Unit 5 Meeting your ancestors课时作业

learning about language

Ⅰ.课文缩写填空

　　The first public TV broadcasts were made in the USA in 1925. Many different people 1.contributed to the development of TV. In 1928, John Logie Baird constructed the first colour TV, but it was not until 1938 that the first colour TV programme was 2.broadcast. Most people have 3.benefited from satellite TV since satellites were used to broadcast TV in 1962. Satellites 4.allow everyone to receive the same broadcast at the same time. The history of sound recorders began in 1877, 5.when Thomas Edison made the first recording of a human voice on his 6.invention,_the record player. It had to be 7.wound up by hand and only played records two minutes long. By the late 1960s, portable cassette players were 8.developed,_along with video recorders. With the development of 9.digital technology, sound and video can now be stored on a PC, on the Internet, or using some form of portable 10.storage.

Ⅱ.阅读理解

　　The dodo is among the most famous extinct creatures, and a_poster_child for human­caused extinction events. Despite its bad name, and the fact that the species was alive during recorded human history, little is actually known about how this animal lived, looked, and behaved. A new study of the only known complete skeleton (骨架) from a single bird takes advantage of modern 3­D laser scanning (扫描) technology to open a new window into the life of this famous extinct bird.

　　The study was presented at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Estrel, Berlin. Leon Claessens, Associate Professor at the College of the Holy Cross, and lead researcher on the study said that, "the 3­D laser surface scans we made of the delicate dodo skeletons enable us to reconstruct how the dodo walked, moved and lived to a level of detail that has never been possible before. There are so many outstanding questions about the dodo bird that we can answer with this new knowledge."

A complete dodo skeleton, found by an amateur collector and barber, Etienne Thirioux, on the island of Mauritius between 1899 and 1917, has remained unstudied, even though it is the only complete dodo skeleton from a single individual bird known to exist. All other skeletons are incomplete combinations, meaning that they are gathered from more than one individual. In addition, Thirioux constructed a second, partially combined skeleton, which contains many bones that also belong to a single bird. "Being able to examine the skeleton of a single, individual dodo, which is not made up from as many individual birds as there are bones,