關于地球年齡的有好多說法。情況如此混亂，到19世紀末，你可以獲知地球的年齡有好多個——取決于你查的是哪種資料。俗話說亂世出英雄，做科學研究似乎也一樣，就著這各抒己見的局面年代一個農家孩子又以特別的方法證明了另一個獨特的數(shù)據(jù)，具體如何，要明天讀下一章了~~~

?《萬物簡史》推出部落節(jié)目版，戳這里訂閱:http://bulo.hujiang.com/menu/6004/



書本的朗讀語音很charming的磁性英音~~~大家可以好好學著模仿哦~~~??！
因為原著為美國人所寫,單詞采用美式拼法,不抄全文，也不用寫序號。答完一空換行繼續(xù)下一空作答。文中需聽寫單詞或詞組用[-No-]表示，句子用[---No---]表示。請邊聽寫邊理解文意，根據(jù)下面的TIPS訓練聽寫。這樣可以提高聽力準確度，并為訓練聽譯打下基礎哦~~~

TIPS聽寫訓練點：單詞拼寫，時態(tài)，單復數(shù)，連讀，長難句（請邊聽邊用符號先記下內容，然后自己回頭組織語句，最后校對，不要逐字逐句聽寫）



Hints:
Kelvin's
George Becker
intractably
novel



Other scientists besides Kelvin turned [-1-] and came up with results that only deepened the uncertainty. Samuel Haughton, a [-2-] geologist at Trinity College in Dublin, announced an estimated age for the Earth of 2,300 million years—[-3-] . When this was drawn to his attention, he recalculated using the same data and put the figure at 153 million years. John Joly, also of Trinity, decided to give Edmond Halley's ocean salts idea a whirl, but his method was based on so many faulty [-4-] that he was hopelessly adrift. [---5---]

Such was the confusion that by the close of the 19th century, depending on which text you consulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and the dawn of complex life in the Cambrian period was 3 million, 18 million, 600 million, 794 million, or 2.4 billion—or some other number within that range. [---6---]

[---7---] He was a bluff and brilliant New Zealand farm boy named Ernest Rutherford, and he produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the Earth was at least many hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more.

Remarkably, his evidence was based on alchemy—natural, spontaneous, scientifically credible, and wholly non-occult, but alchemy nonetheless. Newton, it turned out, had not been so wrong after all. And exactly how that came to be is of course another story.



their minds to the problem respected way beyond anything anybody else was suggesting assumptions He calculated that the Earth was 89 million years old, an age that fit neatly enough with Kelvin's assumptions but unfortunately not with reality. As late as 1910, one of the most respected estimates, by the American George Becker, put the Earth's age at perhaps as little as 55 million years. Just when matters seemed most intractably confused, along came another extraordinary figure with a novel approach.
除開爾文以外，別的科學家也把注意力轉向這個問題，得出的結果只是加深了那種不確定性。都柏林的三一學院有一位受人尊敬的地質學家，名叫塞繆爾?霍頓。他宣稱，地球的年齡約為23億年--大大超出了任何人的看法。他注意到了這個情況，用同樣的數(shù)據(jù)重新算了一遍，得出的數(shù)字是1.53億年。也是三一學院的約翰?喬利決定試一試埃德蒙?哈雷提出的海鹽測算法，但這種方法是以許多不完善的假設為基礎的，他只好順水推舟地干了一下。他得出的結果是：地球的年齡是8900萬年--這個年齡與開爾文的假設完全吻合，不幸的是與現(xiàn)實根本不符。 　　情況如此混亂，到19世紀末，你可以獲知--取決于你查的是哪種資料--我們距離開始出現(xiàn)復雜生命的寒武紀的年數(shù)是300萬年、1800萬年、6億年、7.94億年或24億年--或者是這個范圍里其他數(shù)量的年。直到1910年，美國人喬治?貝克爾才作出了一個最受人尊重的估計，他認為地球的年齡也許不超過5500萬年。 　　正當事情似乎亂作一團的時候，出了另一位杰出人物，有了一種嶄新的方法。他是個直率而又聰明的新西蘭農家孩子，名叫歐內斯特?盧瑟福。他拿出了無可辯駁的證據(jù)：地球至少已經存在許多億年，很可能還更古老。 　　值得注意的是，他的證據(jù)是以煉金術為基礎的--天然，自發(fā)，科學上信得過，毫不神秘，盡管是煉金術。結果證明，牛頓畢竟沒有大錯。那種方法到底是怎么知道的，當然要等下一章來敘述。