Getting rid of dirt, in the opinion of most people, is a good thing. However, the attitudes to dirt are always changing.
In the early 16th century, people thought that dirt on the skin was a means to block out disease, and washing off dirt with hot water could open up the skin and let ills in. A particular danger was thought to lie in public baths. By 1538, the French king had closed the bath houses in his kingdom. The king of England did something similar in 1546. Thus began a long time when the rich and the poor in Europe lived with dirt in a friendly way. France’s Henry IV was famously dirty. Upon learning that a nobleman had taken a bath, the king ordered that, to avoid the attack of disease, the nobleman should not go out.
Though the belief above was long-lived, dirt has no longer been regarded as a nice neighbour ever since the 18th century. Scientifically speaking, cleaning away dirt is good to health. Clean water supply and hand washing are practical means of preventing disease. Yet, it seems that standards of cleanliness have moved beyond science since World War II. Advertisements repeatedly sell the idea; clothes need to be whiter than white, cloths ever softer, surfaces to shine. Has the hate for dirt, however, gone too far?
Attitudes to dirt still differ hugely nowadays. Many first-time parents nervously try to warn their children off touching dirt, which might be responsible for the spread of disease. On the contrary, Mary Ruebush, an American immunologist(免疫学家) , encourages children to play in the dirt to build up a strong immune system. And the latter position is gaining some ground.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________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：
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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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A Brief History of Silk
Comfortable to wear whether the weather is hot or cold, silk is as popular today as it was 5,000 years ago when it was first manufactured. However, the history of silk has not always been as smooth as the fabric (织物) itself.
Today’s basic silk-production process has changed very little since it first began. The fabric comes from silkworms which, although tiny when born, grow rapidly in size. Indeed, on a strict diet of mulberry leaves, it is estimated that they increase in weight by 10,000% over the first six weeks of their life. When they are fully grown, the silkworms create a cocoon—a protective shell made of silk. They then crawl inside in order to prepare for their next stage of development. However, for commercial silk production, these cocoons are then boiled, killing the worm inside, to ensure that the silk is not damaged. After this, the silk is gathered and prepared. A single cocoon can produce between 300 and 900 metres of silk thread.
Although today silk is both grown and worn worldwide, the original production of silk was restricted to China. Likewise, in the sixth century, two monks managed to take some eggs all the way back to their native Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul, in Turkey). This was an event of great importance, since Europe was form that point able to manufacture its own silk.
Before the monks’ success in bringing the silkworms out of China, Europeans were dependent on merchants bringing the fabric from East Asia across the mountain roads of Central Asia and the Middle East. Indeed, so much silk was transported that this trade route became known as Silk Road.
Although man-made fibres (纤维) are cheaper and easier to manufacture, the beauty of silk is difficult to match, and there is always likely to be a large international market.
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Every country has a capital city. It is where the government of the country meets. The capital city is often the largest and most important city in a country and it has more people, shops, businesses, offices and factories than anywhere else.
The Romans founded a city, which was called Londinium, by the River Thames in AD 43. The area is now the City of London, which is the business centre of the city. The Romans built the first London Bridge. In the 11th century, a royal palace and then a minster (a large and important church) were built 3 km to the west of the city. As London grew and became more crowded, and roads and railways were built, people moved to the suburbs of the city to live. What were once outlying villages and towns were swallowed up, forming Greater London. By the 1860s, London was so crowded that railways had to be built underground. The London Underground now carries millions of passengers every year.
As the capital city, London needs good communications with the rest of the United Kingdom and the wider world. Five airports serve London: Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton and Stansted airports. Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest international airports. There are flights to and from about 220 places worldwide, and more than 40 million travelers use the airport each year. There are also new docks, able to handle large modern ships, at Tilbury, near the mouth of the Thames.
Almost all of the country’s main railway lines and motorways, and many of its main roads, radiate (辐射) out from London. Trains using the Channel Tunnel to mainland Europe start in London, and there is a direct motorway link between London and the Channel Tunnel.
Pedestrians only
The concept of traffic-free shopping areas goes back a long time. During the Middle Ages, traffic-free shopping areas were built to allow people to shop in comfort and, more importantly, safety. The modern, traffic-free shopping street was born in Europe in the 1960s, when both city populations and car ownership increased rapidly. Dirty exhaust fumes from cars and the risks involved in crossing the road were beginning to make shopping an unpleasant and dangerous experience. Many believed the time was right for experimenting with car-free streets, and shopping areas seemed the best place to start.
At first, there was resistance from shopkeepers. They believed that such a move would be bad for business. They argued that people would avoid streets if they were unable to get to them in their cars. When the first streets in Europe were closed to traffic, there were even noisy demonstrations, as many shopkeepers predicted they would lose customers.
However, research carried out afterwards in several European cities revealed some unexpected statistics. In Munich, Cologne and Hamburg, visitors to shopping areas increased by 50 percent. On Copenhagen’s main shopping street, shopkeepers reported sales increases of 25-40 percent. Shopkeepers in Minneapolis, USA, were so impressed when they learnt this that they even offered to pay for the construction and maintenance costs of their own traffic-free streets.
With the arrival of the traffic-free shopping street, many shops, especially those selling things like clothes, food and smaller luxury items, prospered. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news for everyone, as shops selling furniture and larger electrical appliances actually saw their sales drop. Many of these were forced to move elsewhere, away from the city centre. Today they are a common feature on the outskirts of towns and cities, often situated in out-of-town retail zones with their own car parks and other local facilities.
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