Directions: Read the
following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into
Chinese. Write your translation clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2.
Time was when the solar system had two watery worlds. 61) Directly next
door to the warm, wet, loamy Earth was the warm, wet, loamy Mars, both planets
covered with oceans and running with rivers—and both possibly teeming with
life. Billions of years ago, however, the low-gravity Mars had both its air
and water leak away, causing the planet to become the dead, freeze-dried place
it is today. That is what the prevailing thinking has been.
Now, it appears that thinking may be wrong. 62) Recently, NASA released new
images from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that suggest water may be
flowing up and streaming onto the Martian surface—dramatically increasing the
likelihood that at least part of the planet is biologically alive. "If these
results prove true," says Ed Weiler, associate administrator of NASA’s Office of
Space Science," [they have] profound implications for the possibility of life. "
Finding liquid water on Mars’ surface has never been
easy—because it simply can’t exist there. The modern-day Martian atmosphere has
barely 1 percent the density of Earth’s, and its average temperature hovers
around 67 degrees Fahrenheit (19 degrees Centigrade). In an environment as harsh
as this, water would either vaporize into space or simply flash-freeze in place.
63) Scientists studying Martian history have always looked for clues the
planet’s ancient water left behind—tracks where vanished rivers once flowed,
basins where vanished seas once stood. 64) The
approximately 65,000 images the Surveyor orbiter has beamed home in the nearly
three years it has been circling Mars are full of this kind of expected
hydro-scarring. But some of the pictures took scientists by surprise. The
older a formation is, the more likely it is to have been distorted over the
eons—smoothed by periodic windstorms or gouged by the occasional incoming
meteor. However, a few of the newly discovered water channels look fresh. That
discovery has lead astonished researchers to conclude that these channels may
have been recently formed. 65) Planetologists have long
assumed that if underground water was going to bubble up on Mars, it would have
to be somewhere in the balmy equatorial zones, where temperatures at noon in
midsummer may reach 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Centigrade). Almost
all the new channels, however, were discovered at the planet’s relative
extremes-north of 30 degrees north latitude and south of 30 degrees south
latitude—and all were carved on the cold, shaded sides of slopes.