Text 2
At the bottom of the world lies a mighty continent still wrapped in the Ice Age and, until recent times, unknown to man. It is a great land mass with mountain ranges whose extent and elevation are still uncertain. Much of the continent is a complete blank on our maps. Man has explored, on foot, less than one per cent of its area. Antarctica differs fundamentally from the Arctic regions. The Arctic is an ocean, covered with drifting packed ice and hemmed in by the land masses of Europe, Asia, and North America. The Antarctic is a continent almost as large as Europe and Australia combined, centered roughly on the South Pole and surrounded by the most unobstructed water areas of the world -- the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.
The continental ice sheet is more than two miles high in its centre, thus, the air over the Antarctic is far more refrigerated than it is over the Arctic regions. This cold air current from the land is so forceful that it makes the nearby seas the stormiest in the world and renders unlivable those regions whose counterparts at the opposite end of the globe are inhabited. Thus, more than a million persons live within 2,000 miles of the North Pole in an area that includes most of Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia -- a region rich in forest and mining industries. Apart from a handful of weather stations, within the same distance of the South Pole there is not a single tree, industry, or settlement.
【1986年考研英语阅读真题及答案解析】相关文章:
最新
2016-10-18
2016-10-11
2016-10-11
2016-10-08
2016-09-30
2016-09-30