专题02 阅读理解-冲刺2023年中考英语必考题型终极预测（广州专用）

冲刺2023年中考英语必考题型终极预测（广州专用） （2023·广东广州·统考一模）   Traveling between Earth and space in an elevator (电梯), moving Earth away from the sun with huge engines . . . If you have watched the sci-fi blockbuster (大片) The Wandering Earth II, you must have been wowed by these amazing technologies. How far are these imaginative ideas from reality? Could we really achieve these things someday? Let’s take a look. ● Earth engines In the movie, the sun is becoming bigger and will “eat” Earth. People plan to build tens of thousands of engines on Earth in order to push it away from the sun. The energy will come from a nuclear fusion reaction (核聚变反应). Would this be possible? Wang Teng at the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Xinhua that in theory (理论上), nuclear fusion is powerful enough to move Earth. According to Wang, controllable nuclear fusion is one of the key problems scientists all over the world are working on. In the reaction, two atoms (原子) join into a heavier one, which creates a great amount of energy. It’s the same energy that powers the sun and other stars. In December 2022, US scientists made a big breakthrough (突破). For the first time in history, they made a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it cost. Although the energy gain (获得) was not much—only enough for boiling about 9.5 liters of water, scientists are positive they could use this reaction to produce clean energy in the future. ● Space elevators The space elevators in the movie look really cool. They travel fast between cables that connect Earth and the space station. According to Wang Yuanzhuo from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, this idea first came from Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895 after seeing the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The basic idea for space elevators is to connect one end of the cable to Earth and the other end to a space station that flies at the same speed Earth rotates (旋转). But the challenge, as experts told Xinhua, is to find the right material for the cables.