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【篇一】
Spare that spider不要伤害蜘蛛
Why, 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 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 eaters, 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 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 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 total weight of all the human beings in the country.
你可能会觉得奇怪,蜘蛛怎么会是我们的朋友呢?因为它们能消灭那么多的昆虫,其中包括一些人类的大敌。要不是人类受一些食虫动物的保护,昆虫就会使我们无法在地球上生活下去,昆虫会吞食我们的全部庄稼,杀死我们的成群的牛羊。我们要十分感谢那些吃昆虫的鸟和兽,然而把它们所杀死的昆虫全部加在一起也只相当于蜘蛛所消灭的一小部分。此外,蜘蛛不同于其他食虫动物,它们丝毫不危害我们和我们的财物。
许多人认为蜘蛛是昆虫,但它们不是昆虫,甚至与昆虫毫无关系。人们几乎一眼就能看出二者的差异,因为蜘蛛都是8条腿,而昆虫的腿从不超过6条。
有多少蜘蛛在为我们效力呢?一位研究蜘蛛的权威对英国南部一块草坪上的蜘蛛作了一次调查。他估计每英亩草坪里有225万多只蜘蛛。这就是说,在一个足球场上约有600万只不同种类的蜘蛛。蜘蛛至少有半年忙于吃昆虫。它们一年中消灭了多少昆虫,我们简直无法猜测,它们是吃不饱的动物,不满意一日三餐。据估计,在英国蜘蛛一年里所消灭昆虫的重量超过了这个国家人口的总重量。
【篇二】
Secrecy in industry 工业中的秘密
Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific research in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiry is a secret one, it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in universities, or even, often enough, in other departments of the same firm. The degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are engaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries, where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance, have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries because they are unwilling to have their names entered as having taken out such and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind of research they are likely to be undertaking.>>
有两个因素严重地妨碍着工业中科学研究的效率:一是科研工作中普遍存在的保密气氛;二是研究人员缺乏个人自由。任何一项研究都涉及到保密,那些从事科研的人员自然受到了限制。他们不能和其他国家、其他大学、甚至往往不能与本公司的其他部门的同行们进行有效的接触。保密程度自然差别很大。某些大公司进行的研究属于一般和基础性的研究。因此不保密对他们才有利。然而,依赖这种研究的很多工艺程序是在完全保密的情况下进行的,直到可以取得专利权的阶段为止。更多的工艺过程根本就不会取得专利权,而是作为秘方保存着。这在化学工业方面尤其突出。同物理和机械工业相比,化学工业中偶然发现的机会要多得多。有时,保密竟达到了这样的程度,即连研究工作的整个性质都不准提及。比如,很多公司向图书馆借阅科技书籍时感到很困难,因为它们不愿让人家记下它们公司的名字和借阅的某一本书。他们生怕别的公司的情报人员据此摸到他们可能要从事的某项科研项目。
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 preserve their history is to recount it as sagas----legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because 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 these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first‘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 the men who made them have disappeared without trace.
我们从书籍中可以读到5,000年前近东发生的事情,那里的人最早学会了写字。但直到现在,世界上仍然有些地方;人们还不会书写。他们保存历史的办法是将历史当作传说讲述,由讲述人一代接一代地将史实描述为传奇故事口传下来。这些传说是很有用的,因为它们能告诉我们以往人们迁居的情况。但是;没有人能把他们当时做的事情记载下来。人类学家过去不清楚如今生活在太平洋诸岛上的波利尼西亚人的祖先来自何方,当地人的传说却告诉了人们:其中有一部分是约在2,000年前从印度尼西亚迁来的。
但是,和我们相似的原始人生活的年代太久远了;因此,有关他们的传说即使有如今也失传了。于是,考古学家们既缺乏历史记载,又无口头传说来帮助他们弄清最早的“现代人”是从哪里来的。
然而,幸运的是,远古人用石头制作了工具,特别是用燧石,因力燧石较之其他石头更易成形。他们也可能用过木头和兽皮,但这类东西早已腐烂殆尽。石头是不会腐烂的。因此,尽管制造这些工具的人的骨头早已荡然无存;但远古时代的石头工具却保存了下来。
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