人教出版高级中学英语知识学习进修九课本学习知识资料文档.doc

-` 选修9 Unit 1 Breaking records-Reading "THE ROAD IS ALWAYS AHEAD OF YOU" Ashrita Furman is a sportsman who likes the challenge of breaking Guinness records. Over the last 25 years, he has broken approximately 93 Guinness records. More than twenty of these he still holds, including the record for having the most records. But these records are not made in any conventional sport like swimming or soccer. Rather Ashrita attempts to break records in very imaginative events and in very interesting places. Recently, Ashrita achieved his dream of breaking a record in all seven continents, including hula hooping in Australia, pogo stick jumping under water in South America, and performing deep knee bends in a hot air balloon in North America. While these activities might seem childish and cause laughter rather than respect, in reality they require an enormous amount of strength and fitness as well as determination. Think about the fine neck adjustments needed to keep a full bottle of milk on your head while you are walking. You can stop to rest or eat but the bottle has to stay on your head. While Ashrita makes standing on top of a 75 cm Swiss ball look easy, it is not. It takes a lot of concentration and a great sense of balance to stay on it. You have to struggle to stay on top especially when your legs start shaking. And what about somersaulting along a road for 12 miles? Somersaulting is a tough event as you have to overcome dizziness, extreme tiredness and pain. You are permitted to rest for only five minutes in every hour of rolling but you are allowed to stop briefly to vomit. Covering a mile in the fastest time while doing gymnastically correct lunges is yet another event in which Ashrita is outstanding. Lunges are extremely hard on your legs. You start by standing and then you step forward with the fight foot while touching the left knee to the ground. Then you stand up again and step forward with the left foot while touching the fight knee to the ground. Imagine doing this for a mile! Yet this talented sportsman is not a natural athlete. As a child he was very unfit and was not at all interested in sports. However, he was fascinated by the Guinness Book of World Records. How Ashrita came to be a sportsman is an interesting story. As a teenager, he began searching for a deeper meaning in life. He studied Eastern religions and, aged 16, discovered an Indian meditation teacher called Sri Chinmoy who lived in his neighbourhood in New York City. Since that time in the early 1970s, Ashrita has been one of Sri Chinmoys students. Sri Chinmoy says that it is just as important for people to develop their bodies as it is to develop their minds, hearts and spiritual selves. He believes that there is no limit to peoples physical abilities. When Ashrita came third in a 24-hour bicycle marathon in New Yorks Central Park in 1978, he knew that he would one day get into the Guinness Book of World Records. He had been urged by his spiritual leader to enter the marathon even though he had done no training. So, when he won third place, he came to the understanding that his body was just an instrument of the spirit and that he seemed to be able to use his spirit to accomplish anything. From then on, Ashrita refused to accept any physical limitation. With this new confidence, Asharita broke his first Guinness record with 27,000 jumping jacks in 1979. The motivation to keep trying to break records comes through his devotion to Sri Chinmoy. Every time Ashrita tries to break a record, he reaches a point where he feels he cannot physically do any more. At that moment, he goes deep within himself and connects with his soul and his teacher. Ashrita always acknowledges his teacher in his record-breaking attempts.In fact, he often wears a T-shirt with Sri Chinmoys words on the back. The words are: "There is only one perfect road. It is ahead of you, always ahead of you." FOCUS ON ... Lance Armstrong Date of Birth: 8th September, 1971 Country: USA Lance Armstrongs Guinness record for the fastest average speed at the Tour de France was set in 1999 with an average speed of 40.27 km/hr. In his teens he was a triathlete but at 16 he began to concentrate on cycling. He was an amateur cyclist before the 1992 Olympic Games but turned professional after he had competed in the Games. In the following few years, he won numerous titles, and by 1996 he had become the worlds number one. However, in October 1996, he discovered he had cancer and had to leave cycling. Successfully fighting his illness, Armstrong officially returned to racing in 1998. In 1999 he won the Tour de France and in 2003 he achieved his goal of winning five Tours de France. Michellie Jones Date of Birth: 9th June, 1969 Country: Australia In 1988 Michellie Jones helped establish the multi-sport event, the triathlon, in Australia. After completing her teaching qualifications in 1990, she concentrated on the triathlon. In 1991, she finished third at