Module 6 课时跟踪练（一) Introduction & Reading - Pre-reading

　　Ⅰ.阅读理解

　　A

　　There are some unusual things living in the world's oceans: a "city" made up of tens of millions of relatives of starfish living on the peak of a seamount, or underwater peak north of the Antarctic Circle; a huge, 16­inch long by one­quarter­inch wide mollusk (软体动物), Chaetoderma felderi, discovered deep in the Gulf of Mexico near Louisiana; and enormous bacteria (细菌) in the eastern South Pacific that may help clean polluted ocean floors.

　　Those are just some of the 5,300 new ocean species that scientists have identified so far. The findings are a general situation of aquatic life. Scientists estimate that the number of sea creatures will come in around 230,000.

　　Some 2,000 scientists from 82 countries are working on the project, which will eventually collect DNA "barcodes" for many of them, estimates of changes in their populations and how they fit into the food chain, and Web pages with the Encyclopedia of Life, a project to put information about all known species online.

　　Another striking finding is a "white shark cafe" - a gathering of white sharks midway between California and Hawaii. In a March interview with CBC Radio One, marine scientist Barbara Block speculated (推测) that the sharks are meeting there to eat and socialise.

　　As the research goes on, not only do scientists have a better picture of the distribution (分布) of the animals that stay in place, they are also approaching a global picture of the movements of animals.

　　语篇解读：本文介绍了海底的情况，涉及科学家对海洋生物的研究。

　　1．Which of the following may make the polluted ocean floor clean?

　　A．Starfish.　　　　　　　 　B．Mollusk.

　　C．Bacteria. D．Sharks.

　　解析：选C　细节理解题。根据第一段可知，细菌可能对海底有清洁作用。

　　2．The underlined word "aquatic" in Paragraph 2 probably means ________.

　　A．oceanic B．imaginative

　　C．various D．newly found

解析：选A　词义猜测题。全文涉及的都是科学家对海洋生物的研究，因此此处也是指海洋生物的普遍情况。