快速查题-中学教师资格证试题

语言素材：

      In some countries in western Europe, such as France, Spain and Britain, the countryside is changing.

      Life has become difficult for many villages, and some disappearing. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, young people from villages usually want to live somewhere livelier and they often move to the towns and do not return. Secondly,

people move to the cities to find work, as there are often very few jobs in the countryside. Sometimes villages remain because people from the cities have bought a “second home” in the village, where they come and stay at weekends. The prices of

houses go up and people from the area cannot afford to buy a house there. Another problems is that it is becoming more and more difficult for farmers to make money from the farms. So they sell their land and find another job.

      All these things mean that many villages in western Europe are fighting to survive. We can only hope that they will remain. The countryside would be a sadder and uglier place without them.

      Many animals have disappeared during the long history of the earth. The most famous of these animals are dinosaurs.

They lived on the earth tens of millions of years ago, long before humans came into being and their future seemed secure at

that time. There were many different kinds of dinosaur and a number of them used to live in China. The eggs of twenty-five

species have been found in Xixia County, Nan yang, Henan province. Not long ago a rare new species of bird-like dinosaur

was discovered in Chaoyang County, Liaoning province. When scientists inspected the bones, they were surprised to find that

these dinosaurs could not only run like the others but also climb trees. They learned this from the way the bones were joined

together.

      Dinosaurs died out suddenly about 65 million years ago. Some scientists think it came after an unexpected incident when a huge rock from space hit the earth and put too much dust into the air. Others think the earth got too hot for the dinosaurs to

live on any more. Nobody knows for sure why and how dinosaurs disappeared from the earth in such a short time.

      We know many other wild plants, animals, insects, and birds have died out more recently. According to a UN report, some 844 animals and plants have disappeared in the last 500 years. The dodo is one of them. It lived on the island of Mauritius and was a very friendly animal. Please listen to a story of the dodo and how it disappeared from the earth.