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  3. Whenever I hear a weather report declaring it’s the hottest June 10 on record or whatever, I can’t take it too seriously, becaus

Whenever I hear a weather report declaring it’s the hottest June 10 on record or whatever, I can’t take it too seriously, becaus

admin2013-06-02  49
问题     Whenever I hear a weather report declaring it’s the hottest June 10 on record or whatever, I can’t take it too seriously, because "ever" really means "as long as the records go hack," which is only as far as the late 1800s. Scientists have other ways of measuring temperatures before that, though — not for individual dates, but they can tell the average temperature of a given year by such proxy measurements as growth marks in corals, deposits in ocean and lake sediments, and cores drilled into glacial ice. They can even use drawings of glaciers as there were hundreds of years ago compared with today.
    And in the most comprehensive compilation of such data to date, says a new report from the National Research Council, it looks pretty certain that the last few decades have been hotter than any comparable period in the last 400 years. That’s a blow to those who claim the current warm spell is just part of the natural up and down of average temperatures — a frequent assertion of the global-warming-doubters crowd.
    The report was triggered by doubts about past-climate claims made last year by climatologist Michael Mann, of the University of Virginia (he’s the creator of the "hockey stick" graph A1 Gore used in "An Inconvenient Truth" to dramatize the rise in carbon dioxide in recent years). Mann claimed that the recent warming was unprecedented in the past thousand years — that led Congress to order up an assessment by the prestigious Research Council. Their conclusion was that a thousand years was reasonable, but not overwhelmingly supported by the data. But the past 400 was — so resoundingly that it fully supports the claim that today’s temperatures are unnaturally warm, just as global warming theory has been predicting for a hundred years. And if there’s any doubt about whether these proxy measurements are really legitimate, the NRC scientists compared them with actual temperature data from the most recent century, when real thermometers were in widespread use. The match was more or less right on.
    In the past nearly two decades since TIME first put global warming on the cover, then, the argument against it has gone from "it isn’t happening" to "it’s happening, but it’s natural," to "it’s mostly natural" — and now, it seems, that assertion too is going to have to drop away. Indeed, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee and who asked for the report declared that it did nothing to support the notion of a controversy over global warming science — a controversy that opponents keep insisting is alive. Whether President Bush will finally take serious action to deal with the warming, however, is a much less settled question.  
What is "proxy measurement" in Paragraph 1 likely to refer to?
选项 A、Studying the characteristics of glaciers.
B、Measuring the growth signs of aquatic organism.
C、Taking advantage of previous pictures.
D、Using clues left from the past.
答案D
解析 本题考查通过上下文猜词意的能力，问“第一段中的‘proxy measurement’指的是什么”。通过前半句“Scientists have other ways of measuring temperatures before that, though—not for individual dates, but they can tell the average temperature of a given year by such proxy measurements ...”，可知科学家虽不能测出地球历史上海一天的准确温度，但能够通过“某种测量方式”推测出它的年平均温度，由此我们可以猜到这种方式是一种间接测量，以获得一个均值。后半句以及接下来的一句解释了这究竟是一种怎样的间接测量方式：“... as  growth marks in corals, deposits in ocean and lake sediments, and cores drilled into glacial ice. They can even use drawings of glaciers as there were hundreds of years ago compared with today.”，即测量珊瑚的生长标记，海洋的沉淀物，湖泊沉积物，冰川核，还可以对比冰川几百年前和现在的形状图。也就是说通过测量地球在过去遗留下来的东西，来获得地球温度的间接数据。因此，D项“利用以前留下的线索”正确。
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