2024年高考英语外刊阅读专项
专题05
Ⅰ.新生野外大白鲨
Ⅱ.水电池
Ш.AI天气预报员
【原文·外刊阅读】
Newborn great white shark possibly seen in the wild for the first time
（文章来源：New Scientist新科学家）
A newborn great white shark may have been spotted in the wild for the first time. Although great whites are found in seas and oceans around the world, very little is known about where and how they give birth.
Wildlife film-maker Carlos Gauna and Phillip Sternes from the University of California, Riverside, were filming with a drone off Santa Barbara on California’s coast when they saw a 1.5-metre-long, entirely white shark. This caught their eye, not just because it was much smaller than adult great white sharks that are up to three times longer, but because these sharks are normally grey on top, despite their name, and white underneath.
The pair had previously seen large, possibly pregnant great whites in the area sink into the depths for long periods, and they noticed that this young shark was shedding something from its skin as it swam. They realised that it was probably a pup born nearby still shedding its embryonic layer – something has never been observed before.
Gauna hopes that the sighting will tell us more about the life cycle of the great white. It is generally believed that they give birth in deeper water, but this observation calls that into question.
“Because most of the scientific community believed filming a newborn so close to shore wasn’t likely, I didn’t expect to find anything. But as I always tell people, if you don’t look, you will never know,” says Gauna. “The piece of the puzzle this footage provides does have the potential to change the direction of where we should be looking.”
“Capturing the actual birth is the holy grail of shark science. What I filmed is simply a clue that gets us closer to it,” he says. “Because of the limitations of filming underwater [and] the unpredictability of the event, it’s a tall order to capture the actual birth.”
Charles Underwood at Birkbeck, University of London, says only three or four great white sharks under a year old have previously been found in the wild – they are few enough that researchers have nicknamed them all.
“Weirdly, we know very, very little about them. As soon as something goes into deep water, we really know nothing,” says Underwood. “They’re elusive, relative to our abilities to look through the sea.”
Gauna and Sternes say one sighting isn’t enough to put an end to the mystery, and more work needs to be done to determine if their sighting was typical. But if we discover that coastal waters are important for the life cycle of great whites, politicians should move to protect these areas to ensure the sharks’ safety, they say.
【原创·阅读理解】
What caught the attention of the wildlife film-makers off the coast of Santa Barbara
A. A large, grey great white shark.
B. A 1.5-meter-long entirely white shark.
C. Adult great white sharks shedding skin.
D. Pregnant great whites in deep waters.
【答案】B
【解析】根据文章内容，野生动物电影制片人在加利福尼亚圣巴巴拉沿海使用无人机拍摄时，注意到了一只全身白色、长达1.5米的小鲨鱼。这引起了他们的注意，因为这只小鲨鱼相比成年大白鲨（长度可达三倍）要小得多。因此，选项B是正确答案。
What did the wildlife film-makers observe about the young shark in the water
A. It was much larger than adult great white sharks.
B. It had a different color pattern than adult great whites.
C. It was giving birth to pups.
D. It was shedding something from its skin.
【答案】D
【解析】根据文章内容，野生动物电影制片人观察到这只小鲨鱼在游泳时从皮肤上脱落了一些东西，他们意识到这可能是附近诞生的小鲨鱼仍在脱去胚胎层，这是前所未见的现象。因此，选项D是正确答案。
What does the wildlife film-maker, Carlos Gauna, hope to learn from the sighting of the young shark
A. The exact location of great white shark births.
B. The size of adult great white sharks.
C. The depth at which great whites give birth.
D. The color patterns of newborn great white sharks.
【答案】C
【解析】根据文章内容，Carlos Gauna希望这次发现能更多地告诉我们关于大白鲨的生命周期的信息。通常认为它们在深水中分娩，但这次观察对这一观点提出了疑问。因此，选项C是正确答案。
What challenges are mentioned in capturing the actual birth of great white sharks
A. The unpredictability of underwater events.
B. The limitations of shark science.
C. The elusiveness of young great white sharks.
D. The deep waters where great whites give birth.
【答案】A
【解析】根据文章内容，采集大白鲨实际分娩的过程被称为鲨鱼科学的“至高荣耀”，但由于水下事件的不可预测性，这是一项困难的任务。因此，选项A是正确答案。
【原文·外刊阅读】
WATER BATTERIES
（文章来源：Science）
The machines that turn Tennessee’s Raccoon Mountain into one of the world’s largest energy storage devices—in effect, a battery that can power a medium-size city—are hidden in a cathedral-size cavern deep inside the mountain. But what enables the mountain to store all that energy is plain in an aerial photo. The summit plateau is occupied by a large lake that hangs high above the Tennessee River, so close it looks like it might fall in.
