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托福北美机经Explanations for Crop Circle麦田怪圈
作者:城市网 来源:总裁世界 更新日期:2015-2-3

  Explanations for Crop Circle

  ①For over three decades the southern English countryside has been the site of a strange phenomenon that has baffled observers and spawned countless news stories and more than a few books. In the middle of the night, flattened circulardepressions have appeared in fields of wheat, rye and other cereal crops. They range in diameter from ten feet to several hundred feet wide and vary from simple circles to complex spirals with rings and spurs, yet all having sharply definededges. These patterns are commonly called crop circles.

  ②A 1678 pamphlet entitled The Mowing-Devil is sometimes referred to as the earliest evidence of a crop circle. The pamphlet tells the story of a farmer who made a deal with the devil to mow his field. While the woodcut illustration appears to show a demonic creature cutting the field in a circular pattern, the story indicates that the whole field was mysteriously cut, not just a small section, as in the case of modern crop circles. A 1880 letter to the editor of Nature by amateur scientist John Rand Capron, describes how a recent storm had created several circles of flattened crops in a field. However, the first real crop circles didn’t appear until the 1970s, when simple circles began appearing in the English countryside. The number and complexity of the circles increased dramatically, reaching a peak in the 1980s and 1990s when increasingly elaboratecircles were produced.

  ③Various theories have been put forth to try to explain this phenomenon. One group of cereologists believe that they are made by extraterrestrial beings. More than 80 eyewitness accounts have reported the crop circles being formed in less than twenty seconds. The same witnesses also describe seeing incandescent, colored balls of light either before or during the circle’s creation. Sometimes these lights are said to descend and actually swirl the crop into its geometricconfiguration in under fifteen seconds. These accounts have led to theories that crop circles are created by aliens who are trying to communicate with us.

  ④Some have also suggested the circles are the result of top-secret military experiments. Proponents of this theory believe that governments are responsible for creating crop circles in tests and experiments with planes armed withmicrowave lasers. Microwave laser technology was first developed during the 1950’s and has been developing at a speed in tandem with the increasing complexity of crop circles. Another fact that is often linked to this theory is that more than half of the crop circles found in the UK appeared during rain or cloudy atmospheric conditions, which may prevent the source of the microwave firing to be visible. Certain crop circle designs are suggestive of a rotatingbeam with a variable diameter, which may be relative to the dispersion of the laser beam or the altitude from which it is fired.

  ⑤Still another popular theory proposed by cereologists holds that crop circles are the result of a physical phenomenon that is currently not well understood. They believe that the depressions are part of a little understood, unusual weather effect, which was named “plasma vortex” by George Terence Meaden, author and former physics professor from Britain. He defines it as “aspinning mass of air which has accumulated a significant fraction of electrically charged matter”. A plasma vortex is supposed to be something like ball lightening but larger and longer lasting. The plasma vortex, which produces a complex mixture of microwaves and magnetic fields, is believed to explain the plant anomalies found in the crop circles.

  ⑥While there are countless theories, the only known, proven cause of crop circles is humans. Their origin remained a mystery until September 1991, when two men confessed that they had created the patterns for decades as a prank to make people think UFOs had landed (they had been inspired by the 1966 Tully UFO report). They never claimed to have made all the circles — many were copycat pranks done by others — but their hoax launched the crop circle phenomena. By the end of 1991, even Meaden conceded that those circles that had complex designs were made by hoaxers.

  ——2013年3月3日北美考试机经

  The word “elaborate” in Paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to____.

  A. complex

  B. beautiful

  C. large

  D. elegant

  温馨提示:文章中标注出来的单词是托福考试重点词汇哦,希望广大考生们牢牢记住。从阅读中积累词汇、句型,要远比背单词书有效得多。

  题目答案:A 你是否答对了呢?


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