It is hard to track the blue whale, the ocean’s largest creature, which has almost been killed off by commercial whaling and is

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问题    It is hard to track the blue whale, the ocean’s largest creature, which has almost been killed off by commercial whaling and is now listed as an endangered species. Attaching radio devices to it is difficult, and visual sightings are too unreliable to give real insight into its behavior.
   So biologists were delighted early this year when, with the help of the Navy, they were able to track a particular blue whale for 43 days, monitoring its sounds. This was possible because of
the Navy’s formerly top-secret system of underwater listening devices spanning the oceans.
   Tracking whales is but one example of an exciting new world just opening to civilian scientists after the cold war as the Navy starts to share and partly uncover its global network of underwater listening system built over the decades to track the ships of potential enemies.
   Earth scientists announced at a news conference recently that they had used the system for closely monitoring a deep-sea volcanic eruption (爆发) for the first time and that they plan similar studies.
   Other scientists have proposed to use the network for tracking ocean currents and measuring changes in ocean and global temperatures.
   The speed of sound in water is roughly one mile a second-slower than through land but faster than through air. What is most important, different layers of ocean water can act as channels for sounds, focusing them in the same way a stethoscope (听诊器) does when it carries faint noises from a patient’s chest to a doctor’s ear. This focusing is the main reason that even relatively weak sounds in the ocean, especially low-frequency ones, can often travel thousands of miles.
The passage is chiefly about______ .

选项 A、an effort to protect an endangered marine species
B、the civilian use of a military detection system
C、the exposure of a U. S. Navy top-secret weapon
D、a new way to look into die behavior of blue whales

答案B

解析 本题属于文章的主旨题。首先我们可以排除A选项an effort to protect an endangered marine species和D选项a new way to look into the behavior of blue whales,因为文章举出蓝鲸的例子只是为了说明军用设施的民用,而不是把精力主要集中在蓝鲸或者对它的保护上面,因此这两个选项是不正确的。现在对比B选项the civilian use of a military detection system和C选项the exposu
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