Almost half a century ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the region’s federally owned electric utility, built the lake and blasted out the cavern as well as a 329-meter-tall shaft that links the two. “It was quite an effort to drill down into this mountain, because of the amount of rock that’s here,” senior manager Holli Hess says dryly. The cavern holds a candy-colored powerhouse, filled with cherry-red electrical ducts and vents and beams in a pale grape. Four giant cylinders, painted bright green and yellow, are the key machines: Each one houses a turbine that becomes a pump when it spins the other way, and a generator that is also an electric motor.
At night, when demand for electricity is low but TVA’s nuclear reactors are still humming, TVA banks the excess, storing it as gravitational potential energy in the summit lake. The pumps draw water from the Tennessee and shoot it straight up the 10-meter-wide shaft at a rate that would fill an Olympic pool in less than 6 seconds. During the day, when demand for electricity peaks, water drains back down the shaft and spins the turbines, generating 1700 megawatts of electricity—the output of a large power plant, enough to power 1 million homes. The lake stores enough water and thus enough energy to do that for 20 hours.
Pumped storage hydropower, as this technology is called, is not new. Some 40 U.S. plants and hundreds around the world are in operation. Most, like Raccoon Mountain, have been pumping for decades.
But the climate crisis is sparking a fresh surge of interest. Shifting the electric grid away from coal and gas will require not only a lot more solar panels and wind turbines, but also a lot more capacity to store their intermittent output—to keep electricity reliable when the Sun doesn’t shine and winds are calm. Giant versions of the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are also being deployed on the grid, but they’re too expensive to do the job alone. Dozens of new technologies, including different battery designs, are at various points on the road from lab bench to commercialization.
Pumped storage, however, has already arrived; it supplies more than 90% of existing grid storage. China, the world leader in renewable energy, also leads in pumped storage, with 66 new plants under construction, according to Global Energy Monitor. When the giant Fengning plant near Beijing switches on its final two turbines this year, it will become the world’s largest, both in terms of power, with 12 turbines that can generate 3600 megawatts, and energy storage, with nearly 40,000 megawatt-hours in its upper reservoir.
【原创·阅读理解】
What is the primary purpose of the machines hidden in Raccoon Mountain
A. To generate electricity.
B. To extract minerals.
C. To pump water into the lake.
D. To create a large cavern.
【答案】A
【解析】根据文章内容，Raccoon Mountain中隐藏的机器的主要目的是产生电力，将多余的电力存储在山顶湖中。因此，选项A是正确答案。
What is the function of the large lake on the summit plateau of Raccoon Mountain
A. To provide water for the Tennessee River.
B. To cool the machinery inside the mountain.
C. To serve as an Olympic-size swimming pool.
D. To store gravitational potential energy.
【答案】D
【解析】根据文章内容，Raccoon Mountain的山顶高原上的大湖的功能是存储重力势能，用于储存电力。因此，选项D是正确答案。
What sets pumped storage hydropower apart from giant lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles for grid storage
A. Pumped storage is more expensive.
B. Pumped storage uses turbines and generators.
C. Lithium-ion batteries are not suitable for grid storage.
D. Lithium-ion batteries are more environmentally friendly.
【答案】B
【解析】根据文章内容，与电动汽车中的巨大锂离子电池相比，抽水蓄能水电使用涡轮机和发电机。因此，选项B是正确答案。
What is the main purpose of the pumps mentioned in the article in relation to Raccoon Mountain's energy storage process
A. To drain water from the Tennessee River.
B. To fill the lake with water during the day.
C. To generate electricity during the night.
D. To propel water up the shaft for energy storage.
【答案】D
【解析】根据文章内容，文章提到的泵的主要目的是将水从田纳西河抽取，然后以一种能在不到6秒钟内填满一个奥林匹克大小的泳池的速度将水喷射到10米宽的井筒中，用于储存重力势能。因此，选项D是正确答案。
【拓展阅读】
The AI weather forecaster arrives
For nearly as long as the modern computer has existed, it has been used to forecast the weather. First deployed during World War II to simulate nuclear weapons and artillery trajectories, nascent computers were soon adopted by meteorologists to simulate the future state of the atmosphere, creating the modern discipline of numerical weather prediction. And although that discipline has grown ever more sophisticated and now produces reliable forecasts several weeks in advance, its approach has remained the same: using massive amounts of computing power to solve the fluid dynamics equations governing the atmosphere.
