快讯：2012年9月6日雅思阅读第一篇同样再次命中！

雅思教父刘洪波于2007年编著的《雅思阅读真经3》中第20页收录文章：吉尔伯特和磁场。2010年8月5日中国区雅思考试阅读第一篇正好考到！

《雅思阅读真经》是刘洪波老师的经典著作，于2004年开始出版第一本，至今已随题库升级出版到了《雅思阅读真经4》。当前市面上已出现山寨版的《雅思阅读真经》，请广大雅思考生购书时仔细分辨，认清作者。

READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1 – 13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

William Gilbert and Magnetism

The accredited father of the science of electricity and magnetism was the English scientist, William Gilbert, who was a physician and man of learning at the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of electricity and magnetism was what the ancients knew, that the lodestone possessed magnetic properties and that amber and jet, when rubbed, would attract bits of paper or other substances of small specific gravity. William Gilbert's great treatise De magnete, magneticisique corporibus" or "On the Magnet", printed in Latin in 1600, containing the fruits of his researches and experiments for many years, indeed provided the basis for a new science.

William Gilbert was born in Colchester, Suffolk, on May 24, 1544. He studied medicine at St. John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1573. He was prominent in the College of Physicians and became its president in 1599. The following year he was appointed physician to Queen Elizabeth I, and a few months before his death on Dec. 10, 1603, physician to James I.

The ancient Greeks knew about lodestones, strange minerals with the power to attract iron. Some were found near the city of Magnesia in Asia Minor (now Turkey), and that city lent its name to all things magnetic. The early Chinese also knew about lodestones and about iron magnetized by them. Around the year 1000 they discovered that when a lodestone or an iron magnet was placed on a float in a bowl of water, it always pointed south. From this developed the magnetic compass, which quickly spread to the Arabs and from them to Europe.

Britain was a major seafaring nation in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was defeated, opening the way to British settlement of America. British ships depended on the magnetic compass, yet no one understood why it worked. Did the pole star attract it, as Columbus once speculated; or was there a magnetic mountain at the pole, as described in Odyssey, which ships should never approach, because the sailors thought its pull would yank out all their iron nails and fittings? Did the smell of garlic interfere with the action of the compass, which is why helmsmen were forbidden to eat it near a ship's compass? For nearly 20 years William Gilbert conducted ingenious experiments to understand magnetism.

"William Gilbert was fascinated by magnets,” as Dr. David P. Stern of NASA notes. Given two magnets, Gilbert knew that magnetic poles can attract or repel, depending on polarity. In addition, however, ordinary iron is always attracted to a magnet. Gilbert guessed, correctly, that near a permanent magnet iron became a temporary magnet, of a polarity suitable for attraction. That is, the end of an iron bar stuck to an S pole of a magnet (south-seeking pole) temporarily becomes an N-pole. Because magnetic poles always come in matched pairs, the other end of the bar temporarily becomes an S-pole, and can in its turn attract more iron. Gilbert confirmed his guess of temporary ("induced") magnetism by an original experiment. Using strings, he hung two parallel iron bars above the pole of a terrella, a model earth he designed for this experiment, and noted that they repelled each other. Under the influence of the terrella, each became a temporary magnet with the same polarities, and the temporary poles of each bar repelled those of the other one.

In 1600 Gilbert published De magnete in Latin. Very quickly it became the standard work throughout Europe on electrical and magnetic phenomena. In this work he describes many of his experiments with his model earth terrella. From his experiments, he concluded that the Earth was itself magnetic and that this was the reason compasses pointed north. In his book, he also studied static electricity using amber. Gilbert strongly argued that electricity and magnetism was not the same thing. For evidence, he (incorrectly) pointed out that electrical attraction disappeared with heat, magnetic attraction did not. By keeping clarity, Gilbert's strong distinction advanced science for nearly 250 years. It took James Clerk Maxwell to show electromagnetism is, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

De Magnete is not only a comprehensive review of what was known about the nature of magnetism, Gilbert added much knowledge through his own experiments. He likened the polarity of the magnet to the polarity of the Earth and built an entire magnetic philosophy on this analogy. In Gilbert's animistic explanation, magnetism was the soul of the Earth and a perfectly spherical lodestone, when aligned with the Earth's poles, would spin on its axis, just as the Earth spins on its axis in 24 hours. He speculated that the moon might also be a magnet caused to orbit by its magnetic attraction to the Earth. This was perhaps the first proposal that a force might cause a heavenly orbit.

Gilbert did not, however, express an opinion as to whether this rotating Earth was at the center of the universe or in orbit around the Sun. In traditional cosmology the Earth was fixed and it was the sphere of the fixed stars, carrying the other heavens with it, which rotated in 24 hours. Since the Copernican cosmology needed a new physics to under gird it, Copernicans such as Johannes Kepler and Galileo were very interested in Gilbert's magnetic researches. Galileo's efforts to make a truly powerful armed lodestone for his patrons probably date from his reading of Gilbert's book.

The first major scientific work produced in England, Gilbert’s De magnete reflected a new attitude toward scientific investigation. Until then, scientific experiments were not in fashion: instead, books relied on quotes of ancient authorities and that is where the myth about garlic interfering with the compass started. Unlike most medieval thinkers, Gilbert was willing to rely on sense experience and his own observations and experiments rather than the authoritative opinion or deductive philosophy of others. In the treatise he not only collected and reviewed critically older knowledge on the behavior of the magnet and electrified bodies but described his own researches, which he had been conducting for 17 years. It was because of this scientific attitude, together with his contribution to our knowledge of magnetism, that a unit of magneto motive force, also known as magnetic potential, was named the Gilbert in his honor.

Questions 1 - 8

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1 – 8 on your answer sheet write.

1.         It was Gilbert who first discovered some substances with magnetic properties.

2.         Arabs invented the magnetic compass in which an iron magnet always pointed south.

3.         Gilbert explained the phenomenon of the magnetic compass in his book De magnete.

4.        Gilbert’s mistaken notion about the distinction between electricity and magnetism held back the development of science.

5.        Gilbert speculated that the moon orbited the Earth by magnetic force.

6.        Copernicans such as Galileo favored traditional cosmology which held that the earth was the center of the universe.

7.        Gilbert's magnetic theories contradicted the traditional cosmology.

8.        As a scientist, Gilbert set himself apart by favoring an intuitive approach and experiments rather than the deductive reason.

Questions 9-13

Choose the appropriate letters A – D and write them in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

9. In Odyssey, why could not ships approach the mountain at the pole?

A.        People believed that they would get lost if garlic hampered the action of the compass.

B.       People believed that the pole star would distract ships away.

C.       People believed that the magnetism would wreck the ship.

D.       People believed that the magnetic mountain would make the compass out of work.

10. By contacting two metal bars, one magnetized, the other neutral, he was able to pass on a charge to the neutral bar.  He called this___________

A.        induced magnetism.

B.        permanent magnetism.

C.        terrella magnetism.

D.       polar magnetism.

11. In De magnete, Gilbert ___________ discussed electricity, magnetism and heat.

A.        emphatically

B.        scientifically

C.        wrongly

D.       passionately  

12. James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that ____________

A.  electricity and magnetism was the same thing.

B.  electrical and magnetic attraction disappeared with heat.

C.  there was some relationship between electricity and magnetism.

D.  electromagnetism has two opposite sides.

13.  Gilbert’s De magnete, a collection of his theories and experiments and reflections on others’ work is commonly known as _____________ 

A.  an essay.

B.  a treatise.

C.  a volume.

D.  a contribution.