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  3. In the course of a long weekend in 1991, the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo volcano injected enough sulfur dioxide into the stratos

In the course of a long weekend in 1991, the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo volcano injected enough sulfur dioxide into the stratos

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问题     In the course of a long weekend in 1991, the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo volcano injected enough sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to temporarily reduce the sunlight reaching the earth’s surface by about 10%. As a result, global temperatures dropped by an average of 0.5 degrees °C over the next 18 months. Turns out the lesson nature taught us that weekend has not been wasted; it may help us combat global warming.
    The late climate scientist Stephen Schneider used to compare the modern world’s dependence on fossil fuels to a drug addict’s need for heroin. The habit is dangerous and unhealthy, yet almost impossible to break. Certainly, that’s the lesson to be drawn from the inability of the world’s governments to reduce carbon emissions over the past 20 years. So what are we to do? The solution for addiction often involves palliatives like methadone for a heroin junkie, and so it may be for our addiction to fossil fuels. Our planetary methadone, Schneider said, may be geoengineering—or the attempt to replicate the effect Mount Pinatubo had on the climate in 1991.
    Geoengineering, the deliberate modification of the environment to suit human needs, has long been regarded as the height of hubris by many people and most environmentalists. We are a long way from fully understanding how the climate system works. Who’s to say that in our efforts to tinker with it we won’t make things worse? These are valid concerns. But it is increasingly hard to see how we are going to solve global warming without some reliance on it. Indeed, after a lengthy study(in which I participated)the U.S. Government Accountability Office just issued a report about geoengineering that makes this very point.
    Can geoengineering really do the job? The evidence is all around us. Modern global warming is itself evidence of inadvertent geoengineering, the result of all that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere for a century or so. But it was the Pinatubo eruption that provided a modern-day example of geoengineering’s potential. Scientists studying the eruption wondered if they could do the same thing deliberately. The eventual result was an ingenious technology known as stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI, which today is on the verge of providing us with a potentially powerful tool to cool the planet.
    Under a plan currently being developed by Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, sulfur dioxide would be pumped up a 25-km-long pipe suspended by high-altitude balloons, then sprayed out into the stratosphere. Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer, says just one such pipe less than a foot in diameter could do the job for the entire northern hemisphere—at a cost of less than $1 billion. More research is needed, however, to establish the technology’s ramifications, including its effects on ozone levels.
The underlined word "inadvertent" in paragraph 4 most probably means______.
选项 A、unintended
B、adamant
C、impotent
D、omnipresent
答案A
解析 属词义推断题。理解词汇要联系其上下文，我们迅速定位到第四段第二句和第三句。其中第二句给予考生的提示颇为关键：我们身边有很多证据。从中我们能够推测到“inadvertent”的意思，身边有了太多的证据了，所以我们不用仔细找，不经意间就能发现证据。unintended是“无心的，不经意的”意思；adamant是“坚定不移的”意思；impotent是“无能的”意思；omnipresent是“无处不在的”意思，由此能够判断选项A为正确答案。
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