高三童鞋辛苦啦。
What a waste of time this question is. Although you can argue until the end of time whether you exist or not, it doesn t get you anywhere. Unless you forget about this unanswerable question, you ll be stuck thinking about it forever, and that isn t of any use to anyone. Move on. Think about something more important! This very roughly, is the view of almost all philosophers, who prefer to answer other, apparently more useful, questions.
Yes, but…
You exist, but not in the way you might think. According to the great French philosopher Ren Descartes, you can t show that anything exists—apart from your own self. The existence of the entire world can be doubted in one way or another, but the facts you re having thoughts shows that there might be something (that s you) having them. This let Descartes to write the famous philosophical phrase, “ I think before I am”.
60. Which of the following can be the missing heading?
A. Forget about it B. What a ridiculous point C. Think about it D. What a pointless question 61. This passage is anything but a(n)___________.
A. comment B. discussion C. argument D. debate
62. The famous answer to the question “Do I exist?” is ___________. A. No, you don t exist. B. I think, therefore, I am. C. Yes, you do exist. D. It won t get you anywhere
C
Knots are the kind of stuff that even myths are made of.
In the Greek legend of the Gordian knot, for example, Alexander the Great used his sword to slice through a knot that had failed all previous attempts to unite it. Knots, enjoy a long history of tales and fanciful names such as “Englishman s tie, ” “and “cat s paw. ” Knots became the subject of serious scientific investigation when in the 1860s the English physicist William Thomson (known today as Lord Kelvin) proposed that atoms were in fact knotted tubes of ether（醚）. In order to be able to develop the equivalent of a periodic table of the elements, Thomson had to be able to classify knots — find out which different knots were possible. This sparked a great interest in the mathematical theory of knots.
A mathematical knot looks very much like a familiar knot in a string, only with the string s ends joined. In Thomson s theory, knots could, in principle at least, model atoms of increasing complexity, such as the hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms, respectively. For knots to be truly useful in a mathematical theory, however, mathematicians searched for some precise way of proving that what appeared to be different knots were really different — the couldn t be transformed one into the other by some simple manipulation（操作）. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Scottish mathematician Peter Guthrie Tait and the University of Nebraska professor Charles Newton Little published complete tables of knots with up to ten crossings. Unfortunately, by the time that this heroic effort was completed, Kelvin s theory had already been totally discarded as a model for atomic structure. Nevertheless, even without any other application in sight, the mathematical interest in knot theory continued at The only difference was that, as the British mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah has put it, “the study of knots became a special branch of pure mathematics. ”