haorantaba
If a diver surfaces too quickly, he may suffer the bends. Nitrogen dissolved in his blood is suddenly liberated by the reduction of pressure. The consequence, if the bubbles accumulate in a joint, is sharp pain and abent body—thus the name. If the bubbles form in his lungs or his brain, the consequence can be death. 如果潜水员浮出水面太快，他可能会得减压病（bend，原意为弯曲）。溶解在血液里的氮气因为气压下降而突然释放，如果气泡聚积在关节部位，就会剧痛，直不起腰——减压病因此得名；如果气泡形成于肺部或者大脑，可能导致死亡。 Other air-breathing animals also suffer this decompression sickness if they surface too fast: whales, for example. And so, long ago, did ichthyosaurs. That these ancient sea animals got the bends can be seen from their bones. If bubbles of nitrogen form inside the bone they can cut off its blood supply. This kills the cells in the bone, and consequently weakens it, sometimes to the point of collapse. Fossil bones that have caved in on themselves are thus a sign that the animal once had the bends. 其他呼吸空气的动物如果浮出水面太快也会得减压病：例如鲸鱼。很久以前，鱼龙也是如此。从这些古代海洋动物的骨骼可以看出它们得过减压病。如果氮气气泡形成于骨骼内，就会切断血液供应。这会杀死骨细胞，弱化骨骼，有时甚至发生断裂。因此存在塌陷骨骼的化石是这种动物曾经得过减压病的标志。 Bruce Rothschild of the University of Kansas knewall this when he began a study of ichthyosaur bones to find out how widespread the problem was in the past. What he particularly wanted to investigate was how ichthyosaurs adapted to the problem of decompression over the 150 million years. To this end, he and his colleagues traveled the world’s natural-history museums, looking at hundreds of ichthyosaurs from the Triassic period and from the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. 勘萨斯大学的布鲁斯·罗斯柴尔德在开始对鱼龙骨骼研究时发现这一问题在过去非常普遍。他特别想知道鱼龙在1.5亿年里如何适应减压。为此，他和同事们参观了世界自然历史博物馆，观察了三叠纪、侏罗纪晚期和白垩纪的数百条鱼龙。 When he started, he assumed that signs of the bends would be rarer in younger fossils, reflecting their gradual evolution of measures to deal with decompression. Instead, he was astonished to discover the opposite. More than 15% of Jurassic and Cretaceous ichthyosaurs had suffered the bends before they died, but not a single Triassic specimen showed evidence of that sort of injury. 刚开始他认为得减压病的标志在较新的化石中会更为少见，这反映了它们在适应减压问题上的逐渐演化。然而，他惊讶地发现情况恰恰相反。超过15%的侏罗纪和白垩纪鱼龙在死亡前得过减压病，但三叠纪的标本却没有证据表明有过这种伤害。 If ichthyosaurs did evolve an anti-decompression means, they clearly did so quickly—and, most strangely, they lost it afterwards. But that is not what Dr Rothschild thinks happened. He suspects it was evolution in other animals that caused the change. 如果鱼龙真的进化出一种对抗减压的方式，显然进化如此之快——但最奇怪的是，它们后来失去了这种能力。罗斯柴尔德博士认为情况并非如此，他怀疑是其他动物的进化导致了这种变化。 Whales that suffer the bends often do so because they have surfaced to escape a predator such as a large shark. One of the features of Jurassic oceans was an abundance of large sharks and crocodiles, both of which were fond of ichthyosaur lunches. Triassic oceans, by contrast, were mercifully shark- and crocodile-free. In the Triassic, then, ichthyosaurs were top of the food chain. In the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they were prey as well as predator—and often had to make a speedy exit as a result. 得减压病的鲸鱼经常快速浮出水面，它们是为了躲避捕食者，比如大型鲨鱼。侏罗纪海洋的特征之一是拥有大量的大型鲨鱼和鳄鱼，它们都喜欢以鱼龙作为午餐。而幸运的是，三叠纪的海洋没有鲨鱼和鳄鱼。在三叠纪，鱼龙是食物链的顶端。在侏罗纪和白垩纪，它们是猎物，也是捕食者，因此经常不得不迅速离开。
北京美克
PASSAGE D
( from NMET Jiangsu Paper)
Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of theliterature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twains most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)
But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction—a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech, for example—were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain’s racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography (自传) about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth—mostly with white men performing in black-face—and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black manthe inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
65. How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?
A. Twain was more willing to deal with racism.
B. Twain’s attack on racism was much less open.
C. Twain’s themes seemed to agree with plots.
D. Twain was openly concerned with racism.
66. Recent criticism of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn arose partly from its _____.
A. target readers at the bottom
B. anti-slavery attitude
C. rather impolite language
D. frequent use of “nigger”
67. What best proves Twain’s anti-slavery stand according to the author?
A. Jim’s search for his family was described in detail.
B. The slave’s voice was first heard in American novels.
C. Jim grew up into a man and a father in the white culture.
D. Twain suspected that the slaves were less intelligent.
68. The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that _____.
A. slaves were forced to give up their babies to their masters
B. slaves’ babies could pick up slave-holders’ way of speaking
C. blacks’ social position was shaped by how they were brought up
D. blacks were born with certain features of prejudice
69. What does the underlined word “they” in Paragraph 7 refer to?
A. The attacks.
B. Slavery and prejudice.
C. White men.
D. The shows.
70. What does the author mainly argue for?
A. Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism.
B. Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln.
C. Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds.
D. Twain’s works should be read from a historical point of view.
