1 . Andy heard from his friend that a comet (彗星) was coming. He knew that a comet is a space rock. He wanted to watch it at
When the evening came, it was a bit cold. So Andy
“Where is the comet? I only see the moon and some stars, ” he asked his friend on the phone. His friend told him where to look,
Andy went to wake his father up who was just
“I think it would be like the moon or something, ” Andy said. “It's not big enough for that, and it might still be very
“I still wish I can see it better. ”
His father nodded and went inside. When he came back, he had a telescope(望远镜) in his hands. Through
After that night, Andy became interested in space and he thought being a(n)
The moon goes around the earth every 27. 3 days. But do you know you can always only see one side of the moon? We call it the near side. The other side always turns away from us. We call it the far side or the dark side.
If you’re on the moon, you’ll be much lighter. You’ll weigh about one sixth of your weight on the earth. There are many places to go if you want to feel like you’re weightless.
Everybody knows that human have been on the moon, but not everyone knows that the moon now is like a picnic area. The astronauts left much rubbish after they left the place. Scientists estimate that there are 181, 437 kilograms of man-made materials(材料）.
Many believe that the full moon(满月) brings out the strangest acts in people, although science hasn’t been able to offer exact proof(证据).Research by scientists at Basel University in Switzerland has found that,around a full moon, people may take longer time to fall asleep, sleep less and sleep less deeply. Next time, if you can’t get to sleep, have a look out of the window. If there’s a full moon, it might not be your partner’s tossing and turning keeping you awake—it could be the full moon.
1. How often does the moon go around the earth?It goes around the earth
2. How much do you weigh on the moon if you are 60 kilograms on the earth?
You weigh about
3. Why is the moon like a picnic area?
Because the astronauts left
4. Which word means “估计” in the third paragraph?
It is “
5. What strange acts may happen to people when there is a full moon?
People may take longer time to sleep,
3 . A question has made the public think a lot for more than a century: Whether(是否) there is life on Mars.
A British spaceship and Europe’s Mars spaceship plan to land on Mars or enter the orbit(轨道) around it. One of the NASA’s spaceships is going to land on January 3, and the other is going to land on the opposite side of Mars on January 24.
Since 1960, over twenty spaceships sent to Mars have failed. Most were lost when they started flying up or landing because those were the most difficult time of any flights.
Scientists wanted to find out whether there was water on Mars. In October, a team of scientists reported that Mars was a dry wasteland(荒地). But weeks later, a second team reported differently that they had found some marks(痕迹). They showed clearly that they were made by the rivers. Such marks told us that Mars was a warmer place billions of years ago—just as life first appeared on Earth. Scientists at once asked the following questions: If it was true, what happened on Mars? Then what about the earth?
Maybe one day, in the near future, human beings will land on Mars, settle on Mars, and directly look for life.
1. What are people talking about for more than a century?| A．When Mars came into being. | B．Whether there is life on Mars. |
| C．Whether people can live on Mars. | D．How people can fly to Mars. |
| A．will land on the different sides of Mars | B．will land on the same day |
| C．will enter the orbit around Mars | D．will land with a man |
| A．A travel guide. | B．A film magazine. | C．A music website. | D．A science book. |
4 . In the universe, as we all know, there is the sun, the moon, the earth and many stars. Through our geography lessons, we know the earth goes around the sun, and the moon goes around the earth. We have day and night because the earth keeps turning all the time. When our part of the earth turns to the sun, it is day. When our part of the earth turns away from the sun, it is night.
Just because the moon is closer to the earth than the sun, it looks much bigger than the sun. Big things look smaller when they are further, and small things also look bigger when they are nearer.
The sun is big enough to give out very strong light. The moon can’t give any light at all, but it looks quite bright, too. Why? In fact, the light from the moon comes from the sun. The moon looks much bigger and brighter than the stars, but actually the stars are much bigger and brighter than the moon. They look smaller than the moon also because they’re further away from the earth than the moon.
We all know that at 9:00 a. m. on October 15th, 2003, Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei went to space. He stayed there for 21 hours. It was the first time for Chinese to get into space. Then in the following years, more and more people get into space. I hope I will go to space one day.
1. When our part of the earth turns to the sun, it is ________.| A．day | B．night | C．evening | D．Sunday |
| A．smaller; closer to | B．smaller; further from |
| C．bigger; closer to | D．bigger; further from |
| A．快速的 | B．必须的 | C．寂静的 | D．明亮的 |
| A．On November 16th, 2003. | B．On October 16th, 2003. |
| C．On November 15th, 2003. | D．On October 15th, 2003. |
5 . A black hole is a place in outer space with very strong gravity. Gravity is a great force（力量） that shapes the universe. On Earth, gravity makes apples fall from trees. It keeps your feet planted on the ground. The gravity in a black hole is much stronger. It is so strong that nothing around it can get away from it, not even light.
Black holes are invisible. We can’t actually see them because they don’t throw back light. But scientists can find them with space telescopes and special tools. The strong gravity makes nearby stars move in a certain way. By studying how the stars move, scientists can find out if they are flying around a black hole. Strange things happen around black holes. This makes black holes a popular subject of science fiction（科幻）stories, although they are very unreal.
A black hole forms（形成）when a star dies. The star falls in on itself and turns into a very small point. Because of its small size and huge mass（质量）, the gravity will be so strong that it will pull light in and become a black hole. Black holes can grow huge as they continue to pull other things in and “eat” them. Many scientists believe that there are super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, including the Milky Way.
