Directions: You are expected to study this section in class. Don’t preview.

Word Pretest

For each italicized word or expression, choose the best meaning below.

1. The year’s harvest was a dismal failure.
A. minor B. depressing C. excellent
2. Did you ever meet anyone with such a cheerful disposition?
A. feeling B. thought C. character
3. This young politician is the minister’s protégé.
A. person who receives guidance and help
B. person who protects others
C. person who works cooperatively with others
4. We must perpetuate the species which have almost died out.
A. perform B. preserve C. destroy
5. This new novel caused a great sensation.
A. excitement B. sensibility C. understanding
6. Botanists often have to go out to do fieldwork in forests.
A. people who study animals
B. people who study medicine
C. people who study plants
7. The saleswoman seems very zealous to please.
A. willing B. eager C. hard
8. If you check the facts, you’ll find your arguments untenable
A. indefensible B. unthinkable C. reasonable

Key :1. B 2. C 3. A 4. B 5. A 6. C 7. B 8. A

Text A

1. Background Information
2. Text:
　　　　　 Charles Darwin and the Evolutionary Revolution

　　Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the man whose name is associated with the revolutionary theory of biological evolution, was the son of a prosperous Shropshire physician. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been not only a physician but an amateur scientist of some fame and early advocate of evolutionary theory. Form the beginning; Darwin was destined for the family profession. At sixteen he was enrolled in the great medical school of the University of Edinburgh but was a dismal failure. He hated the work and could not of disposition but of indifference. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” he said, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” There was more than a little truth in his father’s angry charge. Darwin’s only real enthusiasms were for hunting and natural history.
　　The decision was made to send him to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to prepare for a career in the church. His academic record at Cambridge was only slightly less dismal than it had been at Edinburgh, and with difficulty he got his degree with a bare “pass” in 1831. in the years at Cambridge, however, Darwin continued his passion for natural history and collecting. It was not an unusual interest, for science was much the fashion in the early nineteenth century and tied in with the generally accepted notions of natural theology, that is, the conviction that the phenomena of nature were the specific evidences of God’s wonderfully reasonable order of creation. The intellectual world in which Charles Darwin grew up was smug, orderly, and comfortable.
　　While at Cambridge, Darwin met two great teachers, the biologist John Stevens Henslow and the geologist Adam Sedgwick. Both men took the young naturalist with them on collecting trips, and Henslow, in particular, made him a kind of protégé. He invited Darwin to the famous Friday evening discussions at has home, he gently urged him to take this course or hear that lecture, he recommended books, encouraged his interests, and taught him the value of patient, careful, minute observation, it was Henslow who recommended Darwin for the job that he himself had reluctantly had to turn down, as unpaid naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, about to set out in 1831 on a scientific and mapping voyage to the Southern Hemisphere.
　　Darwin was offered the position, and, barely overcoming the reluctance of his father, he accepted. As a parting gift, Henslow gave him a copy of the recently published first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the work that was to revolutionize geology in the same way that Darwin’s would revolutionize biology. For Lyell argued, in contradiction to the accepted biblical chronology, that the earth had not been created in a few thousand years by catastrophic change but rather was millions of years old. It is worth noting that Henslow, while he admired Lyell’s method, was opposed to his conclusions, as he would later be to Darwin’s. The captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, told Darwin that be hoped that his collections and observations would prove, once and for all, the literal truth of God’s creation as set forth in the Bible. At this point, Darwin found nothing strange in such a notion. But in the course of the five-year voyage, his work led him not toward that notion but away from it. The voyage of the Beagle was the turning point in Darwin’s life.
　　On his return to England, Darwin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, worked briefly for the Geographical Society, and came to know Sir Charles Lyell, whose works he had long admired. Then in 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood and three years later bought “a good, very ugly horse with 18 acres” at Down in Kent, where he spent the rest of his life. Amid the “quiet gladness” of his family, in his study and library and at his modest laboratory, Darwin worked out the theories that had begun to emerge in the notebooks he had made during his voyage half-way around the world. In 1856, as he was preparing the abstract for a paper that would present those theories, he received a communication from another scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, with a sketch of a paper setting out exactly the same views. In spite of the fact that Wallace’s work was almost entirely theoretical while his own rested upon a mass of detailed scientific observations and data, the modest Darwin was ready to withdraw from the field. But his friend Lyell intervened, brought the two men together, and arranged for their work to appear as a joint paper, “on the tendency of Species to Form Varieties, and on the perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.” The paper was read before the Linnaean Society in 1858 and published in the journal of the society for the same year. It caused no stir at all.
　　But this was not the case when, in the following year, Darwin published his on the origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, of the preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. The book was a sensation: the first printing sold out in a single day. The theory of evolution was at last before the public essentially in its modern form.
　　While Darwin had enthusiastic supporters, such as the great zoologist T.H. Huxley, the botanist Sir Joseph Hooker, and, of course, Sir Charles Lyell, he had equally zealous opponents. These included both his aborted teachers Henslow and Sedgwick and a number of other important scientists, led by sir Richard Owen. His enemies, of course, also include a significant number of important members of the clergy and lay spokesmen for outraged biblical literalism. But whether scientists or clergymen, the bitterness of these opponents can be largely attributed to two things: Darwin’s work had completely upset the whole comfortable system of natural theology and it had made untenable the notion of special creation. It was “the crime” of Darwin to demythologize man, to set him down like every other being, a creature of nature in nature’s order rather than in God’s image.

