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  3. The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, e

The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, e

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问题     The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, extracting it in earnest began only in 1859 after an oil strike in Pennsylvania. It was used to make kerosene, the main fuel for artificial lighting after overfishing led to a shortage of whale blubber. Other liquids produced in the refining process, too unstable or smoky for lamplight, were burned or dumped. But the unwanted petrol and diesel did not go to waste for long, thanks to the development of the internal-combustion engine a few years later.
    Since then demand for oil has, with a couple of blips in the 1970s and 1980s, risen steadily alongside ever-increasing travel by car, plane and ship. Three-fifths of it ends up in fuel tanks. With billions of Chinese and Indians growing richer and itching to get behind the wheel of a car, the big oil companies, the International Energy Agency(IEA)and America’s Energy Information Administration all predict that demand will keep on rising.
    We believe that they are wrong, and that oil is close to a peak. This is not the "peak oil" widely discussed several years ago, when several theorists, who have since gone strangely quiet, reckoned that supply would flatten and then fall. We believe that demand, not supply, could decline. In the rich world oil demand has already peaked: it has fallen since 2005. Even allowing for all those new drivers in Beijing and Delhi, two revolutions in technology will dampen the world’s thirst for the black stuff.
    The first revolution was led by a man from Texas who has just died. George Mitchell championed "tracking" as a way to release huge supplies of "unconventional" gas from shale(a smooth soft rock)beds. This, along with vast new discoveries of conventional gas, has recently helped increase the world’s reserves from 50 to 200 years. The other great change is in automotive technology. Rapid advances in engine and vehicle design also threaten oil’s dominance. Foremost is the efficiency of the internal-combustion engine itself. Petrol and diesel engines are becoming ever more frugal.
    Not surprisingly, the oil "supermajors" and the IEA disagree. They point out that most of the emerging world has a long way to go before it owns as many cars, or drives as many miles per head, as America. But it would be foolish to predict from the rich world’s past to booming Asia’s future. The sorts of environmental policies that are reducing the thirst for fuel in Europe and America by imposing ever-tougher fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles are also being adopted in the emerging economies.
It can be inferred from the first paragraph that
选项 A、oil was first discovered and used in the Middle East.
B、the oil age is short-lived and has already come to its end.
C、the shortage of kerosene led to the use of petrol and diesel.
D、the oil age is largely attributed to technological developments.
答案D
解析 第一段第1句话提出the oil age，然后追溯石油利用和开采的历史，指出在石油利用的早期它只是用来生产煤油(make kerosene)，提炼过程中产生的汽油和柴油都白白浪费掉了。第一段最后一句话指出，汽油和柴油被真正加以利用得益于内燃机的发展(thanks to the development of internal-combustion engine)．由此可以看出。D项“石油时代极大地得益于科技的发展”概括了这个意思。
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