Over the past year, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to change that. Tech companies including Google, Huawei, and Nvidia have trained AI models to predict the weather up to 10 days in advance, with an accuracy rivaling or even topping traditional models—and with far less computational overhead. Rather than solving equations, these “deep learning” models predict the near future based on patterns learned through training on 40 years of past weather, as captured by observations fed through the numerical model of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the world’s top forecaster. Once trained, the models can spit out a forecast on a desktop in 1 minute rather than taking 2 hours to run on a supercomputer. But as with most AI, no one truly knows what patterns they’re learning.
ECMWF has already begun to produce its own AI forecast, and other weather agencies are scrambling to catch up. The new models aren’t perfect. They struggle to predict certain essential features—hurricane intensity, for example. But researchers expect AI forecasters will only improve as they begin to learn from direct weather observations collected by sensors, not just data already passed through existing models. And their speed will likely allow forecasters to run them many times over, capturing the full spread of uncertainty that results from butterfly effects in the atmosphere.
No one expects traditional numerical weather prediction to disappear; climate models, for example, rely on the same equation-solving paradigm. AI may struggle to take over these forecasts because its models simulate changes in a future that may not resemble the training data of the past.
But in the long term, the output of supercomputer-driven climate models could itself become training data for a climate forecasting AI—which might ultimately outstrip its mentors.
参考译文：
AI天气预报员登场
几乎与现代计算机诞生同时，它就被用于天气预报。在二战期间首次部署，用于模拟核武器和炮弹轨迹的现代计算机很快被气象学家采用，用于模拟大气未来状态，形成了现代数值天气预报学科。尽管这一学科变得愈加复杂，现在能够提前数周产生可靠的预报，但其方法仍然相同：利用大量计算能力解决统治大气的流体动力学方程。
在过去的一年里，人工智能（AI）开始改变这一状况。包括谷歌、华为和英伟达在内的科技公司已经训练了AI模型，可以预测未来10天的天气，准确性与甚至超过传统模型，且计算开销远远较少。与解方程不同，这些“深度学习”模型通过对过去40年的天气数据进行训练，学习到的模式来预测近期未来，这些数据是通过欧洲中期天气预报中心（ECMWF）的数值模型获取的，该中心是世界顶级的预报机构。一旦训练完成，这些模型可以在桌面上生成一分钟内的预报，而不是在超级计算机上运行需要2小时的时间。但与大多数人工智能一样，没有人真正知道它们学到了什么样的模式。
ECMWF已经开始制作自己的AI预报，其他气象机构也在争分夺秒地迎头赶上。新模型并不完美。它们难以预测某些重要特征，比如飓风强度。但研究人员预计，随着它们开始从直接天气观测传感器收集的数据中学习，而不仅仅是已经通过现有模型传递的数据，AI预测器将不断改进。它们的速度可能使预测员能够多次运行它们，捕捉由于大气中的蝴蝶效应而产生的不确定性的全部扩散。
没有人期望传统的数值天气预测会消失；例如，气候模型依赖于相同的解方程模式。人工智能可能难以接管这些预测，因为其模型模拟的未来可能不像过去的训练数据。但从长远来看，由超级计算机驱动的气候模型的输出本身可能会成为气候预测AI的训练数据，最终可能超越其导师。2024年高考英语外刊阅读专项
专题05
Ⅰ.新生野外大白鲨
Ⅱ.水电池
Ш.AI天气预报员
【原文·外刊阅读】
Newborn great white shark possibly seen in the wild for the first time
（文章来源：New Scientist新科学家）
A newborn great white shark may have been spotted in the wild for the first time. Although great whites are found in seas and oceans around the world, very little is known about where and how they give birth.
Wildlife film-maker Carlos Gauna and Phillip Sternes from the University of California, Riverside, were filming with a drone off Santa Barbara on California’s coast when they saw a 1.5-metre-long, entirely white shark. This caught their eye, not just because it was much smaller than adult great white sharks that are up to three times longer, but because these sharks are normally grey on top, despite their name, and white underneath.
The pair had previously seen large, possibly pregnant great whites in the area sink into the depths for long periods, and they noticed that this young shark was shedding something from its skin as it swam. They realised that it was probably a pup born nearby still shedding its embryonic layer – something has never been observed before.
Gauna hopes that the sighting will tell us more about the life cycle of the great white. It is generally believed that they give birth in deeper water, but this observation calls that into question.
“Because most of the scientific community believed filming a newborn so close to shore wasn’t likely, I didn’t expect to find anything. But as I always tell people, if you don’t look, you will never know,” says Gauna. “The piece of the puzzle this footage provides does have the potential to change the direction of where we should be looking.”