the world championships. In 1992 and 1993, she was the International Triathlon Union World Champion. Since then, she has never finished lower than fourth in any of the world championships she has competed in. At the Sydney Olympics in 2000 she won the silver medal in the Womens Triathlon, the first time the event had been included in the Olympic Games. Recently, for the first time in 15 years, Jones was not selected as part of the national team and therefore did not compete in the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Fu Mingxia Date of Birth: 16th August, 1978 Country: China Fu Mingxia first stood on top of the 10-metre diving platform at the age of nine. At 12 years old she won a Guinness Record when she became the youngest female to win the womens world title for platform diving at the World Championships in Australia in 1991. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, she took the gold medal in the womens 10-metre platform, becoming the youngest Olympic diving champion of all time. This was followed by great success at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games where she won gold for both the 10-metre platform and the three-metre springboard. This made her the first woman in Olympic diving history to win three gold medals. She retired from diving after Atlanta and went to study economics at university. While there she decided to make a comeback and went on to compete at the Sydney Olympic Games, where she won her fourth Olympic gold, again making Olympic history. Martin Strel Date of Birth: 1st October, 1954 Country: Slovenia Strel was trained as a guitarist before he became a professional marathon swimmer in 1978. He has a passion for swimming the worlds great rivers. In 2000, he was the first person ever to swim the entire length of the Danube River in Europe - a distance of 3,004 kilometres in 58 days. For this, he attained his first entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. Then in 2001 he broke the Guinness record for non-stop swimming - 504.5 kilometres in the Danube River in 84 hours and 10 minutes. Martin won his third entry in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2002 when he beat his own record for long distance swimming by swimming the length of the Mississippi River in North America in 68 days, a total of 3,797 kilometres. Then in 2003 he became the first man to have swum the whole 1,929 kilometres of the difficult Parana River in South America.In 2004, Strel again broke his own Guinness record by swimming the length of the dangerous Changjiang River (4,600 km), the third longest fiver in the world. 选修9 Unit 2 Sailing the oceans-Reading SRILING THE OCERNS We may well wonder how seamen explored the oceans before latitude and longitude made it possible to plot a ships position on a map. The voyages of travellers before the 17th century show that they were not at the mercy of the sea even though they did not have modern navigational aids. So how did they navigate so well? Read these pages from an encyclopedia. Page 1: Using nature to help Keeping alongside the coastline This seems to have been the first and most useful form of exploration which carried the minimum amount of risk. Using celestial bodies North Star At the North Pole the North Star is at its highest position in the sky, but at the equator it is along the horizon. So accomplished navigators were able to use it to plot their positions. Sun On a clear day especially during the summer the sailors could use the sun overhead at midday to navigate by. They can use the height of the sun to work out their latitude. Clouds Sea captains observed the clouds over islands. There is a special cloud formation which indicates there is land close by. Using wildlife Seaweed Sailors often saw seaweed in the sea and could tell by the colour and smell how long it had been them. If it was fresh and smelled strongly,then the ship was close to land. Birds Sea birds could be used to show the way to land when it was nowhere to be seen. In the evening nesting birds return to land and their nests. So seamen could follow the birds to land even if they were offshore and in the open sea. Using the weather Fog Fog gathers at sea as well as over streams or rivers. Seamen used it to help identify the position of a stream or river when they were close to land. Winds Wise seamen used the winds to direct their sailing. They could accelerate the speed, but they could also be dangerous. So the Vikings would observe the winds before and during their outward or return journeys. Using the sea Certain tides and currents could be used by skillful sailors to carry ships to their destination.These skills helped sailors explore the seas and discover new lands. They increased their ability to navigate new seas when they used instruments. Page 2: Using navigational instruments to help Finding longitude There was no secure method of measuring longitude until the 17th century when the British solved this theoretical