2.1 Reading text

The three examples of text in this activity come from three different sources: Example 1 is from a popular science magazine, Example 2 is from a student textbook for a module of a higher level than this course and Example 3 is from a book intended for the general reader. Note that a billion is a thousand million, and a million is a thousand thousand. These three texts are probably more complicated than anything else in this week, so the comment afterwards will give you some advice about how to interpret them. After this activity, the rest of the week should be less daunting. You don’t need to remember the information in these examples – what matters more is how you approach the reading.

Read each of the three articles, then in your learning notebook:

• list them in order from easiest to understand to hardest to understand, writing down why you put them in this order (which may be related to the terminology used, the numbers included, or some other reason)
• identify which one you think is the most scientific
• write down a few words – no more than a couple of sentences – summarising what each one was about.

Example 1

Geologists can trace the history of the Earth back about 4.6 billion years, to its formation from a ring of gas and dust around the young Sun. They divide this vast span into intervals that form the basic yardsticks of geological time. Early geologists named these intervals on the basis of the rocks formed within them but without knowing how long they lasted. Succeeding generations have changed the names of some and calibrated them in years to produce a geological time scale – a means of measuring the history of the Earth.

(Hecht, 1995)

Example 2

One of the most important events in the history of life began about 545 million years ago, i.e. some four billion years after the origin of the Earth. The term Cambrian explosion reflects a sudden burst of evolution, when a wide variety of organisms, especially those with hard, mineralised parts, first appear in the fossil record. Thus began the Phanerozoic Eon – ‘the time of visible life’. Very small (1–2 mm) shelly fossils appeared in the earliest part of the Cambrian Period – assorted shapes such as tubes and cones (that presumably enclosed soft tissue), as well as spines, scales and knobs. It’s often difficult to tell, however, whether a fossil is the complete skeleton of a single organism or an isolated part of some larger creature.

(The Open University, 2013)

Example 3

Throughout its 15 billion years, the pace of the Universe’s development has been accelerating, each new wave of innovation building up to trigger the next, in a series of ‘leaps’ to further levels of change and diversification. Compress this unimaginable timescale into a single 24-hour day, and the Big Bang is over in less than a ten-billionth of a second. Stable atoms form in about four seconds but not for several hours, until early dawn, do stars and galaxies form. Our own solar system must wait for early evening, around 6 p.m. Life on Earth begins around 8 p.m., the first vertebrates crawl on to land at about 10.30 p.m. at night. Dinosaurs roam from 11.35 p.m. until four minutes before midnight. Our ancestors first walk upright with 10 seconds to go. The Industrial Revolution, together with our modern age, occupies less than the last thousandth of a second. Yet, in this fraction of time, the face of this planet has changed almost as much as at any but the most tumultuous times in the prehistoric past.

(Myers and Kent, 2005, p. 12)

Reread Example 1 from Activity 2 and try to identify the key words or phrases in the text. I have identified a total of twelve.