高中二年级英语(人教版)上册 Unit 1 Reading

　　Hawking became famous in the early 1970s, when he and American Roger Penrose made new discoveries about the Big Bang and black holes. Since then, Hawking has continued to seek answers to questions about the nature of the universe. In 1988, he wrote A Brief History of Time, which quickly became a best-seller. Readers were pleased and surprised to find that a scientist could write about his work in a way that ordinary people could understand.

　　In the book, Hawking explains both what it means to be a scientist and how science works. He tells readers how discoveries are made and how they change the world. Science, according to Hawking, is often misunderstood: people often think that science is about "true" facts that never change. Scientists, on the other hand, Hawking writes, know that their job is never finished and that even the best theory can turn out to be wrong.

　　A scientific theory is the result of the scientific method. Scientists look at the world and try to describe and explain what they see. First, they carefully observe what they are interested in. To explain what they have seen, they build a theory about the way in which things happen and the causes and effects. Finally, the scientists test the theory to see if it matches what they have seen and if it can predict future events. !f what they are observing can be tested in a practical way, scientists will use experiments. But if, like Hawking, they are studying something that is too large or too difficult to observe directly, they will use a model to test the theory.

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