1 . 阅读下面小短文，根据上下文语境，选择合适的单词填入空白处，每个单词只使用一次，每个语篇有一个是多余的选项。

Mankind has been exploring space to find out the secret of the     1     and has    2     a lot of satellites into space, which can transmit     3     to scientists on earth. However, exploring space is dangerous and challenging. These disasters made everyone     4    , but the     5     to explore the universe never ends.

4 . Space exploration has always been the province of _________: The human imagination readily soars where human ingenuity (创造力) _________ to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly.

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the decade’s end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated (共鸣) with _________ and ambition in much the same way as the most famous _________ speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and _________ American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up in _________ with each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的) and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite .It is figuratively and literally otherworldly(超现实的) in its _________.

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no _________. The perpetual(不断的) argument is that _________ are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit(赤字), reaching toward the stars seems a dispensable luxury-- __________ saving one-thousandth of a single year’s budget would solve our problems.

But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the most bang for a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, __________ out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting a bottom-up attack on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within reach of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go __________.

The space dreamers end up __________ all of us-- not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off technologies they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed off each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can go beyond what were once considered inherent __________. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, health care. Tomorrow we will transcend(超越) these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is __________ of greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.

5 . In July, 2015, NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the "habitable zone" around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another "Earth"

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone—the area around à star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet—of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.

"On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns' host planets the Kepler has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0.”

Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth arid is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have-a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, ' its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than the earth is from the sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

"We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth's evolving environment," said Jon Jenkins, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. "If all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life should exist on this planet, there would be a good opportunity for life to arise."

To help confirm the finding and better determine the properties of the Kepler-452 system, the 'team conducted a series of ground-based observations: These measurements were the key for the researchers to confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-452b and to better pin down(确定)the size of the planet and its orbit.