第三部分阅读理解（共20小题；每小题2分，满分40分）
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出最佳选项。
Spiders are actually useful. They do not harm plants, as some people think. Instead, they protect plants by controlling insects. If you see spiders in a garden, it doesn’t mean the garden is unhealthy. It means the spiders are helping the garden stay healthy.
If you spend some time watching spiders, you may be surprised by what you see. There are many wonderful webs. They may perform skillfully on their thin silk threads. However, some spiders spin (织) no webs at all. They follow insects on the ground with all the skill and cruelty of a tiger hunting big game.
Scientists have named about 30,000 species of spiders, but they think this is only one-fourth of all the different kinds of spiders in the world. In most species, people can easily tell the female spider from the male because the female is much bigger. For example, the female black widow (黑寡妇) weighs about one hundred times as much as the male.
Female spiders lay eggs. After hatching (孵), most spiders live less than a full year, but some don’t. Tarantulas (狼蛛) do not become adults until they are 10 or 11 years old. Female tarantulas often live an extra 10 years! The baby spiders that hatch from the eggs are called spiderlings.
56. The underlined in Paragraph 2 part “a tiger hunting big game” refers to “______.”
A. laying eggs                  B. hatching baby spiders
C. spinning webs               D. catching insects
57. How many kinds of spiders are there in the world according to the passage?
A. About 30, 000.      B. About 60, 000.    C. About 90, 000.    D. About 120, 000.
58. What can we know from the passage?
A. If there are spiders in your garden, it means it is unhealthy.
B. All spiders can spin webs.
C. Normally, a male spider is smaller than a female one.
D. All spiders can live 10 or 11 years after hatching.
59. What will be probably talked about after the last paragraph?
A. The way spiders spin webs.                   B. Something about spiderlings.
C. How the spiders protect plants.                 D. The way spiders stay healthy.

The emperor penguin is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species and lives in Antarctica. The male and female are similar in size, reaching 122 cm in height and weighing anywhere from 22 to 45 kg. The back and head are black, contrasting sharply with the pale-yellow breast and bright-yellow ears. Like all penguins, it is flightless, with a streamlined body and their wings stiffen and flatten into flippers(鳍状肢) for a marine habitat.
Its diet consists primarily of fish, but can also include animals with hard shells. In hunting, the species can remain underwater up to 18 minutes, diving to a depth of 535 m. Its unusually structured hemoglobin(血红蛋白)allows it to function at low oxygen levels.
The emperor penguin is perhaps best known for the journeys adults make each year in order to mate and to feed their babies. The only penguin species that breeds(繁殖) during the Antarctic winter, it goes on a long journey of 50-120 km over the ice to breeding areas which may include thousands of individuals. The female lays a single egg, which is incubated(孵化)by the male while the female returns to the sea to feed; parents take turns searching for food at sea and caring for their chick. They both care for the chick until it is able to enter the water to find food on its own. During the process of incubation, the male can lose up to 1/3 to 1/2 of his body weight. One of the coolest things about the male is that if the chick comes out its egg before the female returns, the male can actually produce a special liquid to feed the chick. He can only do this for a short time. If the female doesn’t return, he must leave the chick to go on with his own life. The emperor penguin can typically live for 20 years in the wild, although observations suggest that some individual may live to 50 years of age.
【小题1】We can learn from paragraph 1 that ____.

Women are now as likely to use the Internet as men—about two-thirds of both genders, yet a new study shows that gaps remain in what each sex does online.
American men who go online are more likely than women to check the weather, the news, sports, political and financial information, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Wednesday. They are also more likely to use the Internet to download music and software and to take a class.
Online women, meanwhile, are bigger users of e-mail, and they are also more likely to go online for religious information and support for health or personal problems.
“For men, it’s just, ‘give me the facts,’” said Deborah Fallows, who wrote the report based on six years of Pew surveys, “For women, its ‘Let’s talk about this. Are you worried about this problem?’ It’s keeping in touch and connecting with people in a richer way.”
About two- thirds of the 6,403 adults surveyed by Pew during 2005 said they use the Internet. By gender, it was 68%of the male respondents, and 66%of the female participants---a statistically insignificant(不重要的)difference given the study’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2%points. In 2002, by contrast, the gap was slightly larger: 61%vs. 57%.
The surveys find that for many activities, such as getting travel information or looking up a phone number, men and women are equally likely to use the Internet.
【小题1】 According to the passage, which of the following is not what American men who go online do?

Penguins live together，but each pair has a little piece of ground of their own.When a penguin wants to walk through its neighbor’s ground，it must ask permission.If it does not do that，it will have to fight.Most of the time，penguins live on the water.They eat shell fish and look after their children carefully.
All penguins are good parents—the male penguins are perhaps the best parents in the world. They walk in the sea in the middle of the dark Antarctic water. They choose their wives in the dark.They can only hear them—not see them.Then the female penguins lay their eggs and go away for about two months.The males take care of the eggs.If the eggs get cold，there will be no chicks.There is no food.The snow falls heavily and the wind blows strongly—sometimes at 150 kilometers an hour.The penguins do not move.When the females return from the sea，they will not remember their husbands.It does not matter.Only one thing matters—the eggs.Male penguins never fight—unless a penguin leaves a chick for a minute.They then fight because they all want it.They are strange and wonderful birds.
【小题1】It seems interesting and unusual that the male penguins choose their wives ______.

How can a creature weighing over 5 tons and normally taking 150 kilograms of food and 120 liters of water per day survive in a desert environment?

In the southwest African country of Namibia, and the Sahara lands of Mali further north, the desert elephant does just that.

Although not regarded as a separate species from the African elephant, the desert cousin differs in many ways. Their bodies are smaller, to absorb less heat, and their feet are larger foreasier walking across sandy surfaces, they are taller, to reach higher branches. They have shorter tusks（象牙）, and most importantly, longer trunks to dig for water in riverbeds.

Desert elephants can travel over 70 kilometers in search for feeding grounds and waterholes, and have a larger group of families. They drink only every 3 –4 days, and can store water in a “bag” at the back of their throat, which is only used when badly needed. Desert elephants are careful feeders – they seldom root up trees and break fewer branches, and thus maintain what little food sources are available. Young elephants may even eat the dung（粪便）of the female leader of a group when facing food shortage.

During drought they are unlikely to give birth to their young but with good rains the birthrate will increase greatly. Desert elephants have sand baths, sometimes adding their own urine（尿液）to make them muddy!

As we continue to overheat our weak planet, it can only be hoped that other animal species will adapt as extraordinarily well to change as the desert elephant.

1.The underlined part in Paragraph 2 means “            ”.

A．remains in the African countries    B．drinks 120 liters of water a day

C．manages to live in desert areas     D．eats 150 kilograms of food daily

2.Desert elephants are called careful feeders because they _________.

A．rarely ruin trees                 B．drink only every 3-4 days

C．search for food in large groups   D．protect food sources for their young

3.The author answers the question raised in the first paragraph with __________.

A．stories and explanation         B．facts and descriptions

C．examples and conclusion         D．evidence and argument

4.What can be inferred from the last sentence in the passage?

A．Overheating the earth can be stopped. 

B．Not all animal species are so adaptable.

C．The planet will become hotter and hotter. 

D．Not all animals are as smart as desert elephants.