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C. Its threat to the Great Lakes ecosystem.

D. Its natural enemies in the local areas.

8. What can we infer from the last paragraph?

A. US Law makers knew little of the threat posed by Asian carp.

B. Electric fences might not be enough to stop the spread of Asian carp.

C. The Chicago River has changed its flowing direction many times.

D. People in Chicago will soon face a serious water supply shortage. C

Still adjusting to life in the big city? Your mobile phone operator might soon be able to tell.

An analysis of a more than 698 million calls made from Shanghai in one month has helped show where people live, who they meet and their movements when they first arrive in a new city.

Although the data didn’t contain names and addresses, it did suggest whether mobile users were locals or migrants to the city. Other biological information was included, such as sex and age. Some 22,000 “new migrants” were described as those who were born outside Shanghai and who did not have call logs in the first week of the month, while one million “settled migrants” had at least one call in that time period. There were 1.7 million locals.

The data covered September 2016, but showed who called whom and roughly where in the city people went, thanks to information on the cell towers they connected to.

Chenhao Tan at the University of Washington in the US, who worked on the project with colleagues at Zhejiang University, says he was expecting the data to show migrants gradually behaving more and more like locals as they spent time in Shanghai.

“That’s actually not the case, they remain quite different from locals,” he says. For instance, the migrants stayed in contact with multiple people who shared their place of birth.

They also spent more time in the center of the city. However, migrants did become more like locals in some ways – such as average call length and the distance they traveled. The settled migrants and locals groups were also more likely than newcomers to receive calls back from people they contacted.

“The real value in this work is in the potential of telling us the rate of change in how a community combines over time,” said Rex Douglass at the University of California, San Diego, US.

“Cellphone data provide an opportunity to show how these ties grow or disappear over time in a way that type of people or survey data have a hard time showing.”

Such mobile phone data sets have been used in other situations – for example to model the potential spread of the Ebola sickness in West Africa.

However, the use of mass telecoms metadata is controversial, because it is quite simple to tie a person’s identity to a random private telephone number. Groups that fight for the rights of people have long worried that despite not including names or the content of calls, such data can show private things about people’s lives.

Tan says that such findings might actually help governments or charity organizations assist migrants. “Governments may be able to more effectively deliver information on potential benefits,” he says.

9. What is Chenhao Tan’s research mainly about?

A. Methods that help migrants get used to life in a new city.

B. Data collection of mobile users and protection of user privacy.

C. Connections between cell phone data and migrants’ lifestyles.

D. Benefits of mobile communication for people living in urban areas.

10. According to the research, the settled migrants ______.

A. don’t like to go downtown in their free time

B. have no call logs in the first month of their arrival

C. tend to call less and travel a shorter distance than locals

D. keep in close contact with other migrants from their hometown

11. What does Rex Douglass think of cell phone data?

A. It is more reliable than other types of survey data.

B. It informs people of the changes to urban communities.

C. It includes lots of private information and should not be used in studies.

D. It can help governments gather the biological information of migrants. D

A strange and poorly understood “fire monument” that’s 5,300 years old has been found in England – at least 800 years older than Stonehenge (巨石阵).

Located in Avebury, England, the monument is so large that it can only truly be seen from the sky. It is hourglass-shaped and surrounded by wooden posts. At some point in the ancient past, these posts – and whatever was inside them – were set on fire, for purposes unknown. It was probably used for ceremonies just 37 kilometers from where Stonehenge was eventually built.

The site was first discovered in the 1960s, when a pipeline was being built through the area. Over time, excavations showed the scale of the monument, and eventually, it was found that much of the outline of it was burned. Evidence nearby shows that barbecues were used to cook food.

In fact, the nearby Durrington Wall – another Neolithic (New Stone Age) settlement – shows that this type of activity took place here, and may have even been the accommodation site for some of Stonehenge’s builders.

The hourglass site at Avebury, however, was probably not used in the same way. The circles are huge, and together, they cover a distance of 4 kilometers. This big fire was not likely used for a feast, but some sort of ceremonial practice.

It would have taken hundreds of trees to build, and a lot of careful digging. It was a complicated construction project that certainly needed careful planning and direction.

Pieces of pottery (陶器) found within the monument do date back to the time of Stonehenge, but carbon-dating techniques by Historic England have now found that the site itself is almost a thousand years older. This means it was constructed during a part of British history that archaeologists (考古学家) know very little about.

It should be noted that 5,300 years ago, Britain was a very different society from the one immediately following on from Stonehenge.

A dramatic new study last month showed that an attack of unknown peoples took place about 4,500 years ago, roughly when Stonehenge was built. The attack was so successful that 90 percent of the country’s gene pool changed almost overnight.

Did the practice of building fire monuments like the one at Avebury also die out after the attack? Was there a huge change in culture at the same time? Watch this space!

12. What is the article mainly about?