托福模拟测试卷6-2019-8月新卷阅读According to paragraph 4, why are scientists confident that the age of the oldest meteorites they st答案解析【小站备考】

The planets of our solar system all revolve around the Sun in the same direction and in orbits that lie in nearly the same plane. This is strong evidence that the planets formed simultaneously from a single disk of material that rotated in the same direction as the modern planets.

Precisely when the planets came into being has been a difficult issue to resolve. While Earth’s water is necessary for life, its abundance near the planet’s surface makes rapid erosion inevitable. Continuous alteration of the crust by erosion and also by igneous (volcanic) and metamorphic (pressure and heat within Earth) processes makes unlikely any discovery of rocks nearly as old as Earth. Thus geologists have had to look beyond this planet in their efforts to date Earth’s origin. Fortunately, we do have samples of rock that appear to represent the primitive material of the solar system. These samples are meteorites, which originate as extraterrestrial objects, called meteors, that have been captured in Earth’s gravitational field and have then crashed into our planet.

Some meteorites consist of rocky material and, accordingly, are called stony meteorites. Others are metallic and have been designated iron meteorites even though they contain lesser amounts of elements other than iron. Still others consist of mixtures of rocky and metallic material and thus are called stony-iron meteorites. Meteors come in all sizes, from small particles to the small planets known as asteroids; no asteroid, however, has struck Earth during recorded human history. Many meteorites appear to be fragments of larger bodies that have undergone collisions and broken into pieces. Iron meteorites are fragments of the interiors of these bodies, comparable to Earth’s core, and stony meteorites are from outer portions of these bodies, comparable to Earth’s mantle (the layer between the core and outer crust).

Meteorites have been radiometrically dated by means of several decay systems, including rubidium-strontium, potassium-argon, and uranium-thorium. The dates thus derived tend to cluster around 4.6 billion years, which suggests that this is the approximate age of the solar system. After many meteorites had been dated, it was gratifying to find that the oldest ages obtained for rocks gathered on the surface of the Moon also were approximately 4.6 billion years. This must, indeed, be the age of the solar system. Ancient rocks can be found on the Moon because the lunar surface, unlike that of Earth, has no water to weather and erode rocks and is characterized by only weak movements of its crust.

Determining the age of the universe has been more complicated. Most stars in the universe are clustered into enormous disk-like galaxies. The distance between our galaxy, known as the Milky Way, and all others is increasing. In fact, all galaxies are moving away from one another, evidence that the universe is expanding. It is not the galaxies themselves that are expanding but the space between them. What is happening is analogous to inflating a balloon with small coins attached to its surface. The coins behave like galaxies: although they do not expand, the space between them does. Before the galaxies formed, matter that they contain was concentrated with infinite density at a single point from which it exploded in an event called the big bang. Even after it assembled into galaxies, matter continued to spread in all directions from the site of the big bang.

The evidence that the universe is expanding makes it possible to estimate its age. This evidence, called the redshift, is an increase in the wavelengths of light waves traveling through space—a shift toward the red end of the visible spectrum of wavelengths. Expansion of the space between galaxies causes this shift by stretching light waves as they pass through it. The farther these light waves have traveled through space, the greater the redshift they have undergone. For this reason, light waves that reach Earth from distant galaxies have larger redshifts than those from nearby galaxies. Calculations based on these redshifts indicate that about 13.7 billion years ago all of the galaxies would have been at one spot, the site of the big bang. This, then, is the approximate date of the big bang and the age of the universe.

模拟测试卷6-2019-8月新卷 According to paragraph 4, why are scientists confident that the age of the oldest meteorites they studied is also the age of the solar system?

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