-
选修
9 Unit 1 Breaking records-
Reading
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
Chinmoy's 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 people's physical abilities.
When Ashrita came third in a 24-hour
bicycle marathon in New York's 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
fact,
he
often
wears a T-shirt with Sri Chinmoy's
words on the back. The words are:
FOCUS ON ...
Lance Armstrong
Date of
Birth: 8th September, 1971
Country: USA
Lance Armstrong's 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
world's
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 Women's 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 women's 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
women's
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
world's 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
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 ship's
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
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
seaman's 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
sun's position. A seaman would measure the sun's
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 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
NA
VIGATIONAL JOURNEY:A LESSON IN
SURVIV
AL
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
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
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
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
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
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 didn't 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
we sank gradually into a
sleepy, half-
alive state. The captain was as weak as the rest
of us, but he was determined not to give
up. He continued his navigational
measurements every day. He kept us busy and tried
to take our
minds off our stomachs and
our thirst. He kept us alive.
You
could
not
imagine
a
more
disturbing
sight
than
what
we
looked
like
when
arriving
in
Timor over forty days after being set
loose in our small boat. Our clothes were torn, we
had fever
and our faces showed the
hardships we had suffered. But after a rest, some
good meals and some
new clothes,
everything changed. We couldn't stop talking about
our voyage and everybody wanted
to hear
about it. We were the heroes who had escaped the
jaws of death by completing the greatest
navigational feat of all time!
选修
9 Unit 3 Australia-Reading
GLIMPSES OF AUSTRALIA
AUSTRALIA
Capital: Canberra
Offcial name: Commonwealth of Australia
Area: 7,686,850 km2
Population: 20 million
Highest point: Mount Kosciuszko, 2,228
metres above sea level
Lowest point: Lake Eyre, 15 metres
below sea level
Australia is the only
country that is also a continent. It is the sixth
largest country in the world
and is in
the smallest continent - Oceania. It is a mainly
dry country with only a few coastal areas
that have adequate rainfall to support
a large population. Approximately 80 of
Australians live in the
south-eastern
coastal area, which includes Australia's two
largest
cities
–
Melbourne and Sydney.
The
centre of the continent, which is mainly desert
and dry grassland, has few settlements.
Australia is famous for its huge, open
spaces, bright sunshine, enormous number of sheep
and
cattle
and
its
unusual
wildlife,
which
include
kangaroos
and
koalas.
Australia
is
a
popular
destination with
tourists from all over the world who come to
experience its unique ecology.
Australia is made up of six states.
Like the states in America, Australian states are
autonomous
in some areas of government.
However, Australia has a federal government
responsible for matters
that
affect
people
all
over
the
country,
such
as
defence,
foreign
policy
and
taxation.
The
federal
parliament is
located in Canberra.
CITIZENSHIP
CEREMONIES
PLANNED
AROUND AUSTRALIA
On 26 January, Australia Day, in over
200 locations across the nation , more than 9,000
people
will become Australian citizens.
different cultural and
social backgrounds into our communities and our
nation,
for Citizenship and
Multicultural Affairs.
many birthplaces
are an excellent way to encourage tolerance,
respect and friendship among all the
people of Australia.
Most
citizenship ceremonies will be followed by
displays of singing and dancing from many
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
上一篇：英语测试题及答案
下一篇：河南省2020-2021学年高一英语下学期期末考试试题