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  3. The unknown pervades the universe. That which people can see, with the aid of various sorts of telescope, accounts for just 4% o

The unknown pervades the universe. That which people can see, with the aid of various sorts of telescope, accounts for just 4% o

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问题     The unknown pervades the universe. That which people can see, with the aid of various sorts of telescope, accounts for just 4% of the total mass. The rest, however, must exist. Without it, galaxies would not survive and the universe would not be gently expanding, as witnessed by astronomers. What exactly constitutes this dark matter and dark energy remains mysterious, but physicists have recently uncovered some more clues, about the former, at least.
    One possible explanation for dark matter is a group of subatomic particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are thought to be the most abundant particles in the universe. According to the Standard Model, the most successful description of particle physics to date, neutrinos come in three varieties, called "flavors". Again, according to the Standard Model, they are point-like, electrically neutral and massless. But in recent years, this view has been challenged, as physicists realized that neutrinos might have mass.
    The first strong evidence came in 1998, when researchers at an experiment, based in Japan, showed that muon neutrinos produced by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere had gone missing by the time they should have reached an underground detector. Its operators suspect that the missing muon neutrinos had changed flavor, becoming electron neutrinos or-more likely-tau neutrinos. Theo- ry suggests that this process, called oscillation, can happen only if neutrinos have mass.
    Over the coming months and years, researchers hope to produce the most accurate measurements yet. The researchers created a beam of muon neutrinos first. On the other side of the target sat a particle detector that monitored the number of muon neutrinos leaving. The neutrinos then travelled 750km (450 miles) through the Earth to a detector in a former iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota. Researchers then were able to confirm that a significant number of muon neutrinos had disappeared-that is, they had changed flavor. While their mass is so small that neutrinos cannot be the sole constituent of dark matter, they have an advantage in that they are at least known to exist.
    The same cannot be said for sure of another possible form of dark matter being studied by a group of physicists in Italy. If the result continues to withstand scrutiny, it would appear to be evidence for an exotic new sort of fundamental particle, known as an axion, which could also be a type of dark matter.
How should we understand the process of oscillation?
选项 A、Cosmic rays are used to produce muon neutrinos.
B、Muon neutrinos went missing during experiments.
C、Cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere.
D、One flavor of neutrinos is changed into another one.
答案D
解析 细节题；oscillation尽管对于大多数考生都是生词，但是反而可以帮助我们更加迅速地定位到原文的第三自然段，通过对原文的阅读我们可以知道，对于neutrinos来说，在实验的过程中数量有所减少，而原文明确告诉我们数量减少必然出现形态的转换，也就是我们在第二自然段读到的3种不同的flavor，比较阅读选项，D正确地表达了这样的意思。
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