It has been a hundred years since the last big one in California, the 1906 San Francisco earth quake, which helped give (1)_____

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问题     It has been a hundred years since the last big one in California, the 1906 San Francisco earth quake, which helped give (1)_____ to modem earthquake science. A century later, we have a highly successful (2)_____, called plate tectonics, that explains why 1906-type earthquakes happen—along with why continents drift, mountains rise, and volcanoes (3)_____ the Pacific Rim. Plate tectonics may be one of the (4)_____ triumphs of the human mind, geology’s (5)_____ to biology’s theory of evolution. And yet scientists still can’t say when an earthquake will happen. They can’t even come (6)_____.
    What scientists can do right now is make good maps of fault zones and (7)_____ out which ones are probably due (8)_____ a rupture. And they can make forecasts. A forecast might say that, over a certain number of years, there is a certain (9)_____ of a certain magnitude earthquake in a (10)_____ spot. And that you should fix your house to its foundation and glue the water heater to the wall.
    Turning forecasts into predictions—"a magnitude 7 earthquake is (11)_____ here three days from now"—may be impossible, but scientists are doing everything they can to solve the (12)_____ of earth quakes. They break rocks in laboratories, studying how stone (13)_____ under stress. They hike (14)_____ ghost forests where dead trees (15)_____ of long-ago tsunamis. They make maps of unsecured, balanced rocks to see where the ground has (16)_____ in the past and how hard. They dig ditches across faults, searching for the active trace. They have wired up fault zones with so many sensors it is (17)_____ the Earth is a patient (18)_____ intensive care.
    (19)_____, we tell ourselves—trying hard to be persuasive—there must be some way to (20)_____ order and criterion on all that untrustworthy ground.


选项 A、myths
B、secrets
C、mysteries
D、puzzles

答案C

解析 词汇辨析题。本段提到"对地震做出准确的预报,至少在目前来讲是不太可能的,但科学家正在想方设法解决这一问题";既然对地震的发生仍然无法预测,也就是说地震对人类来说,还是个未知数,因此选mysteries意为"神秘,神秘的事物之谜"。myth"神话,虚构的故事";secret"秘密,秘诀,奥秘";puzzle"难题,谜",尤指难以解决、解释或使人陷入困惑的问题或事情;这三个词用在这里均不符合题意。
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