PTE考生目前最大的问题之一就是练习题缺乏。除了有限的基本官方书（PLUS，Testbuilder, OG）之外，就没有题了。很多英语基础不是很扎实的同学很难找到练习材料。墨尔本文波雅思PTE培训学校专门为墨尔本，悉尼PTE考生准备了适合PTE听力阅读练习的科学60秒。各位PTE同学可以练习PTE听力中的summarise spoken text和PTE口语中的retell lecture，练习记笔记技巧和复述。废话少说，下面开始：
60秒科学：Ants Could Help Warming Cry Uncle
听力内容：
60秒科学节目（SSS）是科学美国人网站的一套广播栏目，英文名称：Scientific American – 60 Second Science,节目内容以科学报道为主，节目仅一分钟的时间，主要对当今的科学技术新发展作以简明、通俗的介绍，对于科学的发展如何影响人们的生活环境、健康状况及科学技术，提供了大量简明易懂的阐释。
The meek may not just inherit the Earth, they could help keep the planet cool. The meek in this case being ants. For a quarter-century, geographer Ronald Dorn of Arizona State University and his students have studied how ants, termites and tree roots affect rock weathering.
Rocks like plagioclase and olivine that contain calcium and magnesium naturally absorb carbon dioxide to become limestone or dolomite. The more rock that’s exposed, the more CO2 gets trapped.
And ants apparently greatly speed up that process. At Dorn’s six test sites in Arizona and Texas, eight different kinds of ants were found to accelerate the absorption of atmospheric CO2 by as much as 335 times compared with ant-free areas. The research is in the journal Geology. [Ronald I. Dorn, Ants as a powerful biotic agent of olivine and plagioclase dissolution]
Exactly how ants enhance this carbon dioxide trapping remains unclear. The activity could even be due not to the ants, but to the microbes they carry.
Regardless, there are a lot of ants on Earth, as many as 10 trillion individuals by one estimate. Dorn even speculates that the proliferation of ants some 66 million years ago might be why this recent Cenozoic era has been, until very recently, so much cooler than earlier epochs.
Aesop gave ants a reputation for being hard workers. A lot of that effort may have been for a moderate climate’s benefit.
—David Biello
