1 . British sculptor Jason Taylor has made it his mission to use his talent to conserve our ecosystems by creating underwater museums. Over the years, the environmentalist has put over 850 massive artworks underwater worldwide. On February 1, 2021, Taylor launched his latest work---The Underwater Museum of Cannes.
“The main goal was to bring attention to the fact that our oceans need our help,” Taylor told Dezeen. “Ocean ecologies have been destroyed by human activity in the Mediterranean over the past few decades, and it is not obvious what is taking place when observing the sea from afar.”
The Underwater Museum of Cannes contains 6 sculptures featuring local residents of various ages. They range from Maurice, an 80-year-old fisherman, to Anouk, a 9-year-old student. Towering over 6-feet-tall and weighing 10 tons, the faces are sectioned into two parts, with the outer part like a mask. The mask indicates that the world’s oceans appear powerful and unbeatable from the surface but house an ecosystem that is extremely fragile to careless human activities.
Though the waters surrounding the sculptures now appear a pristine blue, the seabed was filled with old boat engines, pipes, and other human-made trash when the project began about four years ago. Besides removing the trash, Taylor also restored the area’s seagrass. Just one square meter of the seagrass can generate up to 10 liters of oxygen daily. The seagrass also helps prevent coastal erosion and provides habitats for many ocean creatures.
“The idea of creating an underwater museum was to draw more people underwater and develop a sense of care and protection,” Taylor told Dezeen. “If we threw unwanted waste near a forest, there would be a public outcry. But this is happening every day in our surrounding waters and it largely goes unnoticed.”
1. What are the underwater museums intended to do?| A．To make huge profits. | B．To raise awareness of protecting the ocean. |
| C．To show Jason Taylor’s talent. | D．To draw attention to endangered sea animals. |
| A．To popularize the features of the locals. |
| B．To remind people to protect themselves. |
| C．To reflect people’s protection of the ocean. |
| D．To stress the sensitiveness of the ecosystem. |
| A．How the project was started. | B．How the seagrass was restored. |
| C．What recovery effort the project made. | D．Why the surroundings were improved. |
| A．The situation of the ocean is easily ignored. |
| B．The destruction caused to the ocean is noticeable. |
| C．Forests play a more important role in ecosystems. |
| D．People have zero tolerance to damage done to nature. |
2 . Shining just 12 light-years from Earth, the star Tau Ceti so resembles the sun that it has appeared in numerous science- fiction stories and was the first star astronomers ever searched for signs of intelligent life, half a century ago. In 2012 Tau Ceti grew still more interesting when astronomers reported five possible planets somewhat larger than Earth circling closer to the star than Mars orbits (围绕……运动) the sun—one of which is in the star’s habitable zone. Newly released images taken by the Herschel Space Observatory provide even more insight about Tau Ceti’s solar system: greater detail about its dust belt.
Dust arises when asteroids and comets (小行星和彗星) crash into one another, so its location reveals where these dust- creating objects—which are too small to be seen directly—orbit a star. In Tau Ceti’s case, “it’s quite a wide dust belt,” says Samantha Lawler of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. As her team reported in November, the belt’s inner edge is roughly two to three astronomical units (AUs) from the star, which is the position of our own sun’s asteroid belt. (An AU is the distance from Earth to the sun.) Tau Ceti’s dust belt extends out to 55 AU, which would be just beyond our system’s main Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, the zone of small bodies whose largest member is probably Pluto. Presumably full of asteroids and comets, Tau Ceti’s dust belt most likely lacks a planet as large as Jupiter, Lawler says. The gravity of such a massive planet would have driven away most small space rocks.
Within a year a new series of radio telescopes in Chile called ALMA should provide a sharper view of the disk, especially of its inner edge. The ALMA images will help astronomers confirm whether the star’s five proposed planets are indeed real. If the disk overlaps the planets’ hypothesized (假设的) orbits, then they probably do not exist; they would have kept away most asteroids near the star, removing the source of dust.
If those planets do exist, however, Lawler’s team suggests that Tau Ceti’s planetary system may resemble what our solar system would have looked like had the four giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune- never formed: small planets orbiting close to the star, and nothing but asteroids, comets and dust beyond.
1. According to astronomers, the five possible planets of Tau Ceti________.| A．resembled Earth in size |
| B．functioned like a solar system |
| C．were located in Tau Ceti’s habitable zone |
| D．were nearer to Tau Ceti than Mars to the sun |
| A．It is narrower than the asteroid belt in our system. |
| B．The bodies inside it are all smaller than Jupiter. |
| C．The gravity of Tau Ceti makes it get denser. |
| D．It is over 55 astronomical units in width. |
| A．they don’t move into the dust belt while orbiting Tau Ceti |
| B．they have kept away most asteroids and comets |
| C．they don’t crash into any asteroid or comet |
| D．they can be seen clearly by ALMA |
| A．is useful because it stops asteroids or comets crashing into the star |
| B．makes Tau Ceti different from the sun because it extends farther |
| C．is interesting because it keeps other planets away from Tau Ceti |
| D．plays a role in helping decide whether the five planets are real |
