2019学年度人教版必修三Unit 4 Astronomy-The science of the starsPeriod1Warming up and Reading

　　The reading passage titled HOW LIFE BEGAN ON THE EARTH provides students a brief introduction on how the universe developed into space and how life began on the earth. It provides a scientific background to any investigation into space and it is factual.

　　This unit is concerned with astronomy and how human beings first evolved on the earth and understand the universe around them. The exploration of space is examined through science fiction as nobody has yet visited a "black hole". We also examined how ideas have developed about gravity. The three scientists who have made the greatest contribution to our understanding of gravity are Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

　　Science of the star：the development of life; space travel and gravity

　　Vocabulary: astronomy, system, religion, theory, atom, billion, globe, violent, carbon, atmosphere, unlike, fundamental, harmful, acid, chain, oxygen, exist, thus, dioxide, puzzle, biology, biologist, satellite, gentle, physicist, climate, crash, spaceship, pull, float, solar system, in time, give birth to, in one`s turn, prevent....from, block out, cheer up, now that, watch out

　　Planets: Mercury(水星), Venus(金星), Earth(地球), Mars(火星), Jupiter(木星), Saturn(土星), Uranus(天王星), Neptune(海王星)

　　The Big Bang: It is the term used to describe a huge explosion that scientists believe happened around 15 billion years ago, creating our universe. Nobody knows what caused the Big Bang, since we cannot look back to a time before it. But just after the event, the universe is believed to have been a knot of tightly packed particles only about the size of a pea. Its temperature was ten thousand trillion, trillion degree Celsius.

　　The universe is made up of stars, planets, and other matter scattered throughout space.

　　Satellites are objects that move in orbit around other objects of greater mass. A satellite may be natural, like the moon, or artificial, like a spacecraft.

　　Our solar system is made up of the sun and the objects that orbit it. These include the eight planets (and probably more than eight) and their moons, as well as asteroids, comets, and meteors.

　　Some examples of the creation stories.

　　1 The story of Hopi people: The Four Creations.

2 From China: The story of Pan Gu