Unit 5 Meeting your ancestors课时作业

learning about language

Ⅰ.阅读理解

　　A

　　Getting close to active or erupting volcanoes can be dangerous. But for Michael Rampino, it's all in a day's work. Rampino is a volcanologist, a scientist who studies volcanoes and how they affect our planet. Rampino has been close to red­hot lava flows (熔岩流) in Hawaii and explosive volcanoes in Indonesia. He knows when to get close to an active volcano and when to back away.

　　Rampino wasn't always a volcanologist. He worked for NASA for seven years. He studied rocks until he began to research climate change and the effects that volcanoes have on climate. He became interested in the subject. "Once I started working with volcanoes，" Rampino said, "I was hooked."

　　Rampino is a professor at New York University. As part of his job, he travels to areas where volcanoes have been active. "Active" means they have erupted within the past few centuries and probably will erupt again. Rampino studies the deposits (沉积物) of ash and other materials from the eruptions. The ash may hold clues to what happened to the Earth in the distant past. It may also help scientists predict what could happen to Earth's climate in the future.

　　Rampino doesn't work alone. He works with a team of scientists who use computers to stimulate (模拟) the effects volcanoes have on Earth's atmosphere.

　　Being a volcanologist may be hard work, but it's also fun. "It's cool traveling the world studying volcanoes，" Rampino says. When he talks to students about his work, he tells them that his goal is "to understand the events that have shaped Earth's history."

篇章导读：本文是一篇记叙文。文章讲述了一位火山学家的相关事迹。