Imagine that the genome (基因组) is a book. The book consists of 23 chapters with thousands of stories made up of paragraphs, words and letters on different levels. There are one billion words in the book, which makes it longer than 5,000 volumes the size of this book, or as long as 800 Bibles. If I read the genome out to you at the rate of one word per second for eight hours a day, it would take me a century. If I wrote out the human genome, one letter per millimeter, my text would be as long as the River Danube. This is an enormous document. A huge volume, a cook book of great length, and it all fits inside the extremely small nucleus (核) of a tiny cell that fits easily upon the head of a pin.
The idea of the genome as a book is not, strictly speaking, even a metaphor (比喻), It is true to a great extent. A book is a piece of digital information, written in one-directional form and defined by a code that translates a small alphabet of letters into a large dictionary of meanings through the order of their groupings. So is a genome. The only complication is that all English books read from left to right, while some parts of the genome read from left to right, and some from right to left, though never both at the same time.
While English books are written in words of different lengths using twenty-six letters. Genomes are written entirely in three-letter words, using only four letters, And instead of being written on flat pages, they are written on long chains of DNA molecules (分子), The genome is a very clever book, because in the right conditions it can both photocopy itself and read itself.
小题1:How do human genomes read according to the passage?| A．Only from left to right. | B．Only from right to left. | | C．From both directions at the same time | D．From one direction at a time |
小题2:We can learn from the passage that the human genome ______.| A．is as long as the River Danube | | B．can be easily placed on the head of a pin | | C．is coded with and alphabet of four letters | | D．is smart enough to read and take photos of itself |
小题3:It can be concluded that the passage is mainly written for ______.| A．specialists in the field | B．general readers | | C．natural scientists | D．readers with academic background |
小题4:The real purpose of the author’s comparison of the genome to a book is ______.| A．to focus on the differences between the two | | B．to lay emphasis on the similarities between the two | | C．to simplify the concept of the human genome | | D．to give an exact description of the human genome |
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