晚练册 第11周-【晨读晚记】2023-2024学年高三上学期英语阅读强化训练

Week Eleven 第11周 晚练 的阅读理解A 原创 If you want to touch a piece of Earth's ancient past,take a rock.Some may have formed fairly recently. Others are billions of years old.Both can tell us about our planet's history. For more than 100 years,scientists have defined minerals by the chemical elements they contain and the arrangement of the atoms in those elements.But that can leave out other important differences.Instead of asking what they're made of,Robert Hazen and his colleagues now ask:"How was this made?"That means thinking about minerals as things that evolve out of the history of life,Earth and the solar system.Hazen's team have already made a few new discoveries. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old.The oldest signs of life appeared about 3.5 billion years ago.But Hazen's team finds that most geologic environments where the earliest life may have arisen as early as 4.3 billion years ago.That means life may have formed almost as soon as Earth did.For rocky worlds,that could show the potential for life is baked in at the very beginning of a planet.But when Earth became ripe for life isn't all that clear. The new results also show "water is just incredibly important".At least on Earth,roughly 80 percent of the known types of minerals need water to form.This means that if researchers see water on a planet like Mars, they can expect it may have a wide range of minerals.Scientists could first identify what minerals are on the Red Planet.Then they could use the catalog to work out what Mars'environment was like in the past.Perhaps they can expound a group of minerals only by the presence of water or life. Right now,scientists do this detective work on just a few minerals at a time."And that's just the beginning. What makes this catalog so valuable is that every new generation of scientists can update it,"Hazen says."We can go back to it again and again and again for different kinds of questions.We're just scratching the surface." How did Hazen's team classify minerals? A.B