（天津专版）2018年高考英语二轮复习 专题三 阅读理解 第三节 题组训练 2 科普知识.docVIP

第三节 题组训练 2 科普知识 A (2017·河东区一模) Do you ever wish for a little more time to do everything you need to do？Well，on July 1 you’ll be getting it—but only one more second. On July 1 at exactly 7：59：59 a．m.Beijing time (or on June 30 at 23：59：59 UTC，Coordinated Universal Time)，the world’s atomic(原子的) clocks will pause for a single second，or，more precisely，change to the unusual time of 7：59：60，according to .The addition of a leap second(闰秒)，announced by the Paris Observatory，is to keep our clocks in time with the slowing of Earth’s rotation(旋转) and astronomical time as measured by the sun. Just one extra second could cause big problems and affect the way computers and websites work，however.When the last leap second was added back in 2012，more than a few websites had some trouble.As reported by P，popular sites like the community website Reddit crashed when the leap second was added. For Reddit，the problem was eventually found to be with a Linux system that got confused when it checked the network time and found an extra second. Speaking to Wired about the problem back in 2012，Linux creator Linus Torvalds commented：“Almost every time we have a leap second，we find something.It’s really annoying，because it’s code(代码) that is almost never used，and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions.” Companies have had to think of their own solutions，and Google’s “leap smear” may be the best-known example.As company engineer Christopher Pascoe explains in a blog post，companies usually try to fix the problem by turning back the clocks by one second at the end of the day so that they play that second again. However，Pascoe believes this creates problems.He asked：“What happens？Does e-mail that comes in during that second get stored correctly？” Google has a solution：Cut the extra second into milliseconds and then put these tiny amounts of time into the system throughout the day.“This means that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight，”says Pascoe.“Our clocks have al