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Infantile Amnesia

What do you remember about your life before you were three? Few people can remember anything that

happened to them in their early years. Adults' memories of the next few years also tend to be scanty. Most people

remember only a few events—usually ones that were meaningful and distinctive, such as being hospitalized or a

sibling’s birth.  

How might this inability to recall early experiences be explained? The sheer （complete / transparent / translucent ）passage of time 時間的流逝does not account無法闡述清楚

for it; adults have excellent recog5nition of pictures of peoplewho attended high school with them 35 years earlier.

Another seemingly plausible explanation—that infants do not form enduring memories at this point in

Powering the Industrial Revolution

In Britain one of the most dramatic changes of the Industrial Revolution was the harnessing（rein） of power. Until

the reign (sovereign power / sovereignty) of George Ⅲ(1760-1820), available sources of power for work and travel had not increased since the

Middle Ages. There were three sources of power: animal or human muscles; the wind, operating on sail or

windmill; and running water. Only the last of these was suited at all to the continuous operating of machines, and

although waterpower abounded in Lancashire(borough / municipality / autonomy/ in northwestern England) and Scotland (country in the northern part of the island of Great Britain,)and ran推動 grain mills as well as textile mills, it had one

great disadvantage: streams flowed where nature intended them to, and water-driven factories had to be located

on their banks whether or not the location was desirable for other reasons不論是不是合適工廠選址. Furthermore, even the most reliable

waterpower varied with the seasons and disappeared in a drought. The new age of machinery（machines collectively）, in short, could not

have been born without a new source of both movable and constant power.

William Smith

In 1769 in a little town in Oxfordshire（county in south central England）, England, a child with the very ordinary name of William Smith was

born into the poor family of a village blacksmith. He received rudimentary village schooling, but mostly he

roamed / nomadic / nomad / his uncle's farm collecting the fossils that were so abundant / abandon / in the rocks of the Cotswold hills . When he

grew older, William Smith taught himself surveying from books he bought with his small savings / savings account / checking account / , and at the age

of eighteen he was apprenticed to / trainee, pupil a surveyor of the local parish / preach/ missionary / father / bishop. He then proceeded to teach himself geology , and

when he was twenty-four, he went to work for the company that was excavating/ exhume the Somerset Coal Canal in the

south of England. / village / valley /

l      archeology: fossil / anthropology : artifacts / antique/ ruins / geologist: the earth crust

Radiocarbon dating

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Radiocarbon dating (or simply carbon dating) is a radiometric dating technique that uses the decay of carbon-14 (14
C) to estimate the age of organic materials, such as wood and leather, up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years.^[1] Carbon dating was presented to the world by Willard Libby in 1949, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Since its introduction it has been used to date many items, including samples of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Shroud of Turin, enough Egyptian artifacts to supply a chronology of Dynastic Egypt,^[2] and Ötzi the Iceman.^[3]

isotope

n. form of a chemical element which has the same atomic number as the other forms but a different atomic weight (Chemistry)

The Origin of the Pacific Island People

The greater Pacific region, traditionally called Oceania, consists of three cultural areas: Melanesia,

Micronesia, and Polynesia. Melanesia, in the southwest Pacific, contains the large islands of New Guinea, the

Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. Micronesia, the area north of Melanesia, consists primarily of small

scattered islands. Polynesia is the central Pacific area in the great triangle defined by Hawaii, Easter Island, and

New Zealand. Before the arrival of Europeans, the islands in the two largest cultural areas, Polynesia and

Micronesia, together contained a population estimated at 700,000.

Oceania

Minerals （inorganic (often crystalline) compounds）and Plants （small vegetable growth）

Research has shown that certain minerals are required by plants for normal growth and development. The

soil is the source of these minerals, which are absorbed （suck up; take up, take in） by the plant with the water from the soil.

Even nitrogen, which is a gas in its elemental （natural） state, is normally absorbed from the soil as nitrate ions(salt or ester of nitric acid{ oxidizing chemical compound that also contains nitrogen }). Some soils are notoriously

deficient in micro nutrients and are therefore unable to support most plant life. So-called serpentine soils, for

example, are deficient in calcium, and only plants able to tolerate low levels of this mineral can survive. In

modern agriculture(raising of crops and livestock), mineral depletion of soils is a major concern, since harvesting crops interrupts the recycling of nutrients back to the soil.

Listen to part of a lecture in a literature class.

Professor:

Now, we can’t really talk about fairytales without first talking about folktales because there’s a strong connection between these two genres—these two types of stories. In fact, many fairytales started out as folktales.

So, what’s a folktale? How would you characterize them? Jeff?

Student:

Well, they’re old stories; traditional stories. They were passed down orally within cultures from generation to generation, so they changed a lot over time. I mean every storyteller or maybe every town might have had a slightly different version of the same folktale.