人教版高中英语必修五-教材练习答案及听力原文

教材练习答案及听力原文

Unit 1

WARMING UP

Answers:

1 Archimedes, Ancient Greek (287-21

2 BC) He was a mathematician. He found that if you put an object into water the water pushes the object up. It rises and partly floats. The force of the water pushing it up is the same as the weight of the object.

2 Charles Darwin, British (1808-1882) The Origin of Species was published in 1859. It explained how plants and animals had changed over time to fit in with a changing environment. At the time it was published it was very controversial. Many people believed the Bible when it said that God made the first two people (Adam and Eve) and that all other people came from these two. Darwin’s book showed that people had developed from apes instead. So this caused a lot of argument between religious and scientific people. However Darwin’s idea became very influential and is still accepted today.

3 Thomas Newcomen, British (1663-1729) He improved the first steam pump built by Thomas Savery in 1698 and turned it into a steam engine for taking water out of mines in 1712. James Watt improved it still further in the 1770s turning it into the first modern steam engine used on the railways.

4 Gregor Mendel, Czech (1822-1884) He grew pea plants and developed ideas on heredity and inherited characteristics. He concentrated on cross-fertilising pea plants and analyzing the results. Between 1856-1863 he grew 28,000 pea plants. He examined seven kinds of seed and plant characteristics and developed some laws of inheritance. The first is that inheritance factors do not combine but are passed to the next generation intact. Second, he found that each partner gives half the inherited factors to the young. Third, some of these factors show up in the offspring (and so are dominant). The other factors are masked by the dominant ones (and so are recessive).

5 Marie Curie, Polish and French (1867-1934) She was born in Poland and came to study in France in 1891 and she lived there for the rest of her life. In 1898 she discovered radium. She received two Nobel prizes, one (with Pierre Curie) for physics (1903) and one for chemistry (1911). She is the only person to have been so honoured. On the death of her husband she took over his job at the Sorbonne in Paris. Her work on radioactivity and the discovery of radium meant that she began a new scientific area of research. She was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize and the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne.

6 Thomas Edison, American (1847-1931) He was already an inventor of other electrical devices (phonograph, electric light bulb) when in 1882 he designed a system for providing New York with electricity from a central power station. This was a tremendous achievement, which had previously been thought impossible.

7 Leonardo da Vinci , Italian (1452-1519) He