ASET阅读理解例题及答案

The Solo

The Solo

Ruby had practised the eight bars so often that she could hear them in the hum of the fridge. Even so, when the band filed onto the rotunda in the park and she saw the crowd spread across the grass on picnic rugs, the notes seemed to slide out of her head like water through a gutter.

She sat at the end of the second row, where the cornets always sat, and fixed her eyes on the music stand. The paper fluttered in the breeze. She pinned it with a peg from her pocket, the way Mr Kowalczyk had shown her in her first week, eighteen months ago, when she had been too small to reach the stand without a cushion.

The first two pieces went by in a blur of marching rhythms. Then the bandmaster lowered his baton, and the park went quiet in that particular way that meant people were waiting.

Ruby lifted her cornet. Her lips felt as dry as paper. She glanced up and found Mr Kowalczyk watching, not her, but the drummer, as though nothing unusual were about to happen at all. It was such an ordinary look that something in her chest loosened.

She played. The first note wobbled, and she heard it wobble, and she kept going anyway. By the fourth bar the sound had steadied and grown, rolling out over the rugs and the gum trees and the café on the corner. When she lowered the cornet, a toddler near the front clapped before anyone else, and then everyone did.

Afterwards, packing up, she asked Mr Kowalczyk why he hadn't looked at her during the solo.

"Why would I watch a thing I already knew would be fine?" he said, and went to help with the drum.

Living Rocks

Living Rocks

At first glance, the lumpy grey mounds in the shallows of Hamelin Pool, in Western Australia's Shark Bay, look like nothing more than rocks. Visitors who walk out along the boardwalk sometimes wonder what all the fuss is about. Yet these mounds, called stromatolites, are among the most remarkable structures on Earth, because they are alive, or at least their surfaces are.

Each stromatolite is built by communities of microbes, living things too small to see without a microscope. The microbes produce a sticky film. Grains of sand and sediment washed in by the tide become trapped in this film, and the microbes slowly grow up through the new layer to reach the sunlight they need. Layer by layer, a mound forms. The process is extraordinarily slow: a stromatolite may grow less than half a millimetre in a year, so a mound the height of a school ruler may have taken many hundreds of years to build.

Stromatolites were once common in shallow seas around the world. Today they survive in only a few places, and Hamelin Pool holds some of the best examples. The reason is the water. A bank of sand and seagrass at the entrance to the pool slows the flow of water from the open ocean, and the hot sun evaporates the shallows, leaving the pool about twice as salty as ordinary sea water. Few of the snails and other grazing animals that feed on microbes can survive in such conditions, so the builders are left in peace.

Scientists value these mounds for another reason. Fossil stromatolites billions of years old are among the earliest evidence of life on Earth, and the oxygen produced by ancient microbes like these helped make the air breathable for the animals that came later. Standing on the boardwalk, then, a visitor is looking at something very like the first chapter of life's story.