托福听力考试背景知识2.doc

托福听力考试背景知识综合辅导() 第一次世界大战中AIRSHIP的背景知识?By the start of the Great War the airship had been developed into two main types - rigid and non-rigid (technically, the latter is more accurately described as pressure-rigid). Cylindrical in cross-section, both were given buoyancy by gas and motion by engine-driven propellers and were controlled by vertical rudders and horizontal elevators. ?In the rigid type, a solid framework, which might be likened to a skeleton, supports an external covering of fabric called the envelope (a very few experimental types had a metallic covering). Within the framework are contained bags of gas called balloonets. In the non-rigid, the envelopes shape is maintained by the pressure of the gas that fills it; there is no framework. The rigids control car and engines are suspended from the framework; in the non-rigid they are attached directly to or suspended directly from the envelope. (In some later rigids the engines were mounted internally, driving the propellers by transmission belts.) ?There was an intermediate type, now long vanished, called the semi-rigid. It had a pressure-rigid envelope but a solid keel. ?The rigid airship, employed so extensively by Germany during the Great War, was perfected soon after the turn of the century by a former Wurttenberg army cavalry officer, Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von Zeppelin, who had been inspired by a balloon ascent he had made in the United States on 19-Aug-1863. 2 His craft were, naturally , known as Zeppelins. Zeppelin is a proprietary, or trade, name (such as Kodak, Ferris Wheel and Autogiro), and is applied properly only to craft constructed by Luftshiffbau Zeppelin G.m.b.H. or firms licensed to use its patents. It should thus be spelled with a capital Z; modern writers who spell it in lower case are mistaken in their apparent belief that it is generic. 3 ?It has become customary to refer to all German rigid airships of the Great War as Zeppelins, but in fact not all were. Some