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  3. The Oil Produces World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petrol

The Oil Produces World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petrol

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问题                             The Oil Produces
    World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petroleum geologists, including me, have been predicting peak oil before 2007, but in an era of cheap oil, few people listened. Lately, several major oil companies seem to have got the message. One of Chevron’s ads says the world is currently burning 2 bbl. of oil for every barrel of new oil discovered. Exxon Mobil says 1987 was the last year that we found more oil worldwide than we burned. Shell reports that it will expand its Canadian oil-sands operations but elsewhere will focus on finding natural gas and not oil. It sounds as though Shell is kissing the oil business goodbye. M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist, correctly predicted in 1956 that oil production in the U.S. would peak in the early 1970s—the moment now known as "Hubbert’s Peak", I believe world oil production is about to reach a similar peak.
    Finding oil is like fishing in a pond. After several months, you notice that you are not catching as many fish. You could buy an expensive fly rod-new technology. Or you could decide that you have already caught most of the fish in the pond. Although increased oil prices (which ought to spur investment in oil production) and new technology help, they can’t work magic. Recent discoveries are modest at best. The oil sands in Canada and Venezuela are extensive, but the Canadian operations to convert the deposits into transportable oil consume large amounts of natural gas, which is in short supply.
    And technology cannot eliminate the difficulty Hubbert identified: the rate of producing oil depends on the fraction of oil that has not yet been produced. In other words, the fewer the fish in the pond, the harder it is to catch one. Peak production occurs at the halfway point. Based on the available data about new oil fields, there are 2,013 billion bbl. of total producible oil. Adding up the oil produced from the birth of the industry until today, we will reach the dreaded 1, 006. 5-billion-bbl. halfway mark late this year. For two years, I’ve been predicting that world oil production would reach its peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005. Today, with high oil prices pushing virtually all oil producers to pull up every barrel they can sweat out of the ground, I think it might happen even earlier.
The author uses the simile of fish and pond to explain that______.
选项 A、new technologies can help in finding oil
B、we should not search for oil only in one plate
C、oil can be reproduced like fish in the pond
D、there is a peak point in oil production
答案D
解析 推理判断题。由题干中的fish和pond定位至文中第三段第二句。从句中的in other words可看出，这是对前一句的解释，首句指出：技术也无法消除Hubbert所发现的困难，即石油生产的速度有赖于石油开发量，之后又指出：石油生产的峰值出现在中间点。可见作者用钓鱼比喻石油开发是为了解释石油生产量出现峰值的原因，故[D]为答案。第二段第五句提到new technology help，[A]表述正确，但作者的意思是说尽管新技术能让石油产量提高，但由于其他客观原因，石油产量还是无法继续增加，而钓鱼这个比喻也正是用于说明此点，排除；文中没有提到在多处探测石油的问题，排除[B]；[C]不符合常识，此外，文中也没有提到鱼类繁殖问题，排除。
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