艾斯英语阅读理解

某天罗伊普艾斯回到家中也就是他姐姐的住处。现在是她姐姐的家了，但是这所房子也是他曾经出生的地方。派特，她的姐姐亲吻他说：“你没怎么变，罗伊，让我好好看看你，我们上次见面是什么时间？”“25年前，”他回答说，“我在这里呆了一周，你还记得么？”他补充说，“你也没怎么变”。罗伊这么说是出于礼貌，但这并不是真的，派特已经看起来像个老妇人。第二天罗伊一个人走过村子。这个地方看起来已经非常不同。道路上还有道路边上有很多交通标志。有了一个新的停车场，一个新的邮局，一个新的公交车站。他突然记起来以前公交车随意停，你只要抬起手车就停了。惊奇一个接着一个，火车没有了，学校没有了，很多的农场机械停在操场上！但是让罗伊感到最大的惊奇是这里的人，他根本一个都不认识了；或许是因为每个人都变老了。他走进邮局买了些邮票，“孩子们和年轻人都去哪里了？”他问邮递员，这个老者的目光从邮票簿上抬起，“孩子？”他说，“他们都去学校了，当然，有三四户新的年轻的家庭在这里，孩子们乘公交车上学，到Horham。”Horham 是20公里外的一个镇子。午饭的时候派特说，“村子很漂亮，是吗？”“不一样了，派特。这里曾经是个令人激动的地方，但是现在到处都是老人。我不明白。。。”“有几个新来的，但是我们认识的人都还在这里。你也不年轻了，罗伊，不是吗?”

《艾斯英语：高中英语听力模拟试题精编1》是2011年4月1日中国出版集团、现代教育出版社出版的图书，作者是李俊和。 特色：材料真实新颖。真实性是听力教学的科学要求，《艾斯英语:高中英语听力模拟试题精编1(2012基础训练)》听力材料全部是对话和独白，即口语体的形式，真实生动。材料选自国内外媒体最新报道，及地道英美口语，富有时代感，语言自然、流畅，原汁原味，给学生创造一个真实的听力氛围。 艾斯英语包含了最新高考英语听力测试命题的全真模拟，时效性强，通过研读艾斯英语，学生能更好地把握高考英语听力测试的命题现状，方便备考。

[00:00.00]This is What’s Trending Today... [00:03.09]Three million years may seem like a long time. [00:08.25]But when you consider that planet Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old, it is a pretty short period of time. [00:19.43]And it is over that shorter time period that the whales in our oceans today got to be so large. [00:30.08]The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived. [00:34.80]They weigh more than even the biggest dinosaurs. [00:40.35]They can grow to 30 meters long and weigh up to 130,000 kilograms. [00:49.64]Blue whales are part of the baleen whale family. [00:54.17]Baleen is a kind of food-filtering structure in the mouths of the whales. [01:00.51]The whales developed this system about 30 million years ago. [01:07.09]Other whales in the baleen family include fin whales, bowhead whales, and right whales. [01:16.45]Today, these whales can weigh well over 70,000 kilograms. [01:23.74]But for millions of years, they were not nearly that large, scientists say. [01:31.07]“All of a sudden – ‘boom’ – we see them get very big, like blue whales,” scientist Nick Pyenson told the New York Times. [01:42.26]He and other researchers recently published an article on whale size in the British research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. [01:55.73]“It’s like going from whales the size of minivans to longer than two school buses,” Pyenson added. [02:04.32]The researchers -- Pyenson, Jeremy Goldbogen and Graham Slater -- believe that a change in the Earth’s climate caused whales to get so large only about 3 million years ago. [02:21.25]This change led to food becoming more easily available. [02:26.46]An oncoming ice age made the ocean water cold. [02:30.96]High winds mixed the water in the ocean faster than before. [02:36.77]Rain and snow made more nutrients run off from the land into the water. [02:44.14]The nutrients resulted in algae. [02:47.68]That attracted small fish and shrimp called krill. [02:53.52]The mixture of nutrients resulted in more food for large whales to eat. [02:59.90]Whales that were able to quickly eat a lot of food survived. And they got larger. [03:07.11]Whales that had teeth instead of baleen, however, did not survive. [03:13.65]The largest baleen whales then produced other large whales. [03:19.78]Over the next three or four million years, the baleen whales grew 10 times bigger than they had been, the researchers say. [03:30.65]It is possible that the largest whales are gone, the researchers said. [03:36.63]But, as they told the BBC, blue whales could grow even bigger -- or they could slowly die – depending on Earth’s changing climate. [03:49.80]And that’s What’s Trending Today. [03:52.30]I’m Dan Friedell.