人教专题03+时文阅读理解-天气与气候-2023年高考英语时文阅读理解、完形填空、语法填空专练.docx

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专题03时文阅读理解-天气与气候
主题语境—人与自然—气候变化威胁到珊瑚—珊瑚礁自己已恢复。
重点单词：took steps to采取措施做……；abundance大量，充足；
1.Though they may not know it, about half a billion people depend on the ecosystems created and sustained by corals. And with climate change threatening coral’s survival, marine scientist Enric Sala had a goal that might have seemed impossible.
“We wanted to get into a time machine, go back hundreds of years and actually see a coral reef like they used to be everywhere, before we started exploiting, polluting and killing them,” Sala said.
The goal was made possible during an expedition Sala led in 2009. The team traveled to a corner of the South Pacific Ocean, to see if the almost untouched reefs held any clues to bringing damaged reefs in other parts of the ocean back to health.
“The bottom was covered by thriving coral. Vivid colors surrounded me－purples, reds, oranges, yellows and greens. It was so beautiful,” Sala said.
His team presented their findings to officials in the island country of Kiribati. The government took steps to protect the waters from fishing. But between 2015 and 2016, record levels of ocean warming damaged half the coral reefs the team had been studying.
After hearing that news, they lost hope for the health of coral reefs. Last year, they went in for another dive. Despite the reported conditions, the reef had somehow restored itself, filled with life and color once more. Sala and his team were overjoyed. This is something that Sala says can be owed to two key factors.
The first is, thankfully, half of the corals had not died. Despite the rise in temperatures, there were enough surviving corals left behind to help reproduce the reefs. The second was the Kiribati government’s decision to fully protect those waters.
“It has an abundance of fish. So they were eating all the algae (藻类) that would cover the dead corals, and make it impossible for the corals to come back, which is what happens in other places like the Caribbean,” Sala expl