10月5日 综合 TPO30
The passage and the lecture discuss theauthenticity of a story that the Greeks could defend themselves with creativeweapon 'burning mirror' from attack by the Roman navy over 2,200 years ago. Thepassage claims that this story is un-trustable and believes that the Greeks ofSyracuse didn't have the capacity to build such device, while the lectureargues that claim made in reading passage is wrong, and confidents that it isreasonable for the ancient Greeks to build such weapon. In the first place, the author asserts thatthe ancient Greeks didn't have the technical ability to build such mirror,because the size of mirror needed to set ships on fire would have to beextremely wide with precise parabolic curvature. In contrast, the speakerbelieves that they did have such ability to build such big mirror, because theancient Greeks had the technology and mathematical knowledge to assembleseveral individual cooper mirrors into a large one. Besides, the lecture states that becausethe ancient ships were not only made by wood but also made by stick substancenamed 'Pitch' which could be on fired by burning mirror in seconds, and thefire could spread to the other side of the ship and even when it is moving,contradicting what is stated in the reading passage that because it takes longtime to set the woods on fire, burning mirror is a completely impractical andineffective way during the war. Finally, the author points out that there wasno reason for the ancient Greek to build burning mirror, since compared withflaming arrows, the burning mirror has no advantage, while the speakerindicates that the Roman soldiers were familiar with traditional weapons andready to deal with the fire made by flaming arrows. In contrast, the fire madeby burning mirror is quite surprising and difficult to be detected by the Romansoldiers. Thus, the contents in the reading passageare totally disrupted by the speaker, who has completely different ideas on thetopic made in the reading passage.
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