人教版高二英語課文下冊Unit 12 Fact and fantasy - Integrating Skills 2
MR CAVOR’S FLYING MACHINE
When I first met Mr Cavor, he was about to finish building the machine in which he planned to travel to the moon. As it had neither wings nor an engine, I was amazed and asked him how his machine could fly. The secret lay in a new material which he had developed. Applied in his machine, it would cut off the earth's power, which science calls gravity, to keep things on the ground. If Mr Cavor's machine would be free from the pull of gravity, nothing would keep it from flying off into the sky.
I still could not understand how it would work, so I asked him to explain it to me. Cavor said that for many years he had been doing research into materials that could block all kinds of energy in the form of waves. "Energy," he said, "such as light or heat, X-rays, electricity or gravity, exists in the form of waves that act on bodies at a distance." Almost all materials block some form of energy. Glass, for example, blocks heat, but it lets light pass through, so that it is useful as a fire screen. Metals, on the other hand, block light, but electrical energy and heat pass through them very well. So far, it sounded like a class of basic physics, and I had no difficulty understanding him.
"Gravity passes through all known materials," he said. "You can use screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical influence of the sun. You can screen things with sheets of metal from radioactivity, but nothing will cut off the gravity of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing is hard to say." Cavor did not see why such a material, which he called Cavorite, should not exist. He argued that such a material was possible and, under certain conditions, could be made.
He explained it to me as follows. "Everybody knows that the air has weight and that it presses on everything on the surface of the earth, no less than fourteen and a half pounds to the square inch. But over a sheet of Cavorite this is not the case, because it blocks the gravity from the earth below it. The next step would be to build a machine in which to apply that great discovery." Cavor was proud to show me the first model.
"It's like this," he said. "Nothing above a layer of Cavorite weighs anything, and everything above it goes up into the air. The material itself moves up too and we are going up with it." "Like Jules Verne's thing in A Trip to the Moon," I said, but Cavor did not read any fiction.
"Imagine a ball," he explained, "large enough to hold two people and their luggage. It will be made of steel and thick glass, and on the outside, Cavorite As soon as the Cavorite cools down, it is no longer affected by gravity, and off you fly." "But then what is to prevent the machine from travelling in a straight line into space for ever?" I asked. "That's a practical problem for which I will still need to find a solution ," Cavor said, "but don't worry, I already have the beginning of an idea."
