天津阅读 Rd101・2004 阅读理解

Monarch butterflies（黑脉金斑蝶）are a common summer sight in the northern United States and Canada. These large orange and black insects（昆虫）brighten parks and gardens as they fly lightly among the flowers. What makes monarchs particularly interesting is that they migrate（迁飞）—all the way to California or Mexico and back. They are thought to be the only insect that does this.

Every year in the late summer monarchs begin their journey to the south. Those heading for Mexico go first for the Louisiana-Mississippi area, then fly across the Gulf of Mexico into Texas. Once in Mexico, they settle themselves in one of about fifteen places in a mountain forest filled with fir trees. Each place provides a winter home for millions of monarchs. The butterflies are so many that they often cover entire trees. When spring comes, they begin their long journey north.

The question is often asked whether every butterfly makes the round-trip journey every year. And the answer is no. The average monarch lives about nine months. So one flying north might lay eggs in Louisiana and then die. The eggs of that generation may be found in Kentucky; the eggs of the next generation may end up in Wisconsin or Michigan. The last generation of the season, about the fourth, will make their way back to Mexico and restart the journey.

Scientists learn about monarchs’ migration by catching and making marks on the insects. By recatching a monarch with such a mark and noticing where it came from, the next scientist can get to know things like the butterfly’s age and its routing（路线）.

SYDNEY: As they sat sharing sweets beside a swimming pool in 1999, Shane Gould and Jessicah Schipper were simply getting along well, chatting about sport, life and “anything else that came up.”

Yet in Sydney next month, they will meet again by the pool, and for a short time the friends will race against each other in the 50-meter butterfly（蝶泳）in the Australian championships at Homebush Bay.

Gould, now a 47-year-old mother of four, has announced she will be making a return to elite competition（顶级赛事）to swim the one event, having set a qualifying（合格的）time of 30.32 seconds in winning gold at last year’s United States Masters championships. Her comeback comes 32 years after she won three golds at the Munich Olympics.

Schipper, now a 17-year-old from Brisbane with a bright future of going to Athens for her first Olympics, yesterday recalled（回忆）her time with Gould five years ago.

“I was at a national youth camp on the Gold Coast and Shane had come along to talk to us and watch us train,” Schipper explained. “It seemed as if we had long been good friends. I don’t know why. We just started talking and it went from there.”

“She had a lot to share with all of us at that camp. She told us stories about what it was like at big meets like the Olympics and what it’s like to be on an Australian team. It was really interesting.”

Next time, things will be more serious. “I will still be swimming in the 50m butterfly at the nationals, so there is a chance that I could actually be competing against Shane Gould,” said Schipper, who burst onto the scene at last year’s national championships with second places in the 100m and 200m butterfly.

With a good shopping position and the right amount（数量）of money, any educated person ought to be able to make a living out of a bookshop. It is not a difficult trade to learn and the large chain-stores can never force the small bookseller out of existence as they have done to the corner shop. But the hours of work are very long—I was only doing a part-time job, but my boss put in a seventy-hour week, besides regular journeys out of shopping hours to buy books.

The real reason why I should not like to be back in the book trade for life, however, is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller cannot always tell the truth about his books, and that gives him a dislike for them. There was a time when I really did love books—loved the sight and smell and feel of them—if they were fifty or more years old, that is. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a bargain lot of them on sale for several pounds. There is a peculiar flavour（独特的味道）about the unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: little-known eighteenth-century poets, or out-of-date geography books. For occasional（偶尔的）reading—in your bath, for example, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed—there is nothing as good as a very old picture story-book.

But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in a mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were dull and even a little tiresome. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy rubbish.

Millions of aircraft take off around the world every year. The skies they fly in seem limitless—miles of empty space. But, with the number of flights increasing each year, this emptiness no longer exists. Researchers in the world of aviation（航空）are worried about the increasing pressure on pilots and ground controllers. And increasing collisions, occurring at or near an airport, have called attention to the need for more aids（辅助设备）to aviation control.

People who travel the skies are not certain about air safety. A great deal of money is spent on new and bigger aircraft and airports to deal with the vast increase in passengers travelling by air. Only a small percentage of this money is spent on navigation（导航）and other aids. Actually, suitable electronic equipment has long existed, and many companies market safety aids designed to make it safer for aircraft to take off, fly any distance, and land, whatever the weather. Yet, there are two problems to be solved. The first is to get governments, airlines and airport officials to agree to basic levels of safety aids. The second problem is to find a way of meeting these basic requirements.

But no matter how well the equipment works, operators of the equipment still play an important role. Communications between pilots and ground controllers are extremely important to air safety. It is worth pointing out that the mishearing or misunderstanding of instructions in English, and the use of another language, in an international conversation, have led to two recent aircraft accidents. A new type of instrument（仪器）called FLIGHTWATCH would help pilots prevent airport collisions. It would be particularly helpful near airports.

Art museums are places where people can learn about various cultures（文化）. The increasingly popular “design museums” that are opening today, however, perform quite a different role. Unlike most art museums, the design museum shows objects that are easily found by the general public. These museums sometimes even place things like fridges and washing machines in the center of the hall.

People have argued that design museums are often made use of as advertisements for new industrial technology. But their role is not simply a matter of sales—it is the honoring of excellently invented products. The difference between the window of a department store and the showcase in a design museum is that the first tries to sell you something, while the second tells you the success of a sale.

One advantage of design museums is that they are places where people feel familiar with the exhibits. Unlike the average art museum visitors, design museum visitors seldom feel frightened or puzzled（困惑）. This is partly because design museums clearly show how and why mass-produced products work and look as they do, and how design has improved the quality of our lives. Art museum exhibits, on the other hand, would most probably fill visitors with a feeling that there is something beyond their understanding.

In recent years, several new design museums have opened their doors. Each of these museums has tried to satisfy the public’s growing interest in the field with new ideas. London’s Design Museum, for example, shows a collection of mass-produced objects from Zippo lighters to electric typewriters to a group of Italian fish-tins. The choices open to design museums seem far less strict than those to art museums, and visitors may also sense the humorous（幽默的）part of our society while walking around such exhibits as interesting and unusually attractive toys collected in our everyday life.