2018 年 06 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 1 套）

Scientists scanning and mapping the Giza pyramids say they've discovered that Great Pyramid of Giza is not exactly even. But really not by much. This pyramid is the oldest of the world's Seven Wonders. The pyramid's exact size has __26__ experts for centuries, as the "more than 21 acres of hard, white casing stones "that originally covered it were __27__ long ago. Reporting in the most recent issue of the newsletter "AERAGRAM," which __28__ the work or the Ancient Egypt Research Associates, engineer Glen Dash says his team used a new measuring approach that involved finding any surviving __29__ of the casing in order to determine where the original edge was. They found the east side of the pyramid to be a __30__ of 5.5 inches shorter than the west side.

The question that most __31__ him, however, isn't how the Egyptians who designed and built the pyramid got it wrong 4,500 years age, but how they got it so close to __32__. "We can only speculate as to how the Egyptians could have laid out these lines with such __33__ using only the tools they had," Dash writes. He says his __34__ is that the Egyptians laid out their design on a grid, noting that the great pyramid is oriented only __35__ away from the cardinal directions(its north-south axis runs 3 minutes 54 seconds west of due north, while its east-west axis runs 3 minutes 51 seconds north of due east)—an amount that's "tiny, but similar," archeologist Atlas Obscura points out.

The Ebro Delta, in Spain, famous as a battleground during the Spanish Civil War, is now the setting for a different contest, one that is pitting rice farmers against two enemies: the rice-eating giant apple snail, and rising sea levels. What happens here will have a bearing on the future of European rice production and the overall health of southern European wetlands.

Located on the Mediterranean just two hours south of Barcelona, the Ebro Delta produces 120 million kilograms of rice a year, making it one of the continent's most important rice-growing areas. As the sea creeps into these freshwater marshes, however, rising salinity (盐分) is hampering rice production. At the same time, this sea-water also kills off the greedy giant apple snail, an introduced pest that feeds on young rice plants. The most promising strategy has become to harness one foe against the other.

The battle is currently being waged on land, in greenhouses at the University of Barcelona. Scientists working under the banner "Project Neurice" are seeking varieties of rice that can withstand the increasing salinity without losing the absorbency that makes European rice ideal for traditional Spanish and Italian dishes.

"The project has two sides," says Xavier Serrat, Neurice project manager and researcher at the University of Barcelona. "The short-term fight against the snail, and a mid- to long-term fight against climate change. But the snail has given the project greater urgency."

Originally from South America, the snails were accidentally introduced into the Ebro Delta by Global Aquatic Technologies, a company that raised the snails for fresh-water aquariums (水族馆), but failed to prevent their escape. For now, the giant apple snail's foothold in Europe is limited to the Ebro Delta. But the snail continues its march to new territory, says Serrat. "The question is not if it will reach other rice-growing areas of Europe, but when."

Over the next year and a half investigators will test the various strains of saline-tolerant rice they've concocted. In 2018, farmers will plant the varieties with the most promise in the Ebro Delta and Europe's other two main rice-growing regions—along the Po in Italy, and France's Rhône. A season in the field will help determine which, if any, of the varieties are ready for commercialization.

As an EU-funded effort, the search for salt-tolerant varieties of rice is taking place in all three countries. Each team is crossbreeding a local European short-grain rice with a long-grain Asian variety that carries the salt-resistant gene. The scientists are breeding successive generations to arrive at varieties that incorporate salt tolerance but retain about 97 percent of the European rice genome (基因组).

Photography was once an expensive, laborious ordeal reserved for life's greatest milestones. Now, the only apparent cost to taking infinite photos of something as common as a meal is the space on your hard drive and your dining companion's patience.

But is there another cost, a deeper cost, to documenting a life experience instead of simply enjoying it? "You hear that you shouldn't take all these photos and interrupt the experience, and it's bad for you, and we're not living in the present moment," says Kristin Diehl, associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

Diehl and her fellow researchers wanted to find out if that was true, so they embarked on a series of nine experiments in the lab and in the field testing people's enjoyment in the presence or absence of a camera. The results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, surprised them. Taking photos actually makes people enjoy what they're doing more, not less.

"What we find is you actually look at the world slightly differently, because you're looking for things you want to capture, that you may want to hang onto," Diehl explains. "That gets people more engaged in the experience, and they tend to enjoy it more."

Take sightseeing. In one experiment, nearly 200 participants boarded a double-decker bus for a tour of Philadelphia. Both bus tours forbade the use of cell phones but one tour provided digital cameras and encouraged people to take photos. The people who took photos enjoyed the experience significantly more, and said they were more engaged, than those who didn't.

Snapping a photo directs attention, which heightens the pleasure you get from whatever you're looking at, Diehl says. It works for things as boring as archaeological (考古的) museums, where people were given eye-tracking glasses and instructed either to take photos or not. "People look longer at things they want to photograph," Diehl says. They report liking the exhibits more, too.

To the relief of Instagrammers (Instagram 用户) everywhere, it can even make meals more enjoyable. When people were encouraged to take at least three photos while they ate lunch, they were more immersed in their meals than those who weren't told to take photos.

Was it the satisfying click of the camera? The physical act of the snap? No, they found; just the act of planning to take a photo—and not actually taking it—had the same joy-boosting effect. "If you want to take mental photos, that works the same way," Diehl says. "Thinking about what you would want to photograph also gets you more engaged."