Question

If you look at the night sky, you’ll often see stars moving very quickly. In fact, they move much more quickly than they should according to their size and the laws of physics.

Scientists do not completely understand why the speed of these stars is so high. But many believe the reason is that much of the universe is made of something called “dark matter”. Groups of stars called galaxies, such as the Milky Way, might even be made up of 90 percent dark matter.

How much something weighs depends on where it is. The same object weighs only half as much on Mars as it does on Earth and almost three times as much on Jupiter. So scientists prefer to talk about the mass (質量) of something rather than how much it weighs, because mass does not change. They can work out the mass of galaxies by measuring the distance between them and the speed they move at.

Recently, Jorge Pe?arrubia, a senior academic at Edinburgh University, UK, and his team discovered something interesting: The mass of the Milky Way is only half as much as the mass of another nearby galaxy, Andromeda. This seems strange, and dark matter may explain why.

Finding out more about dark matter could help us understand how the universe began, but this is not easy. Lots of scientists with different types of expert knowledge are working on the problem.

We can’t see dark matter, it’s very difficult to measure and we can’t find out its mass. Unlike stars, dark matter doesn’t produce or reflect light. But we can make a good guess that it is there because of the way things move and the way light bends. Experts now think dark matter may be very different from the matter that we find on Earth. There may also be five times as much dark matter in the universe as ordinary matter.

1.Something that weighs 15kg on Earth weighs about ________ on Mars and ________ on Jupiter.

A. 7.5 kg, 45 kgB. 30 kg, 45 kgC. 45 kg, 7.5 kgD. 5 kg, 30 kg

2.The author mentions the masses of the Milky Way and Andromeda mainly to ________.

A. explain why the same object has a different weight on different stars

B. compare the distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda

C. show that studying dark matter could help to answer some scientific questions

D. support the idea that scientists prefer to talk about mass instead of weight

3.Dark matter is difficult to investigate because ________.

A. it travels at a very fast speed

B. we can’t see where it is or measure its mass

C. it’s hard to measure the light it produces and reflects

D. it is much bigger than ordinary matter in size

4.According to the text, dark matter ________.

A. could accelerate the speed of stars

B. could lessen the mass of objects in galaxies

C. makes up the entire universe and its stars

D. may help us identify the origins of the universe

Answer 1