阅读一直是英语六级考生重点关注的部分，也是考试的重难点，考前仅剩不到一月的时间了，我们需要去做一些预测性的试题了。一起来看一下这篇2014.12.20英语六级考试阅读预测题（长篇阅读）吧!
Earthquakes
A) An earthquake is one of the most terrifying phenomena that nature can dish up. We generally think of the ground we stand on as “rock-solid” and completely stable. An earthquake can shatter (粉碎)that perception instantly, and often with extreme violence.
B) Up until relatively recently, scientists only had unproven guesses as to what actually caused earthquakes. Even today there is still a certain amount of mystery surrounding them, but scientists have a much clearer understanding. There has been enormous progress in the past century. Scientists have identified the forces that cause earthquakes, and developed technology that can tell us an earthquake"s magnitude and origin. The next hurdle is to find a way of predicting earthquakes, so they don’t catch people by surprise. In this article, we’ll find out what causes earthquakes, and we’ll also find out why they can have such a devastating effect on us.
C) An earthquake is a vibration(震动)that travels through the earth’s crust. Technically, a large truck that rumbles down the street is causing a mini-earthquake, if you feel your house shaking as it goes by; but we tend to think of earthquakes as events that affect a fairly large area, such as an entire city. All kinds of things can cause earthquakes: volcanic eruptions, meteor(流星)impacts, underground explosions (an underground nuclear test, for example), collapsing structures (such as a collapsing mine). But the majority of naturally-occurring earthquakes are caused by movements of the earth’s plates.
D) We only hear about earthquakes in the news every once in a while, but they are actually an everyday occurrence on our planet. According to the United States Geological Survey, more than 3 million earthquakes occur every year. That’s about 8,000 a day, or one every 11 seconds! The vast majority of these 3 million quakes are extremely weak. The law of probability also causes a good number of stronger quakes to happen in uninhabited places where no one feels them. It is the big
quakes that occur in highly populated areas that get our attention.