GRE Reading Comprehension: Barron-GRE阅读Barron - U6A1UU4T37GN1AVZF$

(The passage was written in the latter half of the 20th century.) The coastlines on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean present a notable parallelism: the easternmost region of Brazil, in Pernambuco, has a convexity that corresponds almost perfectly with the concavity of the African Gulf of Guinea, while the contours of the African coastline between Rio de Oro and Liberia would, by the same approximation, match those of the Caribbean Sea. Similar correspondences are also observed in many other regions of the Earth. This observation began to awaken scientific interest about sixty years ago, when Alfred Wegener, a professor at the University of Hamburg, used it as a basis for formulating a revolutionary theory in geological science. According to Wegener, there was originally only one continent or land mass, which he called Pangaea. Inasmuch as continental masses are lighter than the base on which they rest, he reasoned, they must float on the substratum of igneous rock, known as sima, as ice floes float on the sea Then why, he asked, might continents not be subject to drifting? The rotation of the globe and other forces, he thought, had caused the cracking and, finally, the breaking apart of the original Pangaea, along an extensive line represented today by the longitudinal submerged mountain range in the center of the Atlantic. While Africa seems to have remained static, the Americas apparently drifted toward the west until they reached their present position after more than 100 million years. Although the phenomenon seems fantastic, accustomed as we are to the concept of the rigidity and immobility of the continents, on the basis of the distance that separates them it is possible to calculate that the continental drift would have been no greater than two inches per year.