2018版高考英语一轮总复习 第一部分 重点全程攻略 Unit 4 Astronomy the science of the stars限时规范特训 新人教版必修3.docVIP

Unit 4 Astronomy the science of the stars Ⅰ.阅读理解(建议用时16′) A [2017·复旦附中高三检测]Space exploration has always been the province of dreamers: The human imagination readily soars while human ingenuity (创造力) struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly. In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the decades end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous dream speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and transformed American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up at odds with each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的) and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is figuratively and literally otherworldly in its aims. When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow－up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end， with no successor. The perpetual argument is that funds are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit, reaching toward the stars seems a dispensable luxury—as if saving one－thousandth of a single years budget would solve our problems. But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, mapping out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting a bottom－up assault on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spac