TPO13 TIMED——陆开济--30资料文档.docxVIP

The main concern of the reading is that the rare and valuable fossils for sale are not a desirable phenomenon. The lecturer, nevertheless, give a divergent standpoint that the benefits of having fossils circulate in the commercial market is by no means a detrimental measure. The reading begins with the claim that the fossils sold can be otherwise donated to public museums where more people will gain a chance to see the fossils. The lecturer refutes it by saying that the sales of fossil in the market actually trigger off greater exposure to the public. According to the lecturer, fossils on sale means they can be available for purchase so that smaller educational institutions such as public schools and library will buy some of the fossils and display them to the public. In this way, actually more people will come to see them. The second claim brought up in the reading passage is that scientists are likely to lose the chance of studying the fossils if they are simply bought by wealthy collectors. The lecturer, however, offers an alternative account that scientists always get access to those fossils. Specifically, before a piece of fossil becomes valuable, it has to be identified according to professional knowledge, during the process of which scientists have already examined and recorded the data in detail before the fossils come into the possess of private collectors. In contrast to the last point in the reading passage that commercial fossil collectors will leave out evidence of the location of the fossils which may provide valuable information about the fossil, the lecturer asserts that the collectors actually help to explore and find the fossils, which itself is only adding to the information. As is clearly indicated in the listening, collecting operations of those official institutions in the university always lacks the process concerning discovering the fossil. As a consequence, although the public collectors may miss out some data of location and surroundings, i