大学英语六级中的长句阅读理解.docVIP

大学英语长句阅读理解 The issue of whether life ever existed on the planet, and whether it persists to this day, has been highlighted by mounting evidence that the Red Planet once had abundant stable, liquid water and by the continuing controversy over suggestions that bacterial fossils rode to Earth on a meteorite（陨石）from valuable data about the range of conditions under which a planet can generate the complex chemistry that leads to life. 　　but my own worry today is less that of the overwhelming problem of elemental literacy than it is of the slightly more luxurious problem of the decline in the skill even of the middle-class reader, of his unwillingness to afford those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time and concentration, that surround the image of the classic act of reading. 　　The president’s decision a year ago to allow research on already existing stem cell lines was portrayed as a reasonable compromise between scientists’ needs for cells to work with, and concerns that this kind of research could lead to wholesale creation and destruction of human embryos (胚胎), cloned infants and a general contempt for human life. Of Ezekiel Cheever, the most famous schoolmaster of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, his onetime student Cotton Mather wrote that he so planned his lessons that his pupils “came to work as though they came to play,” and Alfred North Whitehead, almost three hundred years later, noted that a teacher should make his/her students “glad they were there.” Peter Kastl and his colleagues report that they can use tears to detect drug abuse and exposure to medication (药物), to determine whether a contact lens fits properly of why it may be uncomfortable, to study the causes of “dry eye” syndrome and the effects of eye surgery, and perhaps even to measure exposure to environmental pollutants. Alternative fuels such as natural gas, burned in internal-combustion engines, could be introduced at relatively low cost, but they would lead to only marginal red