1、modern men came from. Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of
2、 the men who made them have disappeared without trace.Lesson2Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour
3、all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eater
4、s, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings. Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.How many spiders are engaged in this work on
5、 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
6、 in killing insects. 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 insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the tota
7、l weight of all the human beings in the country.Lesson3Modern 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 case at all. The early climbers were looking for
8、the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especially if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at
9、 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
10、 villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often twelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no inn at
11、 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 cheese-makers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course d
12、inners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alpsmust have been very hard indeed.Lesson4In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. One case concern
13、s 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.
14、Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles. Veras curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a
15、series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a childs game of Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printe
16、d 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 sensitivity. During all these tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except wh
17、en blindfold she lacked the ability to perceive things with her skin. It was also found that although she could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands were wet.Lesson5The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. Fo
18、r a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums 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
19、books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) linkwith 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 close a
20、nd constant observation 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 heloved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he a
21、ble to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. 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 Abomin
22、able Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.Lesson6People are always talking about the problem of youth . If there is onewhich I take leave to doubt-then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and ag
23、ree that the young are after all human beings-people just like their elders. There is only one difference 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 f
24、elt that I was just young and uncertain-that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased 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 seekin
25、g.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 seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. Its as
26、if they were in some sense 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 ag
27、e were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.Lesson7I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at foo
28、tball or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didnt know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.Nearly all the sports practised
29、 nowadays 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 exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. 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
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