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  3. Dozens of students at the University of Maryland have toiled in the physics lab, some soldering(焊接)metal parts, some checking so

Dozens of students at the University of Maryland have toiled in the physics lab, some soldering(焊接)metal parts, some checking so

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问题     Dozens of students at the University of Maryland have toiled in the physics lab, some soldering(焊接)metal parts, some checking software and some simply slicing black pieces of paper into perfectly sized triangles. To physics professor Eun-Suk Seo, all of their work is critical. Students are helping her build an equipment that is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station next year, the climax of more than 10 years of her painstaking work on cosmic rays in a collaboration with NASA. Seo is one of many faculty members at the University of Maryland at College Park who work with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, a partnership that allows professors and students to pioneer on a larger scale than would otherwise be possible—and sometimes to get close to history.
    U-Md. ranked fifth in the nation in NASA’s research and development budget for colleges in 2012, with the space agency pouring $47 million into the school’s research endeavours that year, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. Seo’s project—called ISS-CREAM(pronounced "ice cream")for International Space Station Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass—aims to answer the century-old space mystery of what gives cosmic rays such incredible energy, and how that affects the universe.
    Seo is doing her work using graduate and undergraduate students, some of whom are highly trained in engineering or physics, and others who have a more passing interest and go on to study, say, philosophy or music. Those are the ones she has cutting paper. By nature, being a graduate student often means working on cutting-edge research. U-Md. , though, is positioned to foster that through its coordination with NASA.
    The College Park campus is about five miles from Goddard’s 1,270-acre Greenbelt complex, which opened as NASA’s first space flight center in 1959. Named for the father of rocketry, Goddard was involved in the first manned space flights in the 1960s, managing communication networks during the Apollo missions and others. Goddard now employs about 10,000 people, making it one of the largest organizations of scientists and engineers in the world that use space observation to study Earth, the solar system and the universe. For more than a half-century, U-Md. professors and students have been involved in developing and executing Goddard missions, as well as gathering and analyzing data once the missions are launched. Initially, in the 1960s, university researchers took advantage of the quick drive to Goddard and a relationship that was more organic than formal. Now there are contracts and grants, and some professors and students spend more time at Goddard than on campus.
    The collaboration has led to countless advancements, such as those made by professor L. Drake Deming and two graduate students who used NASA telescopes recently to discover traces of water vapor on a planet almost 729 trillion miles from Earth. The partnership also has resulted in new asteroids(小行星)being named for U-Md. researchers and an alumnus in honor of their work in solar system studies. Protopapa and Kelleymichael were named for researchers Silvia Protopapa and Mike Kelley, respectively, and Matthewknight was named for alumnus Matthew Knight.
The passage aims to inform us that______.
选项 A、the U-Md. -Goddard program offers professors and students good opportunities
B、undergraduate and graduate students learn better when doing projects together
C、NASA shows special preference towards U-Md. for its short distance from Goddard
D、everyone, with or without special training, can contribute to the research of space
答案A
解析 主旨题。文章通过Seo教授与NASA的合作引出了马里兰州立大学与Goddard研究中心的合作，说明了马里兰州的教授和学生们依托NASA的资源，实现了许多原本没有机会实现的科学突破，并获得了荣誉，故[A]为答案。
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