托福阅读真题（含答案）20140302Reading.docxVIP

PAGE6 / NUMPAGES7 spun glass：玻璃纤维 cork: n. 软木； 软木塞； （钓鱼用）软木浮子； [植]外皮 tartar: Tartar is a hard yellowish substance that forms on your teeth and causes them to decay if it is not removed.牙垢；牙结石；[化]酒石 Cell Theory The study of cells--cell biology--began in 1660, when English physicist Robert Hooke melted strands of spun glass to create lenses that he focused on bee stingers, fish scales, fly legs, feathers, and any type of insect he could hold still. When he looked at cork, which is the bark from a type of oak tree, it appeared to be divided into little boxes, which were remnants of cells that were once alive. Hooke called these units “cells” because they looked like the cubicles (cellae) where monks studied and prayed. Although Hooke did not realize the significance of his observation, he was the first person to see the outlines of cells. In 1673, Antony van Leeuwenhoek of Holland improved lenses further. He used only a single lens, but due to its quality, it was more effective at magnifying and produced a clearer image than most two-lens microscopes then available. One of his first objects of study was tartar scraped from his own teeth, and he observed that it contained many very small animalcules(microscopic organisms). Over the next few years, Leeuwenhoek built more than 500 microscopes that opened a vast new world to the human eye and mind. He viewed bacteria and other microorganisms--life that people had not known existed. However, he failed to see the single-celled “animalcules” reproduce, and therefore he perpetuated the popular idea at the time that life arises from the nonliving or from nothing. Nevertheless, he described with remarkable accuracy microorganisms and microscopic parts of larger organisms, including human red blood cells. Despite the accumulation of microscopists’ drawings of cells made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cell theory --the idea that the cell is the fundamental unit of all life--did not emerge until the ninete