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  3. The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, e

The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, e

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问题     The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, extracting it in earnest began only in 1859 after an oil strike in Pennsylvania. It was used to make kerosene, the main fuel for artificial lighting after overfishing led to a shortage of whale blubber. Other liquids produced in the refining process, too unstable or smoky for lamplight, were burned or dumped. But the unwanted petrol and diesel did not go to waste for long, thanks to the development of the internal-combustion engine a few years later.
    Since then demand for oil has, with a couple of blips in the 1970s and 1980s, risen steadily alongside ever-increasing travel by car, plane and ship. Three-fifths of it ends up in fuel tanks. With billions of Chinese and Indians growing richer and itching to get behind the wheel of a car, the big oil companies, the International Energy Agency(IEA)and America’s Energy Information Administration all predict that demand will keep on rising.
    We believe that they are wrong, and that oil is close to a peak. This is not the "peak oil" widely discussed several years ago, when several theorists, who have since gone strangely quiet, reckoned that supply would flatten and then fall. We believe that demand, not supply, could decline. In the rich world oil demand has already peaked: it has fallen since 2005. Even allowing for all those new drivers in Beijing and Delhi, two revolutions in technology will dampen the world’s thirst for the black stuff.
    The first revolution was led by a man from Texas who has just died. George Mitchell championed "tracking" as a way to release huge supplies of "unconventional" gas from shale(a smooth soft rock)beds. This, along with vast new discoveries of conventional gas, has recently helped increase the world’s reserves from 50 to 200 years. The other great change is in automotive technology. Rapid advances in engine and vehicle design also threaten oil’s dominance. Foremost is the efficiency of the internal-combustion engine itself. Petrol and diesel engines are becoming ever more frugal.
    Not surprisingly, the oil "supermajors" and the IEA disagree. They point out that most of the emerging world has a long way to go before it owns as many cars, or drives as many miles per head, as America. But it would be foolish to predict from the rich world’s past to booming Asia’s future. The sorts of environmental policies that are reducing the thirst for fuel in Europe and America by imposing ever-tougher fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles are also being adopted in the emerging economies.
The word "blip"(Line 1, Para. 2)most probably means
选项 A、boom.
B、slump.
C、increase.
D、fluctuation.
答案D
解析 第二段第1句指出，除了20世纪70、80年代一些blips之外，石油需求稳步上升(has risen steadily)，然后还隐性地给出了原因：人们乘坐汽车、飞机和轮船出行的不断增加，可见blips是不同于“上升”的概念；再者，整体趋势是“稳步上升”的，在上升过程中有下跌，就构成了波动，所以D项是正确的。
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