上半場閱讀第三篇
第三篇文章與2004年9月S2第四篇文章非常相似。但是這兩篇文章雖然題材類似(科技大類,航空航天類題材),但是今年這篇的考點卻非常簡單(考察的全部是factual information)!下面,讓我們來看看原文,選自newscientist ,全文868字)
LIKE the space telescope he championed, astronomer Lyman Spitzer faced some perilous moments in his career. Most notably, on a July day in 1945, he happened to be in the Empire State building when a B-25 Mitchell bomber lost its way in fog and crashed into the skyscraper 14 floors above him. Seeing debris falling past the window, his curiosity got the better of him, as Robert Zimmerman recounts in his Hubble history, The Universe in a Mirror. Spitzer tried to poke his head out the window to see what was going on, but others quickly convinced him it was too dangerous.
開頭講了一則趣聞,可以直接跳過,以第二段首句的轉折作為文章的第一個重點。下面的第一個題目即有關這則趣聞說明的問題。關于答案,我們要讀完第二段的大致結構才會清楚。
Spitzer was not the first astronomer to dream of sending a telescope above the distorting effects of the atmosphere, but it was his tireless advocacy, in part, that led NASA to launch the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. Initially jubilant, astronomers were soon horrified to discover that Hubble's 2.4-metre main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. Although it was only off by 2.2 micrometres, this badly blurred the telescope's vision and made the scientists who had promised the world new images and science in exchange for $1.5 billion of public money the butt of jokes. The fiasco, inevitably dubbed "Hubble Trouble" by the press, wasn't helped when even the limited science the crippled Hubble could do was threatened as its gyroscopes, needed to control the orientation of the telescope, started to fail one by one.
第二段中,有一對頗有深意的文字:initially jubilant…The fiasco 從中我們可以看出本文的話題是哈勃望遠鏡,文章主題是通過第一段的例證反映出來的,科學家們艱苦探索不畏艱難的精神。
By 1993, as NASA prepared to launch a rescue mission, the situation looked bleak. The telescope "probably wouldn't have gone on for more than a year or two" without repairs, says John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who flew on the most recent Hubble servicing mission. Happily, the rescue mission was a success. Shuttle astronauts installed new instruments that corrected for the flawed mirror, and replaced the gyroscopes. Two years later, Hubble gave us the deepest ever view of the universe, peering back to an era just 1 billion years after the big bang to see the primordial building blocks that aggregated to form galaxies like our own.