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The first jazz musicians played in New Orleans during the early 1900's. After 1917, many of the New Orleans musicians moved to the south side of Chicago, where they continued to play their style of jazz. Soon Chicago was the new center for jazz. Several outstanding musicians emerged as leading jazz artists in Chicago. DanielLouis "Satchmo" Armstrong, born in New Orleans in 1900, was one. Another leading musician was Joseph "King" Oliver, who is also credited with having discovered Armstrong when they were both in New Orleans. While in Chicago, Oliver asked Armstrong, who was in New Orleans, to join his band. In 1923 King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band made the first important set of recordings by a Hot Five and Hot Seven bands under Louis Armstrong also made recordings of special note . Although Chicago's South Side was the main jazz center, some musicians in New York were also demanding attention in jazz circles . In 1923 Fletcher Henderson already had a ten piece band that played jazz. During the early 1930's, the number of players grew to sixteen. Henderson's band was considered a leader in what some people have called the Big Band Era. By the 1930's big dance bands were the rage . Large numbers of people went to ballrooms to dance to jazz music played by big bands. One of the most popular and long a very famous jazz band was the Duke Ellington band. Edward "Duke" Ellington was born in Washington, D. C., in 1899 and died in New York City in 1974. He studied the piano as a young boy and later began writing original musical compositions . The first of Ellington's European tours came in 1933. He soon received international fame for his talent as a band leader, composer, and arranger. Ten years later, Ellington began giving annual concerts at Carnegic Hall in New York City. People began to listen to jazz in the same way that they had always listened to classical music. 重点单词： The modern age is an age of electricity. People are so used to electric lights, radio, televisions, and telephones that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them. When there is a power failure , people grope about in flickering candlelight, cars hesitate in the streets because there are no traffic lights to guide them, and food spoils in silent refrigerators. Yet, people began to understand how electricity works only a little more than two centuries ago. Nature has apparently been experimenting in this field for millions of years. Scientists are discovering more and more that the living won may hold many interesting secrets of electricity that could benefit humanity. All living cells send out tiny pulses of electricity. As the heart beats, it set out pulses of recorded, they form an electrocardiogram , which a doctor can study to determine how well the heart is working. The brain, too, sends out brain waves of electricity, which can be recorded in an electroenephalogram. The electric currents generated by most living cells are extremely smalloften so small that sensitive instruments are needed to record them. But in some animals, certain muscle cells have become so specialized as electrical generators that they do not work as muscle cells at all. When large numbers of these cells are linked together, the effects can be astonishing. The electric eel is an amazing storage battery It send a jolt of as much as eight hundred volts of electricity through the water in which it lives (An electric house current is only one hundred twenty volts.). As many as four-fifths of all the cells in the electric eel's body are specialized for generating electricity, and the strength of the shock it can deliver corresponds roughly to the length of its body. 重点单词： The sooner had the first intrepid male aviators safely returned to Earth, it seemed that women, too, were smitten by an urge to fly. From mere spectators they became wilting passengers and finally pilots in their own right, ploting their skills and daring Line against the hazards of the air and the skepticism of their male counterparts . In doing so, they enlarged the traditional bounds of a women's world, won for their sex a new sense of competence and achievement, and contributed handsomely to the progress of aviation. But recognition of their abilities did not come essily, "Men do not believe us capable." the famed aviator Amelia Earhart once remarked to a friend "Because we are women, seldom are we trusted to do an efficient job." Indeed old attitudes died hard :when Charles Lindbergh visited the Soviet Union in 1938 with his wife, Anne---herself a pilot and gifted proponent of aviation ---he was astonished to discover both men and women flying in the Soviet Air Force. Such conventional wisdom made it difficult for women to raise money for the up-to-date equipment they needed to compete on equal basis with men. Yet compete they did, and often they triumphed handily despite the odds . Ruth Law, whose 590-mile flight from Chicago to Hornell, New York, set a new nonstop distance record in 1916, exemplified the resourcefulness and grit demanded of any woman who wanted to fly. And when she addressed the Aero Club of America after completing her historic journey, her plainspoken words testified to a universal human motivation that was unaffected by gender:" My flight was done with no expectation of reward," she declared, "just purely for the love of accomplishment " 重点单词： Insects' lives are very short and they have many enemies, but they must survive long enough to breed and perpetuate their kind. The less insect like they look, the better their chance of survival. To look "inedible" by resembling or imitating plants, deception widely practiced by insects. Mammals rarely use this type of camouflage but many fish and invertebrates do. The stick caterpillar is well named. It is hardly distinguishable from a brown or green twig .This caterpillar is quite common and can be found almost anywhere in North America. It is also called "measuring worm" or "inchworm." It walks by arching its body, then stretching out and grasping the branch with its front feet, then looping its body again to bring the hind feet forward. When danger threatens, the stick caterpillar stretches its body away from the branch at an angle and remains rigid and still, like a twig, until the danger has passed. Walkingsticks, or stick insects, do not have to assume a rigid, twiglike pose to find protection; they look like inedible twigs in any position. There are many kinds of walkingsticks, ranging in size from the few inches of the North American variety to some tropical species that may be over a foot long. When at rest their front legs are stretched out, heightening their camouflage. Some of the tropical species are adorned with spines or ridges , imitating the thorny bushes or trees in which they live. Leaves also seem to be a favorite object for insects to imitate. Many butterflies can suddenly disappear from view by folding their wings and sitting quietly among the foliage that they resemble. 重点单词： Anthropologists have pieced together the little they know about the history of left-handedness and right-handedness from indirect evidence. Though early men and women did not leave written records, they did leave tools, bones, and pictures. Stone Age hand axes and hatchets were made from stones that were carefully chipped away to form sharp cutting edges. In some, the pattern of chipping shows that these tools and weapons were made by right-handed people, designed to fit comfortably into a right hand. Other Stone Age implements were made by or for left-handers. Prehistoric pictures, painted on the walls of caves, provide further clues to the handedness of ancient people. A right-hander finds it easier to draw faces of people and animals facing toward the left, whereas a left-hander finds it easier to draw faces facing toward the right. Both kinds of faces have been found in ancient painting. On the whole , the evidence seems to indicate that prehistoric people were either ambidextrous or about equally likely to be left- or right-handed. But, in the Bronze Age , the picture changed. The tools and weapons found from that period are mostly made for right-handed use. The predominance of right-handedness among humans today had apparently already been established. 重点单词： |
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