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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.
The purpose of the co-authored paper by Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Louis Irwin was to
选项 A、introduce their findings about Venus.
B、promote the exploration of Venus.
C、convince others that there used to be lives on Venus.
D、criticize other scientists that they are narrow-minded.
答案B
解析 第4段中的“a Venus—boosting paper”，说明这篇文章的目的是推动金星研究或探索，因此B为本题答案。从“a Venus-boosting paper”可知这篇文章的目的是“boost”(推动)而不是“introduce”(介绍)，因此A不对。C、D的干扰性很强，这两项与Dirk Schulze-Makuch所说的话有关，但是Dirk所说的其实并不是文章的观点，他所说的这段话与后面提到的paper是互不相关的两回事，事实上，后面提到了Dirk与别人合作写了一篇文章，只是为了向读者提供有关Dirk的背景。因此他说的并不是文章的观点或目的，故C、D都不对。
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