Unit 4 Exploring Literature单元话题阅读理解练习-2023-2024学年高一英语必修第二册单元重难点易错题精练（译林版2020）

Unit 4 Exploring Literature 单元话题阅读理解练习 （2023上·江苏盐城·高一盐城中学校考阶段练习）Ada Palmer is a professor of European history at the University of Chicago. Her science-fiction series, Terra Ignota, was inspired by 18th-century philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot. “I wanted to write a story that Voltaire might have written if Voltaire had be enable to read the last 70 years’ worth of science fiction and have all of those tools available (可获得的) for his use,” Palmer says in a radio program called Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. Palmer says that Voltaire could actually be considered the first sci-fic writer, thanks to a place he wrote in 1752. “Voltaire has a short story called Micromégas, in which an alien from Saturn and an alien from a star near Sirius come to Earth. They are extremely big in size. They explore Earth and have trouble finding life forms because to them a whale is the size of a flea (跳蚤)”, she says. They eventually realize that the tiny little spot of wood on the ground is a ship, and it’s full of living things, including humans, and they make contact. So it’s a first-contact story. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is often considered the first sci-fi novel. Voltaire was writing much earlier than Shelley, so should he have the title instead? It depends on your definition (定义) of science fiction. “Micromégas doesn’t involve technology,” Palmer says, “so if you define science fiction as depending upon technology—and being about, in the Frankenstein sense. Is man’s knowledge giving us access to powers beyond what we’ve had before? What does that mean?’—it isn’t asking that. But ‘aliens and first contact’ is a very significant science fictional element.” So there’s no obvious answer to the question of who should be considered the first sci-fi writer. Palmer says it’s more important to ask the question than to arrive at any particular answer. “I don’t want to argue, ‘Yes, definitely, everybody’s histories of science fiction should start with Voltaire,” she says