高中三年级英语(人教版)全一册 Unit 1 Reading

　　THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS

　　In 1951, the then director of the Guinness Brewery, Sir Hugh Beaver, wanted to settle an argument about the fastest bird in Europe. After talking to his friends, he concluded that a book which answered such questions might be popular. The Guinness company hired two Englishmen to write what later became the Guinness Book of World Records. The first edition was published in 1955 and has been a best-seller ever since.

　　More than 60,000 new records are sent in to the book each year, but they cannot all be printed. Instead, the editors of the book set down the records and keep track of them in other ways. The records are put into different categories. The Guinness Book of World Records has chapters on the human body, amazing feats, the natural world, science and technology, arts and the media, modern society, travel and transport, and sports and games. You can learn that the oldest person is a woman who lived to be 122 years and 164 days, that the longest moustache reached a length of 1.6 metres and that the longest poisonous snake is 5.71 metres long. There are also strange records, like the Englishman who balanced a small car weighing 159.6 kilogrammes on his head for thirty-three seconds!

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