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  3. The Oil Produces World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petrol

The Oil Produces World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petrol

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问题                             The Oil Produces
    World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petroleum geologists, including me, have been predicting peak oil before 2007, but in an era of cheap oil, few people listened. Lately, several major oil companies seem to have got the message. One of Chevron’s ads says the world is currently burning 2 bbl. of oil for every barrel of new oil discovered. Exxon Mobil says 1987 was the last year that we found more oil worldwide than we burned. Shell reports that it will expand its Canadian oil-sands operations but elsewhere will focus on finding natural gas and not oil. It sounds as though Shell is kissing the oil business goodbye. M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist, correctly predicted in 1956 that oil production in the U.S. would peak in the early 1970s—the moment now known as "Hubbert’s Peak", I believe world oil production is about to reach a similar peak.
    Finding oil is like fishing in a pond. After several months, you notice that you are not catching as many fish. You could buy an expensive fly rod-new technology. Or you could decide that you have already caught most of the fish in the pond. Although increased oil prices (which ought to spur investment in oil production) and new technology help, they can’t work magic. Recent discoveries are modest at best. The oil sands in Canada and Venezuela are extensive, but the Canadian operations to convert the deposits into transportable oil consume large amounts of natural gas, which is in short supply.
    And technology cannot eliminate the difficulty Hubbert identified: the rate of producing oil depends on the fraction of oil that has not yet been produced. In other words, the fewer the fish in the pond, the harder it is to catch one. Peak production occurs at the halfway point. Based on the available data about new oil fields, there are 2,013 billion bbl. of total producible oil. Adding up the oil produced from the birth of the industry until today, we will reach the dreaded 1, 006. 5-billion-bbl. halfway mark late this year. For two years, I’ve been predicting that world oil production would reach its peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005. Today, with high oil prices pushing virtually all oil producers to pull up every barrel they can sweat out of the ground, I think it might happen even earlier.
We may infer from "recent discoveries are modest" (Line 10, para.2) that______.
选项 A、people stop searching for oil
B、people decrease the production of oil
C、people use less oil than they used to
D、the oil exploitation is limited
答案D
解析 推理判断题。由题干中的recent discoveries are modest定位至第二段倒数第二句。该段首句使用一比喻，将探测原油比喻成钓鱼。如果很长时间都钓不到鱼，可以从两方面来分析：需要买价钱昂贵、采用新技术的鱼饵；池塘中大部分的鱼已经钓光了。接下来用石油进行对比：价钱上涨，新技术加以应用，但结果还是不行。在指出Recent discoveries are modest at best后，作者以具体事例说明其原因：尽管有些地方石油储备广泛，但开采原油需要消耗大量的天然气，而后者的供应却不足。可见作者的言外之意是说，由于客观原因导致石油开发量有限，造成石油生产量不能持续增加，故[D]为答案。该段末句提到将石油储备转化成原油的困难，但没有指明人们不再探测石油，排除[A]；[B]具有很强干扰性，从文中可以看出石油生产量达不到最高值，不是人们有意控制，而是客观条件不允许，排除；句子上下文都没有提到有关石油消耗的问题，[C]没有依据，排除。
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