天津阅读 Rd025・2025_06 阅读理解

Welcome to our university’s Botanic Garden—plan your visit and find out about what we do!

You can either pay at the Ticket Office on arrival or book your tickets online. Please note: Tickets cannot be used on any date other than the one they were booked for and are non-refundable.

Guidelines for Visitors

The Garden is an active research activity and a living museum with a collection of over 8,000 plants.

Please bear in mind some simple rules for your visit: Only trained working dogs are permitted to enter the Garden. Children must stay with a grown-up at all times. Stick strictly to the paths and lawns. Do not climb the trees. Please do not pick any part of a growing plant. Cycling and ball games are not permitted in the Garden.

Guided Tours in the Garden

With over 8,000 plant species and a wonderful range of gardens and plantings to enjoy, there is something for everyone at the Garden, and many different aspects to appeal to a wide variety of interest groups.

Free Drop-in Weekend Tours

Enjoy a free-of-charge Garden tour with one of our expert guides, taking in the seasonal highlights of the Garden. Our weekend tours are available every Sunday at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. throughout the year. During the months of January and February these tours focus on the Winter Garden, Snowdrops and general winter interest. The free tours last one hour and start from the Fountain, near the Main Lawn.

Group Tours

Our experienced volunteer guides will help you enjoy the highlights and provide some of the background history and development of this amazing garden. These 90-minute, pre-bookable tours are ideal for adult groups wishing to make the most of their visit to our 40-acre site. Please visit the Group Guided Tours page for more details.

My great grandmother received the dollhouse from a family friend back in the late 1800s. It was then passed down from generation to generation. I was seven when I discovered it underneath the tree on Christmas morning.

In our house, Mom set up a sewing area; I sat at her sewing machine, my feet barely reaching the presser foot. Mom bent over me, her hands on mine, gently guiding small bits of cloth under the needle to create dollhouse bedding. She also taught me to make mini-blankets. With a little paint and glue, Mom demonstrated that anything could be turned into dollhouse furniture. I learnt to view the world as a place of possibility. I spent hours of my girlhood sitting before my dollhouse, telling made-up stories, and creating miniatures. But eventually school activities took over, and the dollhouse was moved to the attic.

Over the next 40 years, the storytelling skills I’d practiced with the dollhouse grew into novel writing skills, and I developed a career as an author. One day, after hours of working on my fourth book, I took a break by surfing the Internet and happened to notice the beautiful dollhouses people posted on social media. They reminded me of mine. I went to the attic, brought it back to my room and started updating it.

During the mindless hours of sewing and furnishing, I listened to audiobooks about the history of dollhouses, learning that they were not invented for play. There’s a long, rich history of people in hardship turning to dollhouses to find comfort. They weren’t produced as toys until mass production became standard after 1945. This inspired me to create a novel where art saves the day.

The truth was I myself needed art to save the day. Mom was then slipping away from me owing to progressive memory loss. The only topic we could discuss with any genuine joy was the update of the dollhouse. She loved retelling its history—those old memories. Mom didn’t find it strange at all that her 50-year-old daughter was updating the dollhouse. She just thought it fun and beautiful. And it was. It was a world where Mom and I were at our best together.

All animals take in oxygen from the air they breathe in, and release CO₂ from their blood when breathing out. Most mammals can’t directly detect oxygen levels in the blood supplied to their tissues. Instead, they rely on the rising level of CO₂ in their blood to signal that they might need to take a breath. But a recent study published in Science suggests seals can sense the amount of oxygen in the blood, and change their diving behavior in response.

To find out if oxygen levels affected seal behavior, Professor McKnight at the University of St. Andrews and his colleagues created a special section in a pool where young seals were held. In one corner, there was a breathing chamber, where they were sheltered from the rain and the wind.

The breathing chamber was surrounded by panels that prevented surface swimming, yet swimming below the surface for about 200 feet would give the seals access to a feeder where they could eat as much fish as they liked. Once the seals got familiar with the setup, the researchers started to gradually change the composition of the air in the breathing chamber, increasing or reducing the levels of oxygen and CO₂ to see an effect on their behavior. Sure enough, the higher the level of oxygen, the longer the seals stayed at the feeder.

The finding suggests that seals don’t just physically respond to oxygen levels by changing their heart rate or breathing, but that they are sufficiently aware of them to change their behavior. This ability would put seals in a class beyond any land mammals that have been tested. Since oxygen levels on land remain stable, humans don’t seem to have evolved to notice low blood oxygen levels, sometimes not even when they’re about to pass out in free-diving.

Therefore, in free-diving without oxygen tanks, accidents are quite common. Our reliance on sensing CO₂ levels in our blood instead of oxygen may be to blame. Actually, this is a perfectly reasonable strategy on land, where growing CO₂ tends to signal breathing issues. But when holding our breath during diving, relying on CO₂ levels is risky, especially on repeated dives. Because every time we surface and breathe in, our sensitivity to CO₂ is decreased, even if its levels are already high, and this increases the chance that a person will, without awareness, pass out before they get to the surface.

Science serves as a powerful tool for unlocking the mysteries of the universe, but understanding its limitations is essential for its effective application. There are occasions where I have used the handle of a knife as a hammer, but the result would have been better if I’d had a more suitable tool at hand. As far as science goes, it is really good at testing things that are testable, but not so for those that are not.

We can do, and have done, an impressive amount with our brains. But there are limits. Sometimes these limits go away if we keep at it for long enough—we just need better facilities and experiments to get the answer. Breaking new ground in modern science this way can be costly. Next-generation supercomputers or incredibly large telescopes are expensive, yet these may be required to find answers to some of the unsolved mysteries of the universe.

Sometimes the limits we encounter in trying to unlock the nature of the universe are cognitive. Think about this: human DNA is only about 1.2 percent different from that of chimps. Chimps are smart, no question. But could you teach them advanced mathematics? What if our DNA were another 1.2 percent further evolved than it is? What might our brains be capable of then? The level of abstract thinking might be unimaginable.

Sometimes the limits we hit are fundamental. There are laws of nature we may never be able to understand, however advanced our brains might become. There are experiments we might never be able to perform. We may never be able to test what caused the universe to be created, and what caused the cause of the universe being created. This is where science may never break through.

For something to be considered scientific, it must, by definition, be testable. There is a problem here: it may not need to be testable right now, but it must be testable at some point in the future by experiment. If an idea is untestable, that doesn’t mean it is wrong. It means it is untestable for now. These untestable ideas also happen to be some of the most interesting ones, probably because they’ve puzzled humanity for centuries.