2014辽宁省鞍山市高考英语阅读理解练习（十）及答案.docVIP

2014辽宁省鞍山市高考英语阅读理解练习（10）及答案 【广东省广州市2014综合测试】 The recent publication of autobiographies by two of Britain’s great scientists, biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Stephen Hawking, is a wonderful opportunity to compare and contrast these two remarkable men. Surprisingly, they have rather more in common than we think. Most striking is the similarity in their backgrounds. They were born in the early 1940s to middle class families---not wealthy but comfortably off, with a strong commitment to academic excellence and public service. Both families were keen to send their boys to Oxford University---and both succeeded, Dawkins studying zoology and Hawking physics. Neither author has a very positive view of his early university life. Hawking describes the attitude at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s as very anti-work, “You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or fail. Hard work was looked down upon by students and we all pretended that nothing was worth making an effort for.” He estimates that he studied for no more than an hour a day as an undergraduate student （本科生）. Undergraduate life was somewhat more rewarding for Dawkins. Like Hawking, he wasn’t particularly hard-working and never attended his lectures. But he found Oxford’s system of weekly essay-based lessons with an academic tutor useful, “It was really only the tutorial system that educated me.” For both men, scientific life really got going as postgraduates after 1962. Dawkins, who remained at Oxford, describes brilliantly the academic competition among the postgraduate students, which he believed helped push him to develop the ideas that formed the basis of his most famous book, The Selfish Gene. This volume transformed scientific thinking about Darwinism evolution. Hawking, on the other hand, moved to Cambridge University after graduation, where his research into the universe would eventually make him the most famous physicists since Albert Einstein. He writes movingly about the disease which prog