2024届高考英语外刊阅读天天练 综合训练 十六

高考英语外刊阅读天天练 综合训练 十六 I. 阅读理解 Mars has ‘enough sunken ice for a biblical flood’ 【The Times(January 19, 2024)】 Scientists have discovered what they believe to be a massive underground reservoir of ancient water ice buried beneath the equator of Mars. Layers of frozen water, some more than two miles thick, are thought to lie within the 3,100-mile long Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), one of Mars’s most geologically intriguing features. Studies of the area first hinted at the presence of mysterious underground deposits in 2007 but their composition was unclear. Now, more than 15 years later, data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter appears to confirm that it is frozen water — the largest deposit yet found at the Martian equator. “We’ve explored the MFF again using newer data from Mars Express’s Marsis [Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding] instrument, and we found the deposits to be even thicker than we thought,” said Thomas Watters, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Centre. “Excitingly, the radar signals match what we expect to see from layered ice and are similar to signals we see from Mars’s polar caps, which we know to be very ice-rich.” Were it liquid, the water would be enough to cover all of Mars in an ocean some 9ft deep. The finding is significant to research into how and why, over billions of years, the planet changed from a once warm, lush waterworld into a frigid desert. Understanding the history of water on Mars will also help to guide studies into the possibility of whether microbial life existed in the once abundant lakes and oceans. It was unclear, until now, whether the vast deposits detected below the surface of the MFF — a once volcanically active region ---- may simply have been ash and dust. However, the new observations by Marsis found the density was too low for that to be the case. “Given how deep it is, if the MFF was simply a giant pile of dust we’d expect it to become compacte