耗时:Questions 26 to 35 are based on the following passage.
Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.
Scientists scanning and mapping the Giza pyramids say they've discovered that the Great Pyramid of Giza is not exactly even. But really not by much. This pyramid is the oldest of the world‘s Seven Wonders. The pyramid’s exact size has 26 puzzled experts for centuries, as the “more than 21 acres of hard, white casing stones” that originally covered it were 27 removed long ago.
Reporting in the most recent issue of the newsletter “AERAGRAM,” which 28 chronicles the work of the Ancient Egypt Research Associates, engineer Glen Dash says that by using a new measuring approach that involved finding any surviving 29 remnants of the casing in order to determine where the original edge was. They found the east side of the pyramid to be a 30 maximum of 5.55 inches shorter than the west side.
The question that most 31 fascinates him, however, isn't how the Egyptians who designed and built the pyramid got it wrong 4,500 years ago, but how they got it so close to 32 perfect. “We can only speculate as to how the Egyptians could have laid out these lines with such 33 precision using only the tools they had,” Dash writes. He says his 34 hypothesis is that the Egyptians laid out their design on a grid, noting that the great pyramid is oriented only 35 slightly away from the cardinal directions （its north-south axis runs 3 minutes 54 seconds west of due north, while its east-west axis runs 3 minutes 51 seconds north of due east) —an amount that's “tiny, but similar,” Atlas Obscura points out.