Unit 1 Great scientists reading课时作业

阅读理解

　　A

　　(2019·济南5月针对性练习)In 1869, the Smiley family purchased an area of land about 100 miles north of New York City. Over time, some of their property and many of the surrounding landscapes became the Mohonk Preserve, which has since grown to 8，000 acres and attracts visitors and rock climbers.

　　But the Mohonk Preserve also has a long scientific legacy. In the 1930s, Dan Smiley, a descendent of the original owners, began keeping track of the plants and animals that lived in the area.

　　Megan Napoli is a research ecologist with the Mohonk Preserve in New York. She thinks Smiley's efforts produced a rare long­term data set of observations, which is useful for studying the impacts of climate change. For instance, other research has shown that songbirds are migrating north earlier and earlier in the spring.

　　It's important for the birds to arrive at the proper time in the spring, because they need to time their arrival with the insects' emergence. So they need to be here to establish their nesting sites and lay their eggs. Once the eggs hatch, they have their baby birds, so they need to time it when the insects are most abundant.

　　Napoli has begun analyzing about 76，000 observations of songbird migration dates collected by Smiley and his team to see if they, too, show that climate change has altered the timing of migrations. Her results suggest that they do.

　　Napoli found that short­distance migrants that spend their winters in the southern U．S. now arrive an average of eleven days earlier than they did in the 1930s. Long­distance migrants that overwinter in the tropics arrive roughly a week earlier. Napoli presented her results at a recent meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.

　　Meanwhile, who knows how many other long­term, personal data collections like Smiley's are out there, waiting to be discovered and to help improve official attempts to track the planet's changes.

　　【解题导语】　本文是一篇说明文。1869年，Smiley一家买下了纽约市以北约100英里处的一块土地，该地区后来发展成为8 000英亩的纽约莫霍克保护区。该地区原来的主人的一个后人Dan Smiley研究该地区的动植物，记录了大量的数据，为科学家研究气候变化提供了宝贵的资料。

1．What do we know about Dan Smiley?