The idea of the black hole was first suggested by two different scientists in the 18th century: John Michelle and Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1967, a physicist named John Archibald Wheeler came up with the name “black hole”. Studying black holes can tell us many things about our galaxy and help scientists answer questions about the universe.
1. The word “invisible” in Paragraph 2 probably means “________”.| A．far to go | B．easy to find |
| C．difficult to catch | D．impossible to see |
| A．how big black holes are | B．how heavy black holes are |
| C．how black holes are formed | D．how black holes “eat” stars |
| A．a star’s moving path can help scientists find a black hole |
| B．writers love writing about black holes because they are real |
| C．many scientists believe that there aren’t any black holes at the center of the Milky Way |
| D．John Archibald Wheeler found the first black hole in space |
6 . China landed a spacecraft on Mars for the first time on May 15, 2021. This makes China the first country to make a successful landing on Mars on its first mission to Mars. China’s Zhurong rover（探测车）, named after a traditional Chinese fire god, has landed on the Martian surface.
The rover is part of the Tianwen-1 mission, which consists of an orbiter（轨道飞行器）, a probe（探测器）, and a lander. The mission was launched in summer last year, and took seven months to complete its journey to the red planet. It arrived at Mars in February this year, and since then the spacecraft has been performing operations such as capturing images of Mars.
Believe it or not, traveling to Mars is actually the easy part of such a mission. The truly hard part is landing on the planet’s surface, as landers must deal with factors like the planet’s thin atmosphere, its variable（多变的）dust storms, and a communication delay（延迟）between Mars and Earth. This delay makes it impossible for people in Mission Control on Earth to control a craft in real time as it gets close to the planet, so the landing must be performed autonomously（自主地）.
To slow its speed as the lander got close to the surface, it used both a parachute（降落伞）and a retrorocket（减速火箭）in its own “seven minutes of terror（恐惧）” as it moved through the atmosphere. It then landed in the Utopia Planitia area, part of which was exploded by NASA’s Viking 2 lander in the 1970s.
The rover will now begin its three-month mission to explore the Utopia Planitia area, where it will be searching for surface and subsurface ice. The mission will include both the rover and the orbiter working together to create a map of water ice, with the orbiter focusing on the planet’s polar areas.
1. Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?| A．The Tianwen-1 mission includes four space missions. |
| B．Zhurong was known as a great astronomer in ancient China. |
| C．The spacecraft has carried out a series of experiments in advance. |
| D．China achieved success in landing on Mars creating a new record. |
a. Mars’s atmosphere.
b. Mars’s bad weather.
c. The landing instructions.
d. The communication delay.
| A．abc | B．bcd | C．abd | D．abcd |
| A．The landing way is quite different. |
| B．The landing process is full of danger. |
| C．The landing site is unknown to NASA. |
| D．The landing time is calculated precisely（精确地）. |
| A．The analysis of ice samples. |
| B．The mapping of water ice on Mars’s polar areas. |
| C．The exploration of the Utopia Planitia area. |
| D．The search of surface and subsurface ice. |
| A. information B. different C. see D. send |
We live on the planet（星球）Earth. Could we live on a
Scientists on Earth tell rovers what to do. Talking to rovers is something like playing a computer game. From Earth scientists can
8 . When we talk about the universe, we mean not only the earth, the sun and the moon, but also the stars and space between them. There are millions of stars in our sky. The sun is one of them. Around it there are eight big planets moving, including the earth. The moon is our nearest neighbour in space. If you look at the sky on a clear night, it is possible to see about 3,000 stars. They look small, but they are really very big hot balls of burning(燃烧着的) gas. Some of them are huge, but others are much smaller like our planet Earth. The biggest stars are very bright, but they can only live for a short time. Every day new stars are born and old stars die.
All the stars are very far away. The light from the nearest star (except the sun) takes more than four years to reach the earth.
Hundreds of years ago, people used stars, like the North Star, to know which direction(方向) to travel in. Today you can still see that star.
1. The universe means ________.| A．the earth | B．the sun, the moon and the stars |
| C．space between the stars | D．All of the above. |
| A．four years | B．1,000 days | C．100 years | D．four light years |
| A．when they were working | B．to tell them when to do farm work |
| C．while they were travelling | D．just for fun |
THE MOON
Son: Look, Dad! How bright and near the moon looks tonight!
Father: But it isn’t as near as it looks.
Son: I know it’s far away from the earth.
Father: It’s three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away.
Son: How far is that?
Father: Well, it takes more than three days to get there by spaceship.
Son: A spaceship flies very, very fast, doesn’t it?
Father: Yes. It flies at about eleven kilometers a second. In 1969 two Americans got to the moon by spaceship. That was one of the most exciting moments of that year.
Son: They didn’t find any living things there, did they?
Father: No, they didn’t. It’s too hot in the day and too cold at night. Nothing can live on the moon.
Son: I hear walking on the moon is more difficult. It’s like jumping and flying. Is that so?
Father: Yes, isn’t that interesting! Everything is much lighter on the moon. You can jump much higher on the moon than on the earth.
Son: I wish I could fly to the moon in a spaceship one day. It must be great fun.
1. How does the moon look tonight?2. How far is the moon from the earth?
3. How far can a spaceship fly in an hour?
4. Why can you jump much higher on the moon than on the earth?
5. What does the underlined word “that” mean?
What is the solar system? It is our sun and other
Our solar system including the Sun, the Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Our solar neighborhood is an
While others disagree with the ideas above. They believe we will like inner space better
Which one do you believe? I can’t wait
