Question

A great number of people in the world have never seen snow.Others see more of it than they want to. Hail is much more common; it happens even in deserts.

Hail is a small round ball of alternating layers(交互层) of snow and clear ice. It forms inside large dark clouds that you can see before or during a storm. There are two ideas about how hailstones from.

One idea shows that hail forms when drops of water freeze in the upper air.

As they fall, they collect more drops of water. They also collect snow. The ice and snow build up in layers. If you cut a hailstone, you can see these alternating layers.

The other idea says that hail starts as a raindrop. The wind carries it higher into the atmosphere(大气层), where it gets covered by snow. It becomes heavy and begins to fall. As it falls, it gets a layer of water, which freezes.

Then the wind carries it back to the snow area, and it gets another layer of snow. This can happen a number of times. Finally the hailstone is too heavy to travel on the wind, and it falls to the ground.

Only a thunderstorm(暴风雨), a storm with loud noises and lightning can produce hail, but very few of them do. Perhaps only one in 400 thunderstorms creates hailstones.

A hailstone is usually less than eight centimeters in diameter. However, hailstones can be much bigger than that. Sometimes they are as big as baseballs. The largest hailstone which people have ever recorded weighed over 680 grams and had a diameter of thirteen centimeters.

Hail can cause the death of plants, especially since hail usually appears in the middle of summer, when the plants are partly grown. If the crops are destroyed, it is too late to plant more, and the farmer has lost everything. In one terrible hailstorm in 1923 in Rostov, in Ukraine, twenty-three people and many farm animals were killed.

1.Which of the following is about HAIL?

A. B. C. D.

2.According to the passage, which of the following is the fact about hail?

A. Hail is formed of snow and ice. B. Hail can’t be found in desert any more.

C. Hail often comes in cold winter. D. People can see snow more often than hail.

3.What does the underlined word “them” in the fifth paragraph refer to?

A. Noises. B. Hailstones. C. Thunderstorms. D. Deserts.

4.What do farmers most probably think of hail according to the last paragraph?

A. Unusual. B. Common. C. Useful. D. Terrible.

5.What’s the passage mainly about?

A. Different ideas about how hail forms. B. A brief introduction about hail.

C. The size and the weight of hailstones. D. The influence that hail causes.

1.A 2.A 3.C 4.D 5.B 【解析】本文介绍了世界上有许多人从未见过雪。但是冰雹更为常见，甚至发生在沙漠中。在文中介绍了冰雹的形成、尺寸和重量、冰雹的影响及危害等都有介绍。 1.细节理解题。由句子“Hail is a small round ball of alternating layers(交互层) of snow and clear ice.”...

Answer 1