Answer keys and explanations:

　　1. E

　　See the sentences in paragraph 1(There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years—exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.) and para.2 (Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior.)

　　2. A B

　　See para.3: ?i style=’normal’>Grandpierre and a collaborator, Gábor ágoston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma.

　　3. C

　　See para.8: Edwards believes the small changes in solar heating produced by Milankovitch cycles are then amplified by feedback mechanisms on Earth.

　　4. D

　　See para.11: Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge, is far from convinced. He describes Ehrlich’s claims as "utterly implausible".

　　5. False

　　See para.5: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.

　　6. False

　　See para.7: "In Milankovitch, there is certainly no good idea why the frequency should change from one to another," ... Nor is the transition problem the only one the Milankovitch theory faces.

　　7. Not Given

　　See para.8: if sea ice begins to form because of a slight cooling, carbon dioxide?is locked into the ice. That weakens the greenhouse effect. (The passage doesn抰 mention anything about locking Co2 into ice artificially.)

　　8. True

　　See para.9: there is no lack of such mechanisms. "If you add their effects together, there is more than enough feedback to make Milankovitch work,"?"The problem now is identifying which mechanisms are at work." This is why scientists like Edwards are not yet ready to give up on the current theory.

　　9. True

　　See the sentences in para.9 (According to Edwards, 卙e says. "I can't see any way of testing [Ehrlich's] idea to see where we are in the temperature oscillation.") and para.10 (Ehrlich concedes this. "If there is a way to test this theory on the sun, I can’t think of one that is practical).

　　10. constant

　　See para.2: According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion.

　　11. orbit

　　See para.6: Most scientists believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth’s orbit, 匛arth's orbit gradually changes shape from a circle to a slight ellipse and back again roughly every 100,000 years.

　　12. instabilities

　　See para.3: ?i style=’magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature.

　　13. cycles

　　See para.4: ...allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years.

　　14. random

　　See para.4: Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.