Total Words: 1030 words
Total Reading Time

The text is based on Makers of the Western Tradition, St. Martin’s press, Inc. 1983

Detailed Study of Text A

◆ Reading Skill ─ Inference
Circle the letter of the best answer. 　

1. In paragraph 1, the author suggests that
A. Darwin’s father thought his won was a disgrace to his family
B. Darwin’s father cared little about his son’s future
C. Darwin’s father didn’t believe his son was by nature not suitable for the medical studies
2. We may assume the intellectual world of Darwin’s time
A. was self-content
B. upset by the new scientific discoveries
C. aware of the conflict between the scientific discoveries and the biblical truth
3. It may be inferred that Robert FitzRoy was a follower of
A. Charles Lyell’s geology
B. Evolution theory
C. Natural theology
4. We may conclude that if Lyell hadn’t intervened, Darwin would have
A. published his work anyway
B. concentrated on the theoretical aspect of his work
C. stopped his work in the field of evolution
Decide whether each of the following statements is true or false.
5. Henslow was interested in the scientific and mapping voyage to the Southern Hemisphere himself.
6. Darwin’s theory was based on a mass of detailed scientific observations and data.
7. All important scientists at that time were enthusiastic supporters of Darwin’s theory.
8. Natural theology was destroyed by Darwin’s evolution theory.

Key: 1. A 2. C 3. C 4. C 5. F 6. T 7. F 8. T

Vocabulary Building

I. Fill in each blanks with one of the given words in its appropriate form.

emerge 　　evolve 　　catastrophic 　　attribute
associate　 indifference　stir 　　　　　reluctance

1. They were very_______ to help.
2.In the course of _______ , some birds have lose the power of flight
3.peter _______ his success to hard work.
4.Many people died in that _______ war.
5.We naturally ________ the name of Darwin with the doctrine of evolution.
6.He was absolutely ________ to this talk.
7.The sun ________ from behind a cloud.
8.This film is going to cause a big _______ in the world.

Key: 1. reluctant 2. evolution 3. attributed 4. catastrophic
5. associate 6. indifferent 7. emerges 8. stir

II. Fill in the blanks with words that are often confused.

1. evolve, revolve
a. He has a new theory after many years of research.
b. The earth round the sun.
c. Many Victorians were shocked by the notion that man had from lower forms of life
2. dismal, dismay
a. He learned to his that he had lost his job.
b. The host spoke to the unwelcome visitor with a tone of voice
c. The news was as as ever.
d. We watched in blank as she packed her bag in anger.
3. attribute, contribute
a. Everyone should what he or she can afford.
b. This play is usually to Shakespeare.
c. Her work has enormously to our understanding of this difficult subject.
d. The author his success to hard work.

Key: 1. a. evolved b. revolves c. evolved
2. a. dismay b. dismal c. dismal d. dismay
3. a. contribute b. attributed c. contributed d. attributed

Ⅲ. Glossary

organism            organic matters          living beings
biology              biologist               natural history
anatomy             physiology             zoology
zoologist             botanic garden          evolution
natural selection       survival of the fittest      Darwinism
neo-Darwinism        Darwinist              evolutionist

4. Cloze
Fill in each blank with one suitable word.

　　The work of French scientist Jean Baptiste Lamarck(1744--1829) has contributed to the theory of evolution.
Lamarck believed that the environment shaped the        of plant and animal life. He believe that the bodies of plants and animals      to fit their environment. He thought that a useful physical change would be passed on         the plant’s or animal’s offspring.
　　For example, Lamarck thought that giraffes developed ______ necks because they had to stretch to        the leaves of tall trees for food. Lamarck didn’t think that giraffes          long necks a small amount. Their offspring inherited this longer neck. Their offspring then stretched their necks a little bit _______. They  _______ this even longer neck on to their own offspring. _______ many generations, giraffes developed the long necks that they  _______ today.
　　Not all of Lamarck’s  _______ is accepted today. Most scientists do believe that the environment has an  _______ on the evolution of life forms. But they don’t agree with the  _______ that a physical change in a plant’s or animal’s body is passed on to the offspring. Instead, they believe that a  _______ must occur in the plant’s or animal’s cells before a change in offspring can take place.

Key: 1. way  2. used  3. to  4. long  5. eat  6. grew  7. stretch  8. longer 
9. inherited  10. After 11. have  12. theory  13. effect  14. theory  15. change