much smaller than that of the sun, and so Ehrlich believes that the oscillation periods could be short enough to be observed. He has yet to calculate the precise period or the extent of variation in brightness to be expected.
经过老师课堂经验发现,雅思阅读对考生来说就是不能合理分配阅读题干的时间和答题时间,这还需要同学在平日里多加练习,以便应试速度,老师提醒大家,成绩绝非一朝一夕之事,勤奋练习才能收益。最后祝你考试顺利。
点击了解雅思培训信息
这两天,雅思官方又发布了一批新增的纸笔考位,还有两个新的机考考点落成!新航道小编带大家一起来看看吧![详情]
03-07临近过年,关于雅思考试的也都是好消息!!雅思官方又新增了一大批考试场次,机考和纸笔考都有,而且还新增了2...[详情]
01-18相信参加雅思考试的学生这两天都关注到了刷屏的雅思资讯,官方宣布允许拼分!是不是烤鸭们可以放松一些了?[详情]
10-31雅思机考考试时间多长?雅思机考还是笔试好?雅思机考流程是怎样的?雅思机考流程时间需要多久?雅思机考流程...[详情]
08-23