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高中英语课文阅读材料 Furthermore...
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Can people change weather?
(Key words: ancient, predict, change, discover, crystal, cloud, rain, temperature, form)
This question has been asked since ancient times. We can predict (1) the weather, but can we change it?
Primitive (2) societies often believed that the weather could be changed through magic or by pleasing some gods. The Indian rain dance is an example of this kind of belief. In the 1700s, some Europeans thought that rain could be created by firing cannons (3). It is clear that this idea grew out of the mistaken belief that thunder caused thunderstorms -- and that cannon fire, which has a similar sound, could have a similar effect.
It is only in recent times that scientific methods of changing the weather have been discovered. Scientists find that rain forms inside a cloud as droplets of water come together to form ice crystals (4). But not all clouds produce such ice crystals. Ice crystals will not form unless tiny solid particles (5) are available to form a "seed" around which the ice crystals can grow. When the ice crystals become large enough, they fall out of the cloud and reach the ground as either rain or snow.
An idea was that a plane could dump crystals of dry ice into a cloud. This would cool some areas of the cloud to temperatures well below normal. At temperatures below zero degree centigrade, a large amount of tiny ice crystals can form. These crystals fall through the cloud and become rain or snow.
We have not come very far in learning to control the weather. But our understanding of what causes weather, and of how to predict weather, has increased greatly.
Question
1. How can scientists create rain to alleviate the drought?
Notes: 1. (v.) 预测 2. (adj.) 原始的 3. (n.) 大炮 4. (n.) 水晶，结晶体 5. (n.) 颗粒
Ernest Hemingway
(Key words: novelist, join, wound, disappoint, slaughter, disillusionment, war-wounded, illness, kill)
Ernest Hemingway, a great American novelist, was born in 1899. When he was a little boy, he often went hunting and fishing with his father. He said: "I love three things, fishing, hunting and later books."
When the First World War broke out, he had just graduated from high school. He joined a volunteer (1) ambulance (2) unit in France. He got wounded in his leg. Though he was greatly praised in newspapers, he was disappointed. He wrote of the First World War: "It's the most cruel human slaughter."
In 1921, he went to Paris and got to know a lot of artists, adventurers and intellectuals. All of them had a bitter disillusionment (3) with the War. They are referred to as "the lost generation" in history. Hemingway wrote In Our Times to express the feelings of a war-wounded people.
In 1926, he wrote the novel The Sun Also Rises. It tells the story of a group of expatriated (4) Americans who collapsed morally because of the war. In 1929, he wrote a very successful novel A Farewell to Arms in which his attitude towards the war was clearly seen. He later wrote a number of novels. The longest is For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is about an incident in the Spanish Civil War. Another famous novel is The Old Man And the Sea. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
In his last years, he published nothing, being seriously tortured (5) by his illness. At last he could not bear it any more and killed himself with a gun. That was in 1961.
Question
1. According to the article, what is the theme of most of Hemingway's works?
Notes: 1. (adj.) 志愿的 2. (n.) 野战医院，救护车 3. (n.) 幻灭 4. (adj.) 流放的，移居国外的 5. (v.) 折磨
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