英语科技文选自考2014年10月真题及答案解析

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26

Which of the following is NOT shown in Trinchieri and Goldszmid’s study?

  • A.Oxaliplatin can help kill cancer cells.
  • B.Bacteria may play an important role in the activity of some anti-cancer drugs.
  • C.Intestinal bacteria can help kill cancer cells.
  • D.A platinum-based drug can kill cancer cells.
27

Cyclophosphamide does not work well when the mice_______.

  • A.become infected by disease germs
  • B.are given antibiotics
  • C.suffer from sarcomas
  • D.have skin cancer
28

What does Cynthia Sears think of Zitvogel and her team’s study?

  • A.It should extend to the treatment of cancer in humans.
  • B.For all the results of their study, the connection between bacteria and cancer is not certain.
  • C.The results of their study are unreliable because antibiotics arc life-saving in the treatment of cancer.
  • D.Gut bacteria can spread life-threatening bloodstream infections.
29

According to the passage, Foing and his team’s studies are extremely important to______in the future.

  • A.making it possible to grow plants in lunar regolith
  • B.making it possible to engineer plant-growth systems and greenhouses
  • C.making it possible for the moon residents to eat plants grown on the moon
  • D.making it possible for the residents on the moon to live far away from Earth
31

(B)

  Two new studies in mice show that some anti-cancer therapies work best when the microbes in our body are strong and healthy—which suggests that antibiotics and cancer might not always make a good combination.

  We know that friendly, or commensal, bacteria can influence inflammation in the body, and that some forms of inflammation help cancers to grow—but it is unclear whether commensal bacteria have a direct influence on cancer development.

  To find out, Laurence Zitvogel at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, France, and her colleagues studied cyclophosphamide, a drug used to treat brain cancers and blood cancers including leukaemia. The drug works by encouraging the body to produce a certain type of immune T-cells that attack tumours.

  Zitvogel’s team gave the drug to mice with sarcomas—a rare cancer that develops in muscle, nerves and bones—and skin cancer. Within 48 hours, the cyclophosphamide had affected the lining of the small intestine, allowing some of the rodents’ gut bacteria to escape and enter their lymph nodes and spleen.

  Once there, it was these bacteria—not the drug itself—that encouraged immature immune cells in the lymph nodes to develop into the tumour-targeting T-cells.

   For further evidence of the important role that the bacteria play, the researchers gave another group of mice antibiotics like vancomycin, which are known to disrupt gut bacteria, before they underwent the same cancer treatment. The cyclophosphamide was far less effective at combating cancer in these mice.

   The results show that the link between bacteria and cancer needs much more careful study, says Cynthia Sears, who researches gut bacteria at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Maryland. But it is far too early for people with cancer to throw out any antibiotics they arc taking, she adds.

   “Extending the results to humans requires deliberate study as antibiotics can be life-saving in the setting of cancer and chemotherapy,” she says. “One key source of life-threatening bloodstream infections in this setting can be the gut bacteria.”

    Meanwhile, a second study suggests bacteria may play an important role in the activity of other anti-cancer drugs. Giorgio Trinchieri and Romina Goldszmid at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, and their colleagues looked at oxaliplatin, a platinum-based drug used in human chemotherapy. The drug triggers the production of reactive oxygen species-molecules that destroy DNA and kill certain kinds of cells, including cancer cells.The team gave the drug to 50 mice with various types of cancer cells injected underneath their skin. Half of the mice had previously received an antibiotic cocktail-three weeks later, about 80 per cent of these mice had died. By contrast, 80 per cent of the mice that were antibiotic-free were still alive after three weeks.

What do the two studies imply, according to the passage?

  • A.Friendly bacteria can influence inflammation in the body.
  • B.Inflammation can help cancers to grow.
  • C.Gut bacteria can help combat cancer.
  • D.Anti-cancer drugs can directly influence cancer development.
32

Which of the following is NOT about the NASA’s plan?

  • A.It is intended to prove that people living in the moon bases can grow some green vegetables for themselves.
  • B.It is intended to find a way to test the idea that plants can grow in lunar regolith.
  • C.It involves crowdsourcing its control experiments.
  • D.It is based on NASA’s findings.
34

All of the following could make it impossible to grow plants on the moon EXCEPT______.

  • A.solar radiation
  • B.the extreme solar radiation condition
  • C.the non-existence of an atmosphere
  • D.a sealed container
35

(A)

  Turnips, cress and basil could sprout on the moon in 2015 if NASA’s first plan to grow plants on a world other than Earth comes to fruition.

  The aim is to find out if the crews of moon bases will be able to grow some of their own greens, a capability that has proved psychologically comforting to research crews isolated in Antarctica and on the International Space Station, NASA says.

  Factors that could confound lunar plant growth include the virtual absence of an atmosphere and high levels of solar and cosmic radiation that bombard the moon’s surface. So the space agency is developing a sealed canister with five days’ worth of air, in which seeds can germinate on nutrient-infused filter paper. The idea is that water will be released on touchdown and sunshine will do the rest.

  Over five to 10 days, video cameras will record the plants’ sprouting, their rate of growth and their ability to thrive in lunar radiation conditions. Footage will be shared with schools across the US, so that students supplied with their own copies of the canister will be able to compare lunar and terrestrial growth rates, a move that allows NASA to cut costs by crowdsourcing its control experiments.

   The 1-kilogram “greenhouse” will be a paid-for stowaway on an uncrewed Google Lunar X-Prize lander mission—most probably the Moon Express mission planned for late 2015.

   NASA’s project builds on earlier work by Bernard Foing at the European Space Agency’s research centre in Nordwijk, the Netherlands. Foing and his team demonstrated in 2008 that plants can grow in crushed rock similar in composition to lunar regolith. While anti-contamination rules prevent attempts to grow plants on the exposed lunar surface, ESA’s results mean that local dust could one day be brought indoors and used in moon gardens. He hopes that future missions might even find a way to test that idea.

   “Following our successful tests on rock cress and marigolds, it will be interesting if some of these experiments try making use of local regolith as a growth medium,” he says. In the long term, such pilot studies may be crucial to engineering the kind of plant-growth systems and greenhouses that will let moon colonists live off the land.

   “This approach to use a scaled greenhouse is a pragmatic first step,” says Foing. “It should open the way to lunar experiments that study the evolution and balance of microbial communities hosted by plants under the moon’s extreme radiation conditions.”

With which of the following subjects is the passage mainly concerned?

  • A.A NASA’s moon express mission
  • B.Lunar plant growth
  • C.Moon gardens
  • D.Terrestrial plant growth