Lessorfl Finding fossil man
We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can prerve their history is to recount it as sagas-legends handed dow n from one gen e ratio n of story-tellers to ano ther. The lege nds are uful becau they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of the people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
But the first people who were like ourlves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have n either history nor lege nds to help them to
find out where the first 'modern merT came from.
Fort un ately, however, ancient men made tools of st one, especially flint, becau this is easier to shape tha n other kin ds. They may also have ud wood and skins, but the have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men
who made them have disappeared without trace.
Lesson2 Spare that spider精彩演讲>2012年高考数学试卷及答案
Why, you may won der, should spiders be our friends ? Becau they destroy so many in cts, and in cts in elude some of the greatest en emies of the huma n race. In cts would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from inct-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat in cts but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the nu mber destroyed by spiders. Moreover, un like some of the other in ct eaters, spiders n ever do the least harm to us or our belongings.
Spiders are not in cts, as many people think, nor even n early related to them. One can tell the differe nee almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an in ct n ever more than six. How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were more than
2,250,000 in one acre, that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.
Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killi ng in cts. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the in cts destroyed by spiders in Britai n in one year would be greater tha n the total weight of all the human beings in the country.
Lesson3 Matterhorn man
Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering days, however, this was not the ca at all.
The early climbers were looking for the easiest way to the top becau the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that duri ng their explorati ons they ofte n faced difficulties and dan gers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim, a solitary goal-the top!
It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Except for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly become popular, Alpine villages tended to be imp
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overished ttlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were gen erally dirty and flea-ridde n; the food simply local chee accompanied by bread often twelve months old, all washed down with coar wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could-sometimes with the local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shepherds or chee-makers .In variably the backgro und was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating ven-cour dinners
and sleepi ng betwee n fine linen sheets at home, the ch a nge to the Alps must have bee n very hard in deed.
Lesson4 Seeing hands
In the Soviet Union veral cas have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fin gers, and even e through solid doors and walls. One ca concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father. One day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a locked safe. Sudd
enly she asked her father why he kept so many old n ewspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bun dies. Vera's curious tale nt was brought to the no tice of a scie ntific rearch in stitute in the tow n of Ulya no vsk, n ear where she lives, and in April she was given a ries of tests by a special commissi on of the Ministry of Health of the Russia n Federal Republic. During the tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in another instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar nsitivity. During all the tests Vera was blin dfold; and, in deed, except whe n blin dfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fin gers this ability cead the moment her hands were wet.
panickedLesson5
The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African ene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a
hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history muums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps
strictly scientific) link with our ancestral past.
Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under clo and constant obrvation in the dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals he loved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or in di cate the final exte nt of their intellige nee. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.
Lesson6
People are always talking about' the problem of youth If there is one —which I take leave to doubt-then it is older people who create it, not the young themlves. Let us get down to fun dame ntals and agree that the young are after all huma n bein gs-people just like their elders. There is only one differenee between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.
When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very plead to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in eking.
I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this ems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some n cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill- mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders-as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he i
s wrong.. Lesson7
I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the comm on peoples of the world could meet one ano ther at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting con tests lead to orgies of hatred, one
could deduce it from gen eral prin ciples.
Nearly all the sports practid no wad ays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exerci: but as soon as the question of prestige aris, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lo, the most savage combative instincts are aroud. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations, who work themlves into furies over the absurd con tests, a
nd riously believe-at any rate for short periods-that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue. Lesson8
euthanasiaParents have to do much less for their children today than they ud to do, and home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made, washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned or prerved, bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals can be had at the restaura nt, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.
It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home, and his children rarely, if ever, e him at his place of work. Boys are therefore ldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but thisellen degeneres show
practice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twen ty-five years. With mother earning and his older chi Id re n drawi ng substa ntial wages father is ld
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om the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother works economic adva ntages accrue, but chi Id re n lo somethi ng of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.
Lesson9
Not all sounds made by animals rve as Ianguage, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to e a ca in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.
To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountain side, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstructi on the Ion ger time will elap for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the a bottom, and by measuring the time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the a at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus, now in general u in ships. Every solid object
will reflect a sound, varying accord i ng to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the a bottom to locating a shoal of fish. With
experienee, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of its echo .
雅思试题A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles-or locate flying in cts on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the principle of which is similar.
Less orMO
In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy committee men regard them with horror, knowing that no pige on holes can be found for them. We could do with a few origi nal, creative men in our political life —if only to create some enthusiasm, relea some energy-but where are they? We are asked to choo between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoti
ng the human beings who em clost to them. Between mid-night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. The twin ideals of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.
马达加斯加2下载Lessord 1郴州火车相撞
Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguid as a minstrel. In tho days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring.
While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himlf t out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish invaders. The had ttled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the lf-c on fide nee ofc onq uerors, and their curity precauti ons were casual. They lived well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected women as well as food and drink, and a life of ea had made them soft.
Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there asmbled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no Ion ger fit for
