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  3. The 17 trillion US gallons of rain, roughly 26m Olympic swimming pools, dumpe

The 17 trillion US gallons of rain, roughly 26m Olympic swimming pools, dumpe

游客2024-04-05  18
问题    The 17 trillion US gallons of rain, roughly 26m Olympic swimming pools, dumped on Texas by Hurricane Harvey has set a new high for a tropical system in the US, but it is unlikely to last long as rising man-made emissions push the global climate deeper into uncharted territory.
   Images of flooded streets in Texas are mirrored by scenes of inundated(洪泛的)communities in India and Bangladesh, the recent mudslides in Sierra Leone and last month’s deadly overflow of a Yangtze tributary(支流)in China. In part, these calamities are seasonal. In part, the impact depends on local factors. But scientists tell us such extremes are likely to become more common and more devastating as a result of rising global temperatures and increasingly intense rainfall.
   Our planet is in an era of unwelcome records. For each of the past three years, temperatures have hit peaks not seen since the birth of meteorology(气象学), and probably not for more than 110,000 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is at its highest level in 4m years. This does not cause storms like Harvey—there have always been storms and hurricanes at this time of year along the Gulf of Mexico—but it makes them wetter and more powerful.
   " For large countries like the United States, we can expect further rainfall records—and not just for hurricanes," said Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. This is part of a wider trend. "For the globe, we’ll see heat and extreme rainfall records fall for the foreseeable future," she predicted. She cautioned that the situation is likely to be different from country to country. Many factors are involved, but human impact on the climate has added to the tendency for more severe droughts and fiercer storms.
   A key focus now is whether climate change is connected to the " stalling" of storms. In the US, hurricanes usually move inland and diminish in power as they get further from the sea. Harvey, however, was stationary for several days—which is the main factor in its rainfall record.
   Scientists have said this may be the single biggest question posed by Harvey. Researchers have recently identified a slowdown of atmospheric summer circulation in the mid-latitudes as a result of strong warming in the Arctic. But such studies of pressure patterns need more powerful analytical tools, including supercomputers.
   In the US, however, such research has become highly politicised. President Donald Trump has announced that the US will pull out of the Paris climate treaty and cut funding for related research. " It shouldn’t be a political matter to try to understand how much more frequent events like Harvey will become in the future," said Tim Palmer, a professor at the University of Oxford. "It appalls me how basic science has become involved in politics like this. " [br] What can we learn about Hurricane Harvey?
选项 A、It destroyed about 26m Olympic swimming pools.
B、It brought a record-breaking amount of rainfall.
C、It was soon put to an end by climate change.
D、It also brought unprecedented disasters to Asia.
答案 B
解析 事实细节题。本题考查关于飓风哈维的信息。由定位段可知，飓风哈维给德克萨斯州带来了大量的降水，创下了美国热带天气的新高，可见其降水量是破纪录的，故答案为B)。A)“大约破坏了2，600万个游泳池”是对定位段的曲解，原文是说其带来的降水相当于2，600万个奥运会游泳池的水量，故排除；C)“气候变化很快令其结束”与原文内容相反，故排除；D)“它也给亚洲带来了前所未有的灾害”是对第二段第一句的曲解，该句提到的在印度、孟加拉和中国等亚洲国家发生的水灾只是在破坏性上与哈维相似，并非是哈维带来的，故排除。
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