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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.
From the passage we can conclude that the author______.
选项 A、is sympathetic to shell
B、worries about the oil industry
C、takes a neutral attitude towards oil industry
D、is optimistic about the oil production
答案B
解析 观点态度题。在第一段和第二段提出世界石油产量达到峰值，将开始下滑的观点之后，举例说明，分析原因。第三段第五句中出现了dreaded(可怕的)一词，结合首段第二句中的few people listened，可以看出作者对这一现象表示担心，故[B]为答案。壳牌石油公司是首段提到的几个大石油公司中的一个，举例的目的是为了说明“石油产量将下滑’’这一现象，作者只是在第一段倒数第二句提到lt sounds as though Shell is kissing the oil business goodbye，并没有表达同情之意，排除[A]；作者在前两段论述较客观，但第三段中的dreaded等词表达了作者对石油生产的担心，具有某种倾向性，态度并非中立，排除[C]；全文都是在解释石油生产量将下滑这一现象，分析原因，结尾处没有任何语句表明其产量将提高，表露乐观态度，[D]无根据，排除。
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