“Capturing the actual birth is the holy grail of shark science. What I filmed is simply a clue that gets us closer to it,” he says. “Because of the limitations of filming underwater [and] the unpredictability of the event, it’s a tall order to capture the actual birth.”
Charles Underwood at Birkbeck, University of London, says only three or four great white sharks under a year old have previously been found in the wild – they are few enough that researchers have nicknamed them all.
“Weirdly, we know very, very little about them. As soon as something goes into deep water, we really know nothing,” says Underwood. “They’re elusive, relative to our abilities to look through the sea.”
Gauna and Sternes say one sighting isn’t enough to put an end to the mystery, and more work needs to be done to determine if their sighting was typical. But if we discover that coastal waters are important for the life cycle of great whites, politicians should move to protect these areas to ensure the sharks’ safety, they say.
【原创·阅读理解】
What caught the attention of the wildlife film-makers off the coast of Santa Barbara
A. A large, grey great white shark.
B. A 1.5-meter-long entirely white shark.
C. Adult great white sharks shedding skin.
D. Pregnant great whites in deep waters.
What did the wildlife film-makers observe about the young shark in the water
A. It was much larger than adult great white sharks.
B. It had a different color pattern than adult great whites.
C. It was giving birth to pups.
D. It was shedding something from its skin.
What does the wildlife film-maker, Carlos Gauna, hope to learn from the sighting of the young shark
A. The exact location of great white shark births.
B. The size of adult great white sharks.
C. The depth at which great whites give birth.
D. The color patterns of newborn great white sharks.
What challenges are mentioned in capturing the actual birth of great white sharks
A. The unpredictability of underwater events.
B. The limitations of shark science.
C. The elusiveness of young great white sharks.
D. The deep waters where great whites give birth.
【原文·外刊阅读】
WATER BATTERIES
（文章来源：Science）
The machines that turn Tennessee’s Raccoon Mountain into one of the world’s largest energy storage devices—in effect, a battery that can power a medium-size city—are hidden in a cathedral-size cavern deep inside the mountain. But what enables the mountain to store all that energy is plain in an aerial photo. The summit plateau is occupied by a large lake that hangs high above the Tennessee River, so close it looks like it might fall in.
Almost half a century ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the region’s federally owned electric utility, built the lake and blasted out the cavern as well as a 329-meter-tall shaft that links the two. “It was quite an effort to drill down into this mountain, because of the amount of rock that’s here,” senior manager Holli Hess says dryly. The cavern holds a candy-colored powerhouse, filled with cherry-red electrical ducts and vents and beams in a pale grape. Four giant cylinders, painted bright green and yellow, are the key machines: Each one houses a turbine that becomes a pump when it spins the other way, and a generator that is also an electric motor.
At night, when demand for electricity is low but TVA’s nuclear reactors are still humming, TVA banks the excess, storing it as gravitational potential energy in the summit lake. The pumps draw water from the Tennessee and shoot it straight up the 10-meter-wide shaft at a rate that would fill an Olympic pool in less than 6 seconds. During the day, when demand for electricity peaks, water drains back down the shaft and spins the turbines, generating 1700 megawatts of electricity—the output of a large power plant, enough to power 1 million homes. The lake stores enough water and thus enough energy to do that for 20 hours.
Pumped storage hydropower, as this technology is called, is not new. Some 40 U.S. plants and hundreds around the world are in operation. Most, like Raccoon Mountain, have been pumping for decades.
But the climate crisis is sparking a fresh surge of interest. Shifting the electric grid away from coal and gas will require not only a lot more solar panels and wind turbines, but also a lot more capacity to store their intermittent output—to keep electricity reliable when the Sun doesn’t shine and winds are calm. Giant versions of the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are also being deployed on the grid, but they’re too expensive to do the job alone. Dozens of new technologies, including different battery designs, are at various points on the road from lab bench to commercialization.
Pumped storage, however, has already arrived; it supplies more than 90% of existing grid storage. China, the world leader in renewable energy, also leads in pumped storage, with 66 new plants under construction, according to Global Energy Monitor. When the giant Fengning plant near Beijing switches on its final two turbines this year, it will become the world’s largest, both in terms of power, with 12 turbines that can generate 3600 megawatts, and energy storage, with nearly 40,000 megawatt-hours in its upper reservoir.
