43. The Big Bang Theory

One of the most amazing things that have happened even in my lifetime is the prediction of cosmology. When I started out forty-odd years ago, we thought we knew that the universe began in a big bang, some people doubted even then. We thought the universe was about ten or twenty billion years old. But now for really very sound scientific reasons, we can say that the universe did start in a Big bang and it’s 13.8 billion years old. So it’s not 14, it's not 13 because a decimal point in there and that’s a stunning achievement to know that. And we also know that the laws of physics that apply to tiny particles inside atoms also explains what happened in the big bang, you can’t have one without the other. A very neat example of this is that when you apply nuclear physics, that kind of physics to understand how stars work, you find out that the oldest star in the universe is about 13 billion years old. So their universe is just a little bit older than the stars. Fantastic, if we done it and counted in the other way around and said that the stars were older than the universe, we would say science was in deep trouble. But it’s not, everything fits together and we know how the universe began, we got to know how the way it is. The future that it ‘ll suspects we don’t know quite well what’s going, but we got some ideas, which are as good as those ideas we had 40 years ago about how big bang happened.

秒懂逻辑：该文章为近似文章，同学们记住下文逻辑即可，考试要点类似。

宇宙开始于大爆炸。科学证实宇宙起源于138亿年前。我们可以用物理学原则来解释大爆炸。

参考答案：

The universe began in a big bang. People thought the universe was about ten or twenty billion years old. Now with scientific reasons, it is confirmed that the universe started in a Big bang and it is 13.8 billion years old. The laws of physics that apply to tiny particles can explain the big bang.

3. Environmental Law

Before we consider international environmental law and climate change, we need to consider domestic legislation, as it is within the sovereign states that international law is put into practice. This reflects the environmentalists’ maxim, think globally act locally. United Kingdom legislative control over the impacts of mans’ activity on the environment is not new. As long ago as the reign of Charles II the main concern was the production of smoke from the burning of sea coal. Almost all areas of trade and industry were subject to very detailed legislative controls at that time, although some were governed by self- regulation’ in the form of guilds, who regulated both supply and methods of production. However, the measures implemented were mostly ineffective because then, as now, the specifying of legal duties and standards without providing any appropriate enforcement merely indicated good intentions but were of little practical effect. The next stage was prompted by the Industrial Revolution with the urbanization of society and its profound effects on the environment. Local industrialists used the Adam Smith model to maximize their economic benefit, but this was to the detriment of the local environment with the operation of ‘Gresham’s Law’ that is, the bad drives out the good. Those industrialists who were concerned for either the health of their employees or the local environment faced higher costs than their competitors. The result was the need for increasingly comprehensive statutory controls on the discharge of pollutants into various receiving media.

秒懂逻辑：

该题较难，主旨为在考虑国际环境事务之前先解决好本地事物，后面提到的UK law和Adam Smith的两个例子均为对其的例证。

参考答案：Domestic legislation needs to be considered before considering international environmental law and climate change. United Kingdom legislative control over mans’ activity on the environment were mostly ineffective because it failed to provide any appropriate enforcement. During Industrial Revolution, Local industrialists used the Adam Smith model to maximize their economic benefit, which was to the detriment of the local environment and called for the need to increase control over pollutants.

19. Female Writers

I’ve been written non-fictions for years actually and but secretly I wanted to be a novelist. When I first started writing at the age of thirty was with the intension of writing a fiction. But I took a long detour and for ten or twelve years and wrote non- fiction which I absolutely had no regret about it at all. I think it exactly the right thing for me to do. But that was that dream took away and side of me to do this. Now I remember reading something that Eudora Welty wrote, who is, you know, the great novelist who has a big influence on me actually, and she said ‘No art ever came out of not risking your neck.’ And I think she is absolutely right about that. It doubts that way to me at that time and it actually feels that way to me every time I sit down to write something. Finally, in the early 90s, I took my deep breath and started writing fiction. It felt risky to me at the time to do that. And one of the very first things that I wrote was what I thought was going to be, the first chapter of the novel called ‘The Secret Life of Bees’. I wrote it in 1992 and it is actually an essentially the first chapter of the novel, as it is now.

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她写了很久的非小说，但是一直想写小说。但是她不后悔她之前的选择。另一位伟大的作家说过‘不冒险，无艺术’。而这对她有很大的影响。终于在90年代她开始写小说了，她写的第一章叫‘蜜蜂的秘密生活’。

参考答案：

The speaker has been written non-fictions for years but secretly wanted to be a novelist. She had no regret about it. Another great novelist said ‘No art ever came out of not risking your neck and has a big influence on her. In the early 90s, she started writing fiction and felt risky back then. The first chapter that she wrote is called the secret life of bees.