I love digging in the back garden. Sometimes, I’d dig for pottery and stuff, but I’ve always wanted to find a fossil (化石). I like finding out about the past. At school, my favourite subject is history. I’ve been watching Andy’s Prehistoric Adventures since I was three. I knew I had a good chance of finding a fossil, because my house was built on a muddy, limestone substrate (石灰岩基质), in Walsall, which means millions of years ago, my garden wasn’t my garden at all—it was a coral reef (珊瑚礁).
On 22 March, it was a sunny day. I came back from school. I asked Dad if I could dig in my favourite spot by the yellow bush near our house, where we had planted potatoes and onions, but he told me not to, because he’d just moved a tree there and it was establishing roots. I went to the back garden instead, taking Dad’s old brown wooden garden tools. I dug a big hole, about a foot deep, which didn’t take very long, where I found a ball of mud with something pointy sticking out the top. I ran into the kitchen screaming. I was so excited. I knew it was a fossil.
At first, I thought it might be a deer’s tooth or a goat’s claw. When Dad washed the mud off, we saw that it had lots of bumpy, wavy lines; we both thought it looked like one of the sea anemones, from the fish tank in his office, but with a horn(触角). Dad sent a video to the Fossil Finds UK Facebook group. A man calling himself an archaeologist (考古学家) replied saying it had the markings of a horn coral from the Palaeozoic era, which is the very beginnings of life on Earth. I had found one of the oldest fossils in England.
We looked in my books and online for more information. We typed our postcode into a British Geology Survey search where you can find out what you’re standing on—ours is the oldest substrate in the area, with lots of clay and limestone, but it’s unusual to find anything so close to the surface. Experts told us that my horn coral lived between 415 million and 480 million years ago. There weren’t even proper fish or sharks then.
注意：
1. 续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式作答。
Before the horn coral, the only fossils I was familiar with were shark teeth that Dad got me.
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When I grow up, I want to be an archaeologist (考古学家).
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The Book That Keeps On Growing
It is one of the most famous books in the world; yet it has no story and no interesting characters, no exciting beginning and no satisfying ending. And yet this book keeps being printed and it keeps growing. This book is the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most famous dictionaries in the English-speaking world.
The Oxford English Dictionary or OED for short, began in 1857 as just an idea of a group of people who thought the world needed an English-language dictionary to show the history of English words from 1150 CE to the present. It wasn’t until the late 1870s, however, when James Murray joined the project that it began to grow. Murray planned for a dictionary of about 6,400 pages in four volumes (册), completed in 10 years.
Murray and his assistants worked in a small metal building. They collected millions of pieces of paper, each one with a word and an example sentence or phrase written on it. Murray and his assistants worked hard, but after five years they had only reached the word ant!
It was not until 1928 that the dictionary was completed and published: 10 volumes with over 400, 000 words and phrases. James Murray did not live to see the completion of his life’s work, he passed away in 1915, over a decade before OED came out.
As soon as the dictionary was published, however, the editors started to update it! In 1933, the Oxford English dictionary was reprinted in 12 volumes. Between 1972 and 1986, four more volumes were added with new technical and scientific vocabulary and words from other English-speaking countries, such as Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In 1989, the entire dictionary was reprinted in 20 volumes! Three years later, all 20 volumes were put onto CD-ROM, and the entire dictionary is available online today.
With about 600,000 words and three million quotations (引语) from over 1,000 years of English, the OED not only is a record of where the English language has come from but has also become an important part of the history of English-speaking cultures around the world.
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