2006年考研英语预测试题二及答案精析

［E］ The increasing attention given to the biodiversity crisis highlights the inadequacy of biodiversity research itself. Earth remains in this respect a relatively unexplored planet. The total number of described and formally named species of organisms has grown, but not by much, and today is generally believed to lie somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million. The full number, including species yet to be discovered, has been estimated in various accounts that differ according to assumptions and methods from an improbably low 3.5 million to an improbably high 100 million. By far the greatest fraction of the unknown species will be insects and microorganisms.

［F］ The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a much clearer picture of the magnitude of the biodiversity problem. Put simply, the biosphere has proved to be more diverse than was earlier supposed, especially in the case of small microorganisms. An entire domain of life, the Archaea, has been distinguished from the bacteria, and a huge, still mostly unknown and energetically independent environment has been found to extend three kilometers or more below the surface of Earth.

［G］ The first is information technology, with which high-resolution digitized images of specimens can now be obtained. Moreover, type specimens, scattered in museums around the world can now be photographed and made instantly available everywhere as “e瞭ypes” on the Internet. The second revolution about to catapult biodiversity studies forward is genomics, which will soon enable scientists to describe bacterial and archaean species by partial DNA sequences and to subsequently identify them by genetic bar-coding.

F→41. →42. →43. →44. →45. →B