专业英语四级阅读理解分类模拟425

专业英语四级阅读理解分类模拟425

READING COMPREHENSION

Section A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS

In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.

Passage One

(1) The international space station is getting a new, inflatable room that resembles a giant spare tire, NASA announced on Wednesday. Slated to launch in mid-2015, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, will fly to space deflated before being puffed into a 13-by-10-foot cylinder. Rather than providing new living space for astronauts, the module will test whether inflatable habitats have a future as orbiting laboratories, lunar outposts or living quarters for deep-space missions. And it's arriving at a bargain price for space hardware. NASA is paying Bigelow Aerospace of Nevada $17.8 million for the module.

(2) "This is a great way for NASA to utilize private-sector investment, and for pennies on the dollar to expand our understanding of this technology," said Lori Garver, the agency's deputy administrator. Station astronauts will periodically enter the BEAM to check whether its thick yet flexible walls, which include layers of Kevlar (凯芙拉合成纤维), adequately block the twin hazards of space travel: radiation and micrometeoroids (微流星体) traveling faster than bullets. "The plan is to have the hatch closed most of the time, with the crew going in and out a few times a year to collect data," Garver said. The module will stay attached to the station for two years. "We have ambitions to go to the moon someday, have a base there," said Robert Bigelow, the real estate and hotel magnate who founded Bigelow Aerospace. Inflatables offer two advantages over traditional aluminum-can-like modules. They weigh less per cubic foot of living space, making them cheaper to launch, and they can balloon to diameters far too wide to fit in current rockets.

(3) Bigelow licensed the concept from NASA in 1999 after the agency abandoned plans to use inflatable living quarters for a mission to Mars. NASA is Bigelow's first customer. On Wednesday, Bigelow said he and his wife have invested $ 250 million into developing inflatable space habitats.

They hope to attract wealthy tourists, pharmaceutical companies and governments that want affordable space programs to an orbital outpost that Bigelow says will be ready to fly in 2016.

(4) Called Alpha, the private space station will offer living space for 12, twice the occupancy of the international space station. Renting one-sixth of Alpha for two months will cost $ 25 million, Bigelow said, transportation not included. It's unclear if a market exists for a private space station, said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Still, Bigelow has already tasted success. In 2006 and 2007, the company launched two small inflatable satellites atop Russian ballistic missiles. Both operated as planned.

(5) Wednesday's announcement marks a deepening of NASA's partnerships with commercial companies. The agency is also funding three companies developing craft to transport astronauts to and from orbit—vehicles also needed to bring customers to Bigelow's outposts. One of those companies, Space Exploration Technologies, or Space X, will fly the BEAM module to the space station in the "trunk" of one of its uncrewed Dragon capsules. "It sounds like a good deal for both NASA and Bigelow," said Pace. "Nothing can replace flight-test experience."

(6) The project may also stymie criticism that the 16-nation international space station, which took 13 years to construct, has been underutilized by NASA, said former station commander—Michael Lopez-Alegria, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "It's a real step in the right direction."

(本文选自https://www.360docs.net/doc/f113976119.html,)

Passage Two

(1) The year 2010 began with a herd of manufacturers chasing Amazon's Kindle. It ends with some of the same companies in pursuit of Apple's iPad. In between those tablet-computing crazes, we've all been challenged to keep up with the expanding universes of social networking and smartphones. (2) Nothing illustrates what makes the tech business both fascinating and frustrating as well as the rise of Facebook. The social-networking site crossed the 500 million-user mark and debuted numerous features, such as an upgraded e-mail service and options to share your location with friends and get discounts from nearby retailers. But it also spent much of the year infuriating (触怒) users with privacy changes that exposed more of their data and were confusing or impossible to undo. The simpler privacy interface it launched in May should help, but it won't if this company again forgets that its users don't all operate at start-up speeds.

(3) Other social networks had a smoother road. Twitter offered its growing user base a more reliable

service and a busier but more useful interface, while Foursquare had users checking into such far-off locations as the international space station.

(4) You can't write the story of any of these sites without noting how smartphones have allowed their users to connect from so many places. Apple's iPhone 4 led that pack in 2010, but Google's Android operating system improved at a faster pace and didn't require its users to sign up with only one carrier, even if some of the carriers selling Android phones showed a serious lack of taste in their tweaks (轻微调整) to Google's software.

(5) I probably devoted more column inches to smartphones than to any other sort of hardware, and with good reason: This is the most exciting, fastest-moving part of the electronics industry. Tablet computers aren't far behind, though. Apple's launch of the iPad in January redefined this market in a way that finally made the concept relevant to home users. Competitors took the hint and have begun rolling out devices that will never qualify as "iPad killers" but do earn the title of "iPad competitor." (6) The success of the iPad and other tablets pushed down the price of the Kindle and other e-book readers. But Amazon's e-reader may need to drop below $100 and get a major screen upgrade to hold its place in the market. Both smartphones and tablets have further eroded the significance of traditional desktop and laptop computers. Sure, people still buy the things in massive numbers. But when you can get so much work and play done on a smartphone or tablet—or, for that matter, any other device with a browser that can run Web-based applications like Google Does—why bother stressing out over your choice of one brand of computer?

(7) This trend has hurt Microsoft, the company that once benefited more than any other from the traditional computing market. Its biggest software shipment of the year, its Office 2010 productivity suite for its Windows operating system, was a yawner (无趣的东西) of a release.

(本文选自https://www.360docs.net/doc/f113976119.html,)

Passage Three

(1) When a doctor determines your risk for heart disease, he or she might look at your weight and blood pressure. But soon, they may also look at your neck. Independent of other factors, the width of your neck may play a role in determining your heart disease risk, according to researchers with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's Framingham Heart Study, who presented their data Wednesday at a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Fla.

(2) "It's very interesting that neck circumference was associated with (higher measures of) heart disease risk," said Dr. Vijay Nambi, a cardiologist at the Baylor College of Medicine, who was not