《毕金献阅读理解》电子书节选之四_大学英语阅读

《毕金献阅读理解》电子书节选之四

　　Every year brings fresh reminders of the weather s power over human life and events in the form of horrifying tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. These leave behind forgettable statistics and unforgettable images of devastated towns and battered humanity that can only humble people in the face of such wrath. Farmers often suffer the most, from the drought to the hailstorms or quick freezes that even today can wipe out whole crops in minutes. Icy assaults serve as reminders of the inescapable vulnerability of life and social well?being to the whims of the weather. And history is packed with reminders of far worse. The weather, for example, provoked a major social dislocation in the United States in the 1930 s when it turned much of the South west into the Dust Bowl.

　　No wonder, then, that man s great dream has been some day to control the weather. The first step toward control, of course, is knowledge, and scientists have been hard at work for years trying to keep track of the weather. The United States and other nations have created an international apparatus that maintains some 100,000 stations to check the weather round the clock in every sector of the globe and, with satellites, in a good deal of the more than 16 billion cubic kilometers of the atmosphere. With computers on tap and electronic eyes in the sky, modern man has thus come far in dealing with the weather. Yet man s predicament today is not too far removed from that of his remote ancestors. For all the advances of scientific forecasting, in spite of the thousands of daily bulletins and advisories that get flashed about, the weather is still ultimately often changing and unpredictable. Man s dream of controlling it is still just that a dream.