课前阅读
Unit 1 Making a Difference Reading NO BOUNDARIES
Imagine this:you are twenty-one years old
and a promising graduate student at one of the top universities in the world.
One day,your doctor tells you that you have an incurable disease
and may not have more than twelve months to live.
How would you feel? What would you do?
Most of us would probably feel very sad
and give up our dreams and hopes for the future.
Here is what Stephen Hawking thought:
(There did not seem) much point in working on my PhD
I did not expect to survive that long.
Yet two years had gone by and I was not that much worse.
In fact,things were going rather well for me
and I had got engaged to a very nice girl, Jane Wilde.
But in order to get married,I needed a job,
and in order to get a job,I needed a PhD.
Instead of giving up,Hawking went on with his research,
got his PhD and married Jane.
Nor did he let the disease stop him from living the kind of life
he had always dreamt of.
He continued his exploration of the universe
and travelled around the world to give lectures.
In 2002,Hawking visited China
and spoke to university students in Hangzhou and Beijing.
As his disease has disabled him,
Hawking has to sit in his now-famous wheelchair and speak through a computer.
He told the students about his theories and thoughts on some of the greatest questions.
What is time,how did the universe begin,and what exactly are black holes?
Hawking became famous in the early 1970s,
when he and American Roger Penrose
made new discoveries about the Big Bang and black holes.
Since then,Hawking has continued to seek answers to questions
about the nature of the universe.
In 1988, he wrote A Brief History of Time,which quickly became a best-seller.
Readers were pleased and surprised to find that a scientist
could write about his work in a way that ordinary people could understand.
In the book,
Hawking explains both what it means to be a scientist and how science works.
He tells readers how discoveries are made and how they change the world.
Science,according to Hawking,is often misunderstood:
people often think that science is about "true" facts that never change.
Scientists,on the other hand,Hawking writes,
know that their job is never finished
and that even the best theorycan turn out to be wrong.
A scientific theory is the result Of the scientific method.
Scientists look at the world and try to describe and explain what they see.
First,they carefully observe what they are interested in.
To explain what they have seen,
they build a theory about the way in which things happen
and the causes and effects.
Finally,the scientists test the theory to seeif it matches what they have seen
and if it can predict future events.
If what they are observing can be tested in a practical way,
scientists will use experiments.
But if,like Hawking,
they are studying something that is too large or too difficult to observe directly
they will use a model to test the theory.
People who listen to Hawking's lectures
sometimes find it difficult to understand him,
because his thoughts and ideas
often seem as large as the universe he is trying to describe.
The speech computer is not the problem.
In fact,people who hear it often say it sounds just like a human voice.
Hawking is happy with it, too.
"The only trouble,"says Hawking,who is British,
"is that it gives me an American accent."
阅读理解
Reading MAKING A DIFFERENCE
It is not necessary to be a great scientist to make a difference,
but there are things we can learn from the best minds in this world.
Great scientists like Stephen Hawking always want to know more.
They are never satisfied with a simple answer
and are always looking for new questions.
The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was so curious that he used a microscope
and a telescope
in order to be able to take a closer look at things both great and small.
By asking why, how and what if,curious minds find new ideas and solutions.
If knowledge is power,as Sir Francis Bacon wrote in 1597,
then perhaps creativity can be described as the ability to use that power.
Scientists must be creative and use their imagination all the time.
When Zhang Heng,the Chinese astronomer and geographer,
wanted to draw a map of the heavens,
he was not satisfied with a simple paper map.
Instead, he built a model that could move
in order to show how the position of the stars changed from season to season.
We must believe in what we do,even when others do not.
Both Galileo and Zhang Heng
found it difficult to make people believe that their theories were correct.
People laughed at Zhang Heng when he first introduced his seismograph,
and it was only later that the world recognised his greatness.
Galileo's observations show that Copernicus,another great astronomer,
was right and that the earth moves around the sun,not the other way around.
At that time,the church said that the earth was the centre of the universe
and Galileo was not allowed to publish or discuss his observations.
Today,both Zhang Heng and Galileo are known as scientific pioneers
who helped us better understand the world.
Perhaps the most important thing if we want to make a difference
is to find something that we like to do and that we are good at.
Knowing who we are means knowing how we think and what we like to do.
Everyone has his or her special skills and interests,
and only by discovering what we do best
can we hope to reach our goals and truly make a difference.
综合练习
Work Book unit 1 Integrating skills
Reading ALBERT EINSTEIN
When Stephen Hawking was writing A Brief History of Time,
his editors told him that he would lose half of his readers
for each equation he put in the book.
Despite this warning,Hawking found it necessary to include one equation.
His choice was the world's most famous equation,Albert Einstein's E = mc2.
As simple as the equation may seem,
it represents a theory so important
that it changed science and physics completely.
In fact, Einstein's discoveries made such a big difference
that he felt he had to apologise to Newton.
"Forgive me,"Einstein wrote, "you found the only way which,
in your age,was just about possible for a man of highest thought
and creative power.
Einstein had replaced Newton's theories with his own
and changed our understanding of the universe.
Before Einstein,
scientists believed that light travelled through space in a straight line.
But Einstein was able to prove that light coming from the stars
was bent as it passed the sun.
As a result,it appeared to scientists on earth that the stars had moved.
He worked out just how much the light would be bent;
he could also work out how far the stars would appear to have moved.
His discovery was completely new;
it was said that only three people could understand it at the time.
The difficulty was how he could prove his ideas to other scientists
Many of them did not accept his scientific ideas.
But Einstein went on with his research.
By 1919,scientists who had been watching the stars believed in his work
and he quickly became world-famous.
From that time on Einstein was greatly respected
as the leading scientist of the century.
The First World War (1914-1918) had brought him great sadness.
He had taken Swiss nationality in 1901
and therefore did not have to join the army,
as Switzerland did not take sides in the war.
Einstein thought that war was a terrible thing
and believed that fighting and killing in wars was wrong.
He did urge the United States to build an atomic bomb to defeat the Nazis,
but when Einstein saw the effect of the bomb,he regretted his actions.
What he wanted to see was an end to all the armies of the world.
When Hitler came into power in the early 1930s, Einstein,
who was a Jew,found it impossible to continue living in Germany.
His friends were beaten, or taken away,or their homes were destroyed.
While he was doing research in America,
Einstein wrote a letter to a newspaper to say that these acts were wrong.
It meant that he would never be able to visit Germany again.
That is why Einstein and his family left Europe for the USA in 1933.
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