英语阅读理解[1]

Passage 1

You are unique. There are billion people in the world but no other person is exactly like you. Besides people, there are millions of other living things. Every living thing is different from each other. Every living thing is a unique combination of characteristics.

你是独一无二的。世界上有65亿人，但没有一个人和你完全一样。除了人，还有成千上万的其他生物。每种生物相互都是不同的。每种生物都是个性的独特组合。

Why is each living thing unique Where do its characteristics come from Do people receive characteristics from their mothers and fathers How The work of Gregor Mendel was especially important to help us to answer these questions.

为什么每种生物都是独一无二的它的个性来自哪里人类的个性是来自父母吗又是怎样来的格雷戈·门德尔（奥地利遗传学家）所从事的工作对于我们回答这些问题尤其重要。

Mendel studied plants, especially pea plants. In some way they were all the same. For example, they all had flowers. But some had red flowers, and others had white flowers. Some were tall, others were short. Mendel was especially interested in the differences. He wondered why each plant was of certain color, shape, size. He experimented with thousands of pea plants, with a careful record. And he discovered some interesting things. He mated different pea plants. First, he mated a red flower plant with a white flower plant. All of the offspring plants had red flowers. Mendel was curious about what happened to the white. Then he mated two of the offspring plants. Every time he did this, they produced three red plants and one white plant. There was the white again. So Mendel knew that even red plants somehow passed on whiteness. Mendel decided that pea plants carried factors, and the parents passed these factors onto their offspring.

门德尔研究植物，尤其是豆科植物。在某种程度上，植物都是一样的。例如，它们都有叶子。但有的开红花，有的却开白花。有的高有的矮。门德尔对这些差异尤其感兴趣。他想知道为什么每种植物都有特定的颜色、形状、大小。他对成千上万棵豆科植物进行实验，并做仔细记录。他发现了一些有趣的东西。他对不同的豆科植物进行嫁接。首先，他把一棵红花植物嫁接到白花植物上，它们的后代是开红花。白色哪里去了门德尔感到很好奇。然后他把这种后代植物相互再嫁接。每次结果都是产生了三棵开红花的植物和一棵开白花的植物。又有白色的了。因此门德尔得出结论，即便开红花的植物也会遗传白色。门德尔断定豆科植物带有某些因子，父母将这些因子遗传给后代。

Today we call these factors genes. Genes are tiny pieces of matter. They carry information from parents to offspring. Now we know that every person is unique and one reason for this is that every person is a unique combination of genes.

今天我们将这些因子称为基因。基因是非常小的物质。它们把父母的信息传递给后代。现在我们知道，之所以每个人都是独一无二的，原因之一就是每个人都是基因的独特组合。

"

Passage 2

No other author in American literature is better known or more loved than Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in Missouri in 1835, he grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River and became a riverboat pilot. when he was 21 years old. So he adopted the pen name of "Mark Twain", which was derived from a phrase meaning "two fathoms deep" used by the boatmen on the Mississippi as they measured the depth of the river. The river environment inspired the two novels which brought him his greatest fame: "Tom Sawyer” and "Huckleberry Finn". Another book, "Life on the Mississippi", told of his adventures on the river boats of that period.

在美国文学史上没有哪个作家比塞缪尔·朗赫恩·克莱门斯更出名或更令人喜爱。他1835年生于密苏里州，他在密西西比河畔长大，21岁就成了河船领航员。因此他采用了笔名“马克·吐温”，这是来自船员在密西西比河测量水深时所用的一个词，意为“水深两浔”。河边的环境激发他创作了两部小说：《汤姆·索亚历险记》和《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》，使他一夜成名。另一本书《密西西比河上的生活》讲述了那个时期他在船上的冒险经历。

It was during the Civil War that Mark Twain’s life as a writer started. At that time he was working as a newspaper man in Nevada and California. His short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaberas County” was an immediate success and his new career began. "A Million Pond Note" written in 1893 was another well-known short story.

马克·吐温作为作家的生涯是在美国内战期间开始的。当时他在内华达州和加利福尼亚当一名新闻记者。他的短篇小说《卡拉维拉斯县驰名的跳蛙》很快就取得了成功，他的新的生涯就此开始。1893年写的《百万英镑钞票》是另一著名的短篇小说。

In 1870, Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon. He had fallen in love with her picture even before he met her. According to his biographer, his wife had a great influence on Twain’s later books.

1870年，马克·吐温和欧丽维亚·兰登结婚。他甚至在还未见过她时就爱上了她的照片。他的传记作者认为，他的妻子对他晚期的作品有很大的影响。

Mark Twain was also a very successful lecturer. His travels around the country giving talks on a variety of subjects helped make him famous and increased the sale of his books.

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马克·吐温还是个非常成功的演讲家。他周游全国，作有关各种话题的演讲，这使他名声大扬，也增加了他书的销售量。

"Tom Sawyer" and “Huckleberry Finn” are considered Twain’s best works. They are marked by humor and satire and provide his readers with an excellent picture of his era. His last book was completed in 1909, one year before his death. He was 74 years old.

《汤姆·索亚历险记》和《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》被认为是马克·吐温最好的作品。他们的特点是幽默和讽刺，给读者提供了一副他那个时代的生动画面。他的最后一本书完成于1909年，即他去世的前一年，那年他74岁。