粗骨土(skeleton soils)
A:A Skeleton Key B:A Man of Many Secrets C:World-wild Fame D:Great Escape
The Man of Many Secrets—Harry Houdini—was one of the greatest American entertainers in the theater next century. He was a man famous for his escapes—from prison cells, from wooden boxes floating in rivers, from locked tanks full of water. He appeared in theaters all over Europe and America. Crowds came to see the great Houdini and his "magic" tricks.
Of course, his secret was not magic, or supernatural powers. It was simply strength. He had the ability to move his toes as well as he moved his fingers. He could move his body into almost any position he wanted.
Houdini started working in the entertainment world when he was 17, in 1891. He and his brother Theo performed card tricks in club in New York. They called themselves the Houdini Brothers. When Harry married in 1894, he and his wife Bess worked together as magician and assistant. But for a long time they were not very successful. Then Harry performed his first prison escape, in Chicago in 1898. Harry persuaded a detective to let him try to escape from the prison, and he invited the local newspapermen to watch.
It was the publicity that came from this that started Harry Houdini’s success. Harry had fingers trained to escape from handcuffs and toes trained to escape ankle chins. But his biggest secret was how he unlocked the prison doors. Every time he went into the prison cell, Bess gave him a kiss for good luck—and a small skeleton key, which is a key that fits many locks, pass quickly from her mouth to his.
Harry used these prison escapes to build his fame. He arranged to escape from the local prison of every town he visited. In the afternoon, the people of the town would read about it in their local newspapers, and in the evening every seat in the local theater would be full. What was the result World-wild fame, and a name remembered today.
A:A Skeleton Key B:A Man of Many Secrets C:World-wild Fame D:Great Escape
In almost all cases the soft parts of fossils are gone for ever but they were fitted around or within the hard parts. Many of them also were attached to the hard parts and usually such attachments are visible as depressed or elevated areas, ridges or grooves, smooth or rough patches on the hard parts. The muscles most important for the activities of the animal and most evident in the appearance of the living animal are those attached to the hard parts and possible to reconstruct from their attachments. Much can be learned about a vanished brain from the inside of the skull in which it was lodged.
Restoration of the external appearance of an extinct animal has little or no scientific value. It does not even help in inferring what the activities of the living animal were, how fast it could run, what its food was, or such other conclusions as are important for the history of life. However, what most people want to know about extinct animals is what they looked like when they were alive. Scientists also would like to know. Things like fossil shells present no great problem as a rule, because the hard parts are external when the animal is alive and the outer appearance is actually preserved in the fossils.
Animals in which the skeleton is internal present great problems of restoration, and honest restorers admit that they often have to use considerable guessing. The general shape and contours of the body are fixed by the skeleton and by muscles attached to the skeleton, but surface features, which may give the animal its really characteristic look, are seldom restorable with any real probability of accuracy. The present often helps to interpret the past. An extinct animal presumably looked more or less like its living relatives, if it has any. This, however, may be quite equivocal. For example, extinct members of the horse family are usually restored to look somewhat like the most familiar living horses — domestic horses and their closest wild relatives. It is, however, possible and even probable that many extinct horses were striped like zebras. If lions and tigers were extinct they would be restored to look exactly alike. No living elephants have much hair and mammoths, which are extinct elephants, would doubtless be restored as hairless if we did not happen to know that they had thick, woolly coats. We know this only because mammoths are so recently extinct that prehistoric men drew pictures of them and that the hide and hair have actually been found in a few specimens. For older extinct animals we have no such clues.
The muscles of a fossilized animal can sometimes be reconstructed because
A:they were preserved with the present relatives of the animal. B:they were lodged inside the animal’s skull. C:they were hardened parts of the animal’s body. D:they were attached to the animal’s skeleton.
A:A Skeleton Key B:A Man of Many Secrets C:World-wild Fame D:Great Escape
The Man of Many Secrets—Harry Houdini—was one of the greatest American entertainers in the theater next century. He was a man famous for his escapes—from prison cells, from wooden boxes floating in rivers, from locked tanks full of water. He appeared in theaters all over Europe and America. Crowds came to see the great Houdini and his "magic" tricks.
Of course, his secret was not magic, or supernatural powers. It was simply strength. He had the ability to move his toes as well as he moved his fingers. He could move his body into almost any position he wanted.
Houdini started working in the entertainment world when he was 17, in 1891. He and his brother Theo performed card tricks in club in New York. They called themselves the Houdini Brothers. When Harry married in 1894, he and his wife Bess worked together as magician and assistant. But for a long time they were not very successful. Then Harry performed his first prison escape, in Chicago in 1898. Harry persuaded a detective to let him try to escape from the prison, and he invited the local newspapermen to watch.
It was the publicity that came from this that started Harry Houdini’s success. Harry had fingers trained to escape from handcuffs and toes trained to escape ankle chins. But his biggest secret was how he unlocked the prison doors. Every time he went into the prison cell, Bess gave him a kiss for good luck—and a small skeleton key, which is a key that fits many locks, pass quickly from her mouth to his.
Harry used these prison escapes to build his fame. He arranged to escape from the local prison of every town he visited. In the afternoon, the people of the town would read about it in their local newspapers, and in the evening every seat in the local theater would be full. What was the result World-wild fame, and a name remembered today.
A:A Skeleton Key B:A Man of Many Secrets C:World-wild Fame D:Great Escape
A:A Skeleton Key B:A Man of Many Secrets C:World-wild Fame D:Great Escape
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