Our planet Earth is 4,600 million years old. If we reduce 【M1】______
this inconceivable time-span into an understandable concept, we
can liken the Earth with a person of 46 years of age. Nothing 【M2】______
is known about the first 7 years of this persons' life, and whilst
only scattered information exists about the middle span, we
know that only at the age of 42 did the Earth begin to flower.
Dinosaurs and the great reptiles did appear until one year 【M3】______
ago, when the planet was 45. Mammals arrived only 8 months
ago; in the middle of last week man-like apes revolved into 【M4】______
ape-like men, and at the weekend the past ice age enveloped 【M5】______
the Earth.
Modem man has been around for 4 hours. During the last
hour Man discovered the agriculture. The industrial revolution
began a minute early. During those sixty seconds of biological 【M6】______
time, Modem Man made a rubbish tip of the Paradise. He 【M7】______
has multiplied numbers to plague proportions, caused the 【M8】______
the extinction of 500 species of animals, ransacked the
planet of fuels and now stands like a brutish infant, gloating 【M9】______
over his meteoric rise to ascendancy, on the near brink of a 【M10】______
war to end all wars and of effectively destroying this oasis of
life in the solar system.
【M1】
SECTION B ENGLISH TO CHINESE
Directions: Translate the following text into Chinese.
The bird, however hard the frost may he, flies briskly to his customary roosting-place, and, with beak tucked into his wing, falls asleep. He has no apprehensions; only the hot blood grows colder and colder, the pulse feebler as he sleeps, and at midnight, or in the early morning, he drops from his perch—dead.
Yesterday he lived and moved, responsive to a thousand external influences, reflecting earth and sky in his small brilliant brain as in a looking-glass; also he had a various language, the inherited knowledge of his race, and the faculty of flight, by means of which he could shoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place to places and with it he was able to drop himself plumb down from the tallest tree-top, or out of the void air, on to a slender spray, and scarcely cause its leaves to tremble.
Now, on this morning, he lies stiff and motionless; so easy and swift is the passage from life to death in wild nature! But he was never miserable.