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  3. If our solar system has a Hell, it’s Venus. The air is choked with foul and corrosive sulfur, heaved from ancient volcanoes and

If our solar system has a Hell, it’s Venus. The air is choked with foul and corrosive sulfur, heaved from ancient volcanoes and

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问题     If our solar system has a Hell, it’s Venus. The air is choked with foul and corrosive sulfur, heaved from ancient volcanoes and feeding acid clouds above. Although the second planet is a step farther from the sun than Mercury, a runaway greenhouse effect makes it hotter indeed. It’s the hottest of the nine plants, a toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit of baking rocky flats from equator to poles. All this under a crushing atmospheric pressure 90 times that of where you’re sitting now. From the earthly perspective, a dead end. It must be lifeless.
    "Venus has nothing," is the blunt word from planetologist Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. "We’ve written it off."
    Yet a small group of advanced life-forms on Earth begs to differ, and theorizes that bizarre microbial ecosystems might have once populated Venus and, in fact, may be there still. Members of this loose band of researchers suggest that their colleagues have water too much on the brain, and are, in a sense, H2O chauvinists.
    "Astrobiologists are neglecting Venus due more to narrow thinking than actual knowledge of the environment, or environments, where life can thrive," says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a geobiologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who recently co-authored a Venus-boosting paper in Astrobiology with colleague Louis Irwin.
    The bias against life on Venus is partly rooted in our own biology. Human experience instructs that liquid water, preferably lot of it, is essential for life. In search for extraterrestrial life, we obsess over small rivers in Mars’ surface apparently carved by ancient gushes of water, and delight in hints of permafrost just underneath its surface.(By comparison, Venus isn’t even that interesting to look at: A boring cue ball for backyard astronomers, its clouds reflects 75% of visible light.)Attention and then funding follow the water: Three more landers will depart for Mars this spring, and serious plans for sample-return missions hover in the midterm future.
    "If you have limited resources, you base exploration on what you know," says Arizona State University planetary geologist Ronal Greeley. It’s like losing your keys on the way home at night: The first place you look is under the streetlights not because they’re more likely to be there, but because if they are, you’ll spot them. For astrobiologists, the streetlights are the spectral lines for water, and they’ve spotted that potential on Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, even Neptune’s moon Triton. Not on the baking rocky flats of Venus.
What do we learn from the passage about Venus and Mars?
选项 A、The atmospheric pressure of Venus is stronger than Mars.
B、Venus attracts more attention and funding than Mars.
C、Venus is closer to the Sun than Mars.
D、Venus looks more beautiful than Mars.
答案C
解析 从第1段第3句可以知道水星是离太阳最近的行星，而金星只比它离太阳远一点，也就是说金星比其他七颗行星离太阳都要近，当然也就比火星离太阳较近了，因此C为本题答案。文章没有就A中的atmospheric pressure对比火星和金星，而倒数第2段末句暗示了火星因有水的遗迹而吸引了更多的关注和研究资金，故A、B都不对；文中在第5段括号里的内容对比了两个行星，但D与文意相反，故也不对。
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