1 . Today, poetry and science are often considered to be mutually exclusive(互相排斥)career paths. But that wasn’t always the case. The mathematician Ada Lovelace and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell were both accomplished poets. The poet John Keats was a licensed surgeon. Combining the two practices fell out of favor in the 1800s. But translating research into lyrics, haiku, and other poetic forms is resurging(再现)among scientists as they look for alternative ways to inspire others with their findings.

“Poetry is a great tool for questioning the world,” says Sam Illingworth, a poet and a geoscientist who works at the University of Western Australia. Through workshops and a new science-poetry journal, called Consilience, Illingworth is helping scientists to translate their latest results into poems that can attract appreciation from those outside of their immediate scientific field.

Stephany Mazon, a scientist from the University of Helsinki in Finland, joined one of Illingworth’s workshops. In the workshop, she was grouped with other scientists and tasked with writing a haiku, a 17-syllable-long poem, which spotlighted water, a fluid that featured in all of the group members’ research projects. “It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to write the poem,” Mazon says. She plans to continue writing. “We do a disservice(伤害)to ourselves to think that scientists can’t be artistic and that art can’t be used to communicate scientific ideas,” Mazon says.

That viewpoint is echoed by Illingworth, who thinks science communication initiatives are too often dominated by public lectures with their hands-off PowerPoint slides. “Actually, when science communication involves writing and sharing poems, it invites a two-way dialogue between experts and nonexperts,” he says. Scientist-poet Manjula Silva, an educator at Imperial College London, agrees. Poetry provides a way to translate complex scientific concepts into a language that everyone can understand, Silva says.

Scientists and poets are both trying to understand the world and communicate that understanding with others. The distinction between scientists and poets is less than people might think. We’re all just people with hopefully really interesting things to say and to share.

To write his own medical text, Li Shizhen referenced over 800 medical texts, countless books on history and geography, and works of literature. He even studied the complete works of many ancient poets, from     1     he selected a surprising number of verses about medicine. However, the greatest issue he encountered was the widespread     2    (inconsistent) in the use of drug names. Realising the importance of field research outweighed     3    of extensive reading, in 1565 Li travelled far and wide into the mountains and wilderness. He covered what are today’s provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui and Jiangsu, and many other places.

After over a decade of field research, Li     4    (successful) completed the first draft of his masterpiece, Bencao Gangmu, or the Compendium of Materia Medica in 1578. He revised     5     work at least three times right up until his death in 1593.

Since its first publication in 1596, the book     6    (receive) world-wide recognition. British naturalist Charles Darwin acknowledged the book     7     an “ancient Chinese encyclopedia.” In 2011, the book    8    (list) on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. In 2017, an international conference was held in Beijing     9    (celebrate) Li’s 500th birthday.

Today, there are a     10    (grow) number of international exchanges centering on Li Shizhen and his book, and many people around the world can still find the wisdom of human development in this ancient classic.

4 . The scientist’s job is to figure out how the world works, to “torture (拷问)” Nature to reveal her secrets, as the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon described it. But who are these people in the lab coats (or sports jackets, or T-shirts and jeans) and how do they work? It turns out that there is a good deal of mystery surrounding the mystery-solvers.

“One of the greatest mysteries is the question of what it is about human beings — brains, education, culture etc. that makes them capable of doing science at all,” said Colin Allen, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University.

Two vital ingredients seem to be necessary to make a scientist: the curiosity to seek out mysteries and the creativity to solve them. “Scientists exhibit a heightened level of curiosity,” reads a 2007 report on scientific creativity. “They go further and deeper into basic questions showing a passion for knowledge for its own sake.” Max Planck, one of the fathers of quantum physics, once said, the scientist “must have a vivid and intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction (推论), but by an artistically creative imagination.”

But others disagree with this universal scientific mind. They believe that scientists have special abilities that set them apart. Discovering these abilities may be hard, Allen thinks, as many scientists will be reluctant to reveal them and would prefer to preserve the mystery of creativity, fearing that if it became an object of study it would lose its magic.

But for Allen, this is all part of a bigger question of what lies behind anyone’s behavior. “We are only just beginning to understand how the characteristics of organisms, including ourselves, aren’t the fixed products of either genes or of environment/culture, but each of us is the product of a continual interactive process in which we help build the environments that in turn shape us,” he said.

“As long as our best technology for seeing inside the brain requires subjects to lie nearly motionless while surrounded by a giant magnet, we’re only going to make limited pro gress on these questions,” Allen said.

7 . Madame Curie will always be remembered as the discoverer of the element radium.

A certain scientist had discovered that a metal called uranium gave off a kind of radiation, which Marie Curie was later to call radioactivity. But where did this radiation come from, and what was it like? This was what she set out to discover. She did experiment after experiment. All seemed to prove that in the mineral which she was examining there was some source of radiation which man knew nothing about.

At this time her husband left his own laboratory work, in which he had been very successful, and joined her in her research for this unknown radiation. In 1898 they declared that they believed there was something in nature which gave out radiation. To this something, still unseen, they gave the name radium.

There was an old building at the back of the university, where Pierre Curie had been working. Its walls and roof were made of wood and glass. There were some old tables, a blackboard, and an old stove. It was not much better than a shed, and no one else seemed to want it. The Curies moved in and set up their laboratory and workshops. Here for four difficult years they worked every moment that they could spare, weighing and boiling and measuring and calculating and thinking. They believed that radium was hidden somewhere in the mass of mineral dirt which was sent to them from far away. But where?

Then, one evening in 1902, as husband and wife sat together in their home, Marie Curie said: “Let’s go down there for a moment.”   It was nine o’clock and they had been “down there” only two hours before. But they put on their coats and were soon walking along the street to the shed. Pierre turned the key in the lock and open the door. “Don’t light the lamps,” said Marie, and they stood there in the darkness. “Look! ... Look!”

And there, glowing with a faint blue light in the glass test-tubes on the tables, was the mysterious something which they had worked so hard to find: Radium.

8 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

When I think of a “mad genius”, no one deserves the title more than Nikola Tesla. Born in Austria in 1856, this scientist is not just an engineer, but an inventor and     1    (explore) of the many mysteries of the world.

To begin with, Tesla possessed an     2    (objective) brilliant mind. He was blessed with the gift of a photographic memory. When inspiration     3    (strike), he was capable of visualizing the idea from concept to design, not needing to pen it down.     4    (work) entirely from memory, he would be able to build the device     5     referring to any notes at all. If this was not     6    (amaze) enough, he was fluent in eight different languages.

As an inventor, his experiments at that time     7    (see) as remarkably far-fetched, and must have seemed like magic. His innovative ideas would ultimately set the groundwork for the next generation of scientists. Indeed, many of his 300     8    (register) patents contributed to the creation of widespread technology today such as the radio, X-Ray machine and wireless technology. Tesla even predicted     9     birth of the smartphone. His forward-looking ideas have earned him the label of a futurist-one     10     explores the possibilities of the future.