题目内容
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文：Stan: Hi, Camellia. Have you attended professor Gabriel's lecture？
Camellia: No. What was it about？
Stan: Energy -- energy future and today.
Camellia: Oh, what a pity. You know, I' m writing a paper on this subject. And I have spent a lot of time to collect materials. I shouldn’t have missed this chance.
Stan: Don’t worry. I made a lot of notes. You can take my notebook and have a look.
Camellia: It's very kind of you... (open the notebook).., mmm,., but it seems.., mmm.., that you have written hastily and some parts are not...
Stan: That’s true. The lecture is magnificent, so I tried to write down all the things.,, mmm.., never mind. I' m free now and I can tell you what I can remember.
Camellia: Oh, thank you. You' re really a great friend.
Stan: OK. The professor began with the alternative energy. He said there is a great deal of information mad enthusiasm about the development and increased production for the global energy needs from alternative energy sources.
Camellia: I know that solar energy, wind power and moving water are all sources of alternative energy.
Stan: And they are progressing. It makes many people believe that our future energy demands will easily be met.
Camellia: It’s not So？
Stan: According to the professor, absolutely not. We often mention alternative energy to refer to those energy that is produced from sources other than our primary energy supply: fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas. The problem is, fossil fuels are non-renewable.
Camellia: Yes, you know, fossil fuels were formed from plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. So there would be another hundreds of millions of years to reproduce.
Stan: They arc limited in supply and we have mostly depended on them for our energy needs, from home heating and electricity to fuel for our automobiles and mass transportation. They will one day be used up. There is no esca ping this conclusion.
Camellia: How about nuclear energy. Isn’t it a potential source of energy？
Stan: The professor said nuclear energy, which is primarily generated by splitting atoms, only provides 6% of the world’s energy supplies. And it is not likely to be a major source of world energy consumption because of public pressure and the relative dangers associated with unleashing the power of the atom.
Camellia: Did the professor give any information about how much fossil energies provide？
Stan: Let me see.., ah, yes, that’s nearly 88% of the world’s energy needs, or about 350 quadrillion British Thermal Units -- or BTUs. The total world energy demand is about 400 quadrillion BTUs -- each year. A BTU is roughly equal to the energy and heat generated by a match. Of this amount oil, coal and natural gas supply, oil is the king, providing about 41% of the world's total energy supplies, or about 164 quadrillion BTUs. Coal provides 24% of the world’s energy, or 96 quadrillion BTUs, and natural gas provides the remaining 22%, or 88 quadrillion BTUs.
Camellia: Just how limited are our fossil fuel reserves？
Stan: Some estimates say our fossil fuel reserves will be used up within 50 years, while others say it will be 100-120 years.
Camellia: It’s terrible. We are going to run out of fossil fuels for energy and we have no choice but to prepare for the new age of energy production since, most certainly , human demands for energy will not decrease.
Stan: Nobody really knows when the last drop of oil, lump of coal or cubic foot of natural gas will be collected from the Earth. All of it will depend on how well we manage our manage our energy demands and how well we ca
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At 5:30 in the morning we are deep in a dark forest on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal. We' ve been out walking for only 15 minutes, but I' m already soaked in sweat.
As a colleague and I plod along, my head lamp picks out the occasional trail marker, but mainly the light seems to operate as a major local landmark for insects. Several mosquitoes have already discovered the delights of the soft parts of my ears, while others are slowly working their way between my socks and legs to be discovered later after much scratching. Suddenly a deranged roaring and barking starts 25m above my head and builds chaotically and intensity before slowly quieting after several minutes. Similar mad choruses respond from other areas of the forest. Hearing the dawn cacophony of howler monkeys always given me a deep sense of pleasure -- the joy of being back in the tropics. It may be a hot, humid place where insects, plants and fungi rule, but the phone and fax won’t find me here. I' m free to watch monkeys, collect data and try to tease out a tiny piece of the great puzzle of life’s diversity.
That diversity faces disaster, and every biologist has a horror story to tell. Each year many of us return to the field after a cold winter’s teaching to discover that our research sites have been destroyed and our experiments and study organisms have disappeared. We can see with our own eyes the mass extermination of the world’s animal and plant life as forests, savannas and wetlands give way to farmland, housing developments and shopping malls. If current rates of habitat destruction continue, it is likely that we will condemn from a quarter to half the world’s currently living species to extinction within the next 100 years.
Nowhere is life more diverse than in tropical rain forests, and nowhere is the assault on life more tragic. Scientists are only beginning to understand the complex webs of interdependencies among various species. Increasingly, ecological re- search in the tropics in revealing how dependent humans are on forests for a wide variety of important services, particularly regulation of the earth’s atmosphere and climate. We may owe as much to the residents of the rain forests as we do our cat- tie, corn and wheat.
Much of our understanding of tropical-forest biology comes from research on Barro Colorado Island, a 1,600-hectare dot in the middle of the Panama Canal. B. C. I. , as the island is affectionately known to the biologists who work there, is covered with dense tropical forest, which was declared a nature reserve in 1923. The Smithsonian Tropical Research' Institute facility on B. C. I. , established in 1946, is a Mecca for tropical biologists, who work to uncover the complex links between the large variety of species that live in forests and to demonstrate the importance of these woodlands as sources for medicines and other products of incalculable value to humans.
The atmosphere at the research station is probably similar to that at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the 1940s when a group of the world’s top physicists were cloistered together trying to design the atom bomb. The justified the creation of a nuclear weapon by assuming it would provide the ultimate deterrent that could be used to reinforce peace in a democratic world. Similarly, the longer-term future of human civilization on earth is dependent on the earth’s forests, which act as its lungs, livers and kidneys. That is why scientists on B. C.I. are struggling to unravel the mysteries of the forests before they disappear.
At first the forest in Panama just looks tike a wall of green. Then you start to notice differences between plant species, and the sheer diversity seems suddenly overwhelming. Variations between plants are often subtle and only apparent for the short period of time that a species bears flowers or fruit. Slowly you begin to identify specific types and family groups such as the palms, helico
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听力原文： American researchers have made a discovery that might help them better understand the mysterious sense of smell. VOA’s Jessica Bermon reports. There are about a thousand protein receptors in the nose that tell the brain what it’s smelling. Each receptor can detect one or more odors but scientists have never before linked a specific odor molecule to a particular receptor. Writing in the journal Science, researchers at New York’s Columbia University report doing just that with a meat odor and a receptor in the noses of rats. Steward Fairstine led the team of investigators. He says humans are capable of deceming something like ten thousand different odors. Mr. Fairstine says the research might also tell scientists more a bout brain chemicals and hormones which are part of the same family as odor receptors. Jessica Bermon, VOA news Washington.
The discovery by American researchers might help them understand ______.
The author "took the chair" for all the following reasons EXCEPT that
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