When global warming finally came, it stuck with a vengeance (异乎寻常地). In some regions, temperatures rose several degrees in less than a century. Sea levels shot up nearly 400 feet, flooding coastal settlements and forcing people to migrate inland. Deserts spread throughout the world as vegetation shifted drastically in North America, Europe and Asia. After driving many of the animals around them to near extinction, people were forced to abandon their old way of life for a radically new survival strategy that resulted in widespread starvation and disease. The adaptation was farming: the global-warming crisis that gave rise to it happened more than 10,000 years ago.
As environmentalists convene in Rio de Janeiro this week to ponder the global climate of the future, earth scientists are in the midst of a revolution in understanding how climate has changed in the past — and how those changes have transformed human existence. Researchers have begun to piece together an il
A. to give up his former way of life
B. to leave the coastal areas
C. to follow the ever-shifting vegetation
D. to abandon his original settlement
It was the day I froze a household pet that I began to worry about my memory. Technically, it was not a real household pet I froze but a bag of tropical fish, which on the scale of beloved members of any home, rank somewhere below the family cat and above an attractive set of coasters. And technically, I didn’ t completely freeze my fish. Rather, I absent-mindedly tossed them into the refrigerator with a bag of other things I had bought and fortunately found them just before my highly sensitive tropical fish could turn into lightly breaded dinner fish.
Nonetheless, that near-death experience--for the fish, if not for me--woke me up to the fact that my memory might not be all it once was:
In the hope of improving my memory, I decided I would first try the memory books. How-ever, much of what I read was, at first blush, utterly forgettable.
If I was truly going to juice up my recall, however, book reading wouldn’t cut it. What I needed was some k
A. relief
B. humor
C. worry
D. solemnity
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