正確原文：
Inancient times, many people believed the earth was a flat disc. Well over 2,000years ago, the ancient Greek philosophers were able to put forward two goodarguments proving that it was not. Direct observation of heavenly bodies wasthe basis of both these arguments. First, the Greeks knew that during eclipsesof the moon, the earth was between the sun and the moon, and they saw that during these eclipses, the earth’s shadow onthe moon was always round, they realized that this could be true only if theearth was spherical. If the earth were a flat disc, then its shadow duringeclipses would not be a perfect circle, it would be stretched out into a longellipse. The second argument was based on what the Greeks saw during theirtravels. They noticed that the North Star, or Polaris, appeared lower in thesky when they traveled south, in more northernly regions, the North Starappeared to them to be much higher in the sky. By the way, it was also fromthis difference in the apparent position of the North Star that the Greeksfirst calculated the approximate distance around the circumference of the earth,a figure recorded in ancient documents says 400,000 stadia, that’s the pluralof the word stadium. Today, it’s not known exactly what length one stadiumrepresents, but let’s say it was about 200 meters, the length of many athleticstadiums. This would make the Greek’s estimate about twice the figure acceptedtoday, a very good estimate for those writing so long before even the firsttelescope was invented.
生詞摘錄：
1. flat: adj. 平的
2. disc: n. 圓盤(pán)
3. heavenly body: adj. 天體
4. eclipse: n. 月食
5. spherical: adj. 球狀的
6. ellipse: n. 橢圓（形）
7. Polaris: n. 北極星
8. approximate:adj. 大約的，近似的
9. circumference:n. 圓周，周圍
10. stadium: n. 體育場(chǎng)
11. stadia: stadium的復(fù)數(shù)
12. athletic: adj. 運(yùn)動(dòng)的
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