【原创·阅读理解】
What is the primary purpose of the machines hidden in Raccoon Mountain
A. To generate electricity.
B. To extract minerals.
C. To pump water into the lake.
D. To create a large cavern.
What is the function of the large lake on the summit plateau of Raccoon Mountain
A. To provide water for the Tennessee River.
B. To cool the machinery inside the mountain.
C. To serve as an Olympic-size swimming pool.
D. To store gravitational potential energy.
What sets pumped storage hydropower apart from giant lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles for grid storage
A. Pumped storage is more expensive.
B. Pumped storage uses turbines and generators.
C. Lithium-ion batteries are not suitable for grid storage.
D. Lithium-ion batteries are more environmentally friendly.
What is the main purpose of the pumps mentioned in the article in relation to Raccoon Mountain's energy storage process
A. To drain water from the Tennessee River.
B. To fill the lake with water during the day.
C. To generate electricity during the night.
D. To propel water up the shaft for energy storage.
【拓展阅读】
The AI weather forecaster arrives
For nearly as long as the modern computer has existed, it has been used to forecast the weather. First deployed during World War II to simulate nuclear weapons and artillery trajectories, nascent computers were soon adopted by meteorologists to simulate the future state of the atmosphere, creating the modern discipline of numerical weather prediction. And although that discipline has grown ever more sophisticated and now produces reliable forecasts several weeks in advance, its approach has remained the same: using massive amounts of computing power to solve the fluid dynamics equations governing the atmosphere.
Over the past year, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to change that. Tech companies including Google, Huawei, and Nvidia have trained AI models to predict the weather up to 10 days in advance, with an accuracy rivaling or even topping traditional models—and with far less computational overhead. Rather than solving equations, these “deep learning” models predict the near future based on patterns learned through training on 40 years of past weather, as captured by observations fed through the numerical model of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the world’s top forecaster. Once trained, the models can spit out a forecast on a desktop in 1 minute rather than taking 2 hours to run on a supercomputer. But as with most AI, no one truly knows what patterns they’re learning.
ECMWF has already begun to produce its own AI forecast, and other weather agencies are scrambling to catch up. The new models aren’t perfect. They struggle to predict certain essential features—hurricane intensity, for example. But researchers expect AI forecasters will only improve as they begin to learn from direct weather observations collected by sensors, not just data already passed through existing models. And their speed will likely allow forecasters to run them many times over, capturing the full spread of uncertainty that results from butterfly effects in the atmosphere.
No one expects traditional numerical weather prediction to disappear; climate models, for example, rely on the same equation-solving paradigm. AI may struggle to take over these forecasts because its models simulate changes in a future that may not resemble the training data of the past.
But in the long term, the output of supercomputer-driven climate models could itself become training data for a climate forecasting AI—which might ultimately outstrip its mentors.
参考译文：
AI天气预报员登场
几乎与现代计算机诞生同时，它就被用于天气预报。在二战期间首次部署，用于模拟核武器和炮弹轨迹的现代计算机很快被气象学家采用，用于模拟大气未来状态，形成了现代数值天气预报学科。尽管这一学科变得愈加复杂，现在能够提前数周产生可靠的预报，但其方法仍然相同：利用大量计算能力解决统治大气的流体动力学方程。
在过去的一年里，人工智能（AI）开始改变这一状况。包括谷歌、华为和英伟达在内的科技公司已经训练了AI模型，可以预测未来10天的天气，准确性与甚至超过传统模型，且计算开销远远较少。与解方程不同，这些“深度学习”模型通过对过去40年的天气数据进行训练，学习到的模式来预测近期未来，这些数据是通过欧洲中期天气预报中心（ECMWF）的数值模型获取的，该中心是世界顶级的预报机构。一旦训练完成，这些模型可以在桌面上生成一分钟内的预报，而不是在超级计算机上运行需要2小时的时间。但与大多数人工智能一样，没有人真正知道它们学到了什么样的模式。
ECMWF已经开始制作自己的AI预报，其他气象机构也在争分夺秒地迎头赶上。新模型并不完美。它们难以预测某些重要特征，比如飓风强度。但研究人员预计，随着它们开始从直接天气观测传感器收集的数据中学习，而不仅仅是已经通过现有模型传递的数据，AI预测器将不断改进。它们的速度可能使预测员能够多次运行它们，捕捉由于大气中的蝴蝶效应而产生的不确定性的全部扩散。
没有人期望传统的数值天气预测会消失；例如，气候模型依赖于相同的解方程模式。人工智能可能难以接管这些预测，因为其模型模拟的未来可能不像过去的训练数据。但从长远来看，由超级计算机驱动的气候模型的输出本身可能会成为气候预测AI的训练数据，最终可能超越其导师。
