One thing the tour books don't tell you about London is that 2,000 of its residents are foxes. They ran away from the city about centuries ago after developers and pollution moved in. But now that the environment is cleaner, the foxes have come home, one of the many wild animals that have moved into urban areas around the world. "The number and variety of wild animals in urban areas is increasing," says Gomer Jones, president of the National Institute for Urban Wildlife, in Columbia, Maryland. A survey of the wildlife in New York's Central Park last year _ the species of mammals, including muskrats, shrews and flying squirrels. A similar survey conducted in the 1890s counted only five species. One of the country's largest populations of raccoons now lives in Washington D.C., and moose are regularly seen wandering into Maine towns. Peregrine falcons dive from the window ledges of buildings in the largest U.S. cities to prey on pigeons. Several changes have brought wild animals to the cities. Foremost is that air and water quality in many cities has improved as a result of the 1970s pollution-control efforts. Meanwhile, rural areas have been built up, leaving many animals on the edges of suburbs. In addition, urban wildlife refuges have been created. The Greater London Council last year spentPS750,000 to buy land and build 10 permanent wildlife refuges in the city. Over 1,000 volunteers have donated money and cleared rubble from derelict lots. One evening last year a fox was seen on Westminster Bridge looking up at Big Ben. For peregrine falcons, cities are actually safer than rural cliff dwellings . By 1970 the birds had died out east of the Mississippi because the DDT had made their eggs too thin to support life. That year, scientist Tom Cade of Cornell University began raising the birds for release in cities, for cities afforded abundant food. Cities can attract wild animals without turning them harmful. The trick is to create habitats where they can be self-sufficient but still be seen and... What is the passage mainly about? A) Wildlife returning to large cities B) Foxes returning to London C) Wild animals living in zoos D) A survey of wildlife in New York
A
Have you ever thought of joining a book club and buying new books through the post? Here at the International Book Club, we already have many members buying books from us by mail. Immediate benefits: *As a special offer, you may choose any reduced-price books from our new members' book list, to the value of $6 in total (plus postage and packing). By doing this, you will save pounds on the publishers' prices. *Tick the box on your form to order a free watch. *If you reply within seven days, we will send you another free gift carefully chosen from our book list by our staff. *Order a DVD from the many on offer in our list, at half the recommended retail price. *When you've joined: As a member, you'll enjoy savings of between 30% and 50% off the publisher's price on every book you buy, and what's more, they'll come straight to your door. Your free club magazine arrives once a month, to keep you up-to-date with the latest bestsellers. This means that every year we offer over 1,000 books to choose from. On the Internet, you can find all our titles for the year on our exclusive members' website. Being a member: All we are asking you to do while you are a member is to choose four books during your first year. After that, you can decide on the number of books you wish to take. In each of our monthly club magazines, our experienced staff choose a Club Choice book -- a work of fiction or a reference title which they feel is particularly worth buying, and which is offered at an extra-special price. However, if you do not want this book, just say so in the space provided on the form. We will always send the book if we do not receive this. So, return your application form today, but hurry -- it's not every day we can make you an offer like this. To apply to become a member, all you need to do is simply fill in the enclosed form and return it in the envelope supplied. Before you know it, your books will be with you. Please don't send any money now, as we will send you your bill with the books. And remember, you have up to... Every month the club provides a free club magazine in order to _ . A) let readers know the number of books to be sold B) attract more and more readers to join the club C) make readers know the club's development D) keep readers well informed of recent bestselling books
D
(Q).
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 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 Penarrubia, 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. 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
(A).
C