The Northern Lights The sun is stormy and has its own kind of weather. It is so hot and active that even the Sun’ s gravity

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问题                         The Northern Lights
    The sun is stormy and has its own kind of weather. It is so hot and active that even the Sun’ s gravity cannot hold its atmosphere in check! Energy flows away from the Sun toward the Earth in a stream of electrified particles that move at speeds around a million miles per hour. These particles are called plasma(等离子体), and the stream of plasma coming from the Sun is called the solar wind. The more active the Sun, the stronger the solar wind.
    The solar wind constantly streams toward the Earth, but don’ t worry because a protective magnetic field surrounds our planet. The same magnetic field that makes your compass point north also steers the particles from the Sun to the north and south poles. The charged particles become trapped in magnetic belts around the Earth. When a large blast of solar wind crashes into the Earth’ s magnetic field, the magnetic field first gets squeezed and then the magnetic field lines break and reconnect. The breaking and reconnecting of the magnetic field lines can cause atomic particles called electrons trapped in the belts to fall into the Earth’ s atmosphere at the poles. As the electrons fall to the Earth, they collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere, creating flashes of light in the sky.
    Each atmospheric gas glows a different color. Oxygen and nitrogen glows red and green and nitrogen glows violet purple. As these various colors glow and dance in the night sky, they create the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights.
    Watching auroras(北极光)is fun and exciting, but normally you can only see them in places far north like Alaska and Canada. The movement of the aurora across the sky is usually slow enough to easily follow with your eyes but they can also pulsate(跳动), flicker(闪烁), or even move like waves. During solar maximum, 5 auroras are seen as far south as Florida, even Mexico’ Auroras often seem to be very close to the ground, but the lowest aurora is still about 100 kilometers above the ground, a distance much higher than clouds are formed or airplanes can fly. A typical aurora band can be thousands of kilometers long, a few hundred kilometers high, but only a few hundred meters thick.
    We hope you are able to travel to far north places like the Arctic Circle and see the Northern Lights at least once during your lifetime. We know you will never forget it!
The solar wind comes into being as a result of______.

选项 A、disappearance of the Sun’ s gravity
B、unpredictable weather of the Sun
C、fast flow of energy away from the Sun
D、a stream of particles being blown away

答案C

解析 根据第一段第三、四句可知,热量在时速约100万英里的带电粒子流中由太阳向地球流动,这些粒子被称为等离子体,源于太阳的等离子体流又被称为太阳风。由此不难推测出,太阳风是能量从太阳向地球高速流动造成的,所以选择C项。
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