problem. Nobody knew that the earth moved westwards 15 degrees every hour, but sailors did know an approximate method of calculating longitude using speed and time. An early method of measuring speed involved throwing a knotted rope tied to a log over the side of the ship. The rope was tied to a log which was then thrown into the sea. As the ship advanced through the water the knots were counted as they passed through a seamans hands. The number of knots that were counted during a fixed period of time gave the speed of the ship in nautical miles per hour. Later, when seamen began to use the compass in the 12th century they could calculate longitude using complicated mathematical tables. The compass has a special magnetic pointer which always indicates the North Pole, so it is used to help find the direction that the ship needs to go. In this way the ship could set a straight course even in the middle of the ocean. Finding latitude The Bearing Circle It was the first instrument to measure the suns position. A seaman would measure the suns shadow and compare it with the height of the sun at midday. Then he could tell if he was sailing on his correct rather than a random course. A Bearing Circle The Astrolabe The astrolabe, quadrant and sextant are all connected. They are developments of one another. The earliest, the astrolabe, was a special all-in-one tool for telling the position of the ship in relation to the sun and various stars which covered the whole sky. This gave the seamen the local time and allowed them to find their latitude at sea. However, it was awkward to use as one of the points of reference was the moving ship itself. The Quadrant This was a more precise and simplified version of the astrolabe. It measured how high stars were above the horizon using a quarter circle rather than the full circle of the astrolabe.It was easier to handle because it was more portable. Its shortcoming was that it still used the moving ship as one of the fixed points of reference. As the ship rose and plunged in the waves, it was extremely difficult to be accurate with any reading. The sextant The sextant was the updated version of the astrolabe and quadrant which reduced the tendency to make mistakes. It proved to be the most accurate and reliable of these early navigational instruments. It works by measuring the angle between two fixed objects outside the ship using two mirrors. This made the calculations more precise and easier to do. THE GREATEST NAVIGATIONAL JOURNEY:A LESSON IN SURVIVAL I am proud to have sailed with Captain Bligh on his journey of over 40 days through about 4,000miles in an open boat across the Pacific Ocean in 1789. Our outward voyage in the "Bounty" to Tahiti had been filled with the kind of incidents that I thought would be my stories when I returned home. But how wrong I was! On our departure from Tahiti, some of the crew took over the ship.They deposited the captain into a small boat to let him find his own way home. But who else was to go with him? Those of us on board the "Bounty" were caught in a dilemma. Was it better to risk certain death by sitting close together on a small, crowded open boat with very little food and water? Or should one stay on the "Bounty" with the crew and face certain death from the British Navy if caught? The drawback of staying on the ship seemed to grow as I thought about how wrong it was to treat Captain Bligh in this way. So I joined him in the small boat. As dusk fell, we seemed to face an uncertain future. We had no charts and the only instruments the captain was allowed to take with him were a compass and a quadrant. Once we were at sea, our routine every day was the same. At sunrise and sunset the captain measured our position using the quadrant and set the course using the compass. It was extremely difficult for us to get a correct reading from the quadrant as the boat moved constantly. The captain used a system called "dead reckoning". He knew there was land directly northwest of our original position. So his task was to make sure we stayed on that course. As you can see from the map we kept to a straight course pretty well. In addition, the captain kept us all busy reading the tables to work out our position. Although this took a great deal of time, it didnt matter. Time was, after all, what we had a lot of! Our daily food was shared equally among us all: one piece of bread and one cup of water. It was starvation quantities but the extreme lack of water was the hardest to cope with psychologically. Imagine all that water around you, but none of it was safe to drink because the salt in it would drive you mad! All the time the captain tried to preserve our good spirits by telling stories and talking hopefully about what we would do when we got back to England. We only half believed him. The tension in the boat got worse as the supply of food and water gradually disappeared. We could foresee that we would die if we could not reach land very soon and w