【正文】 o diseases, grew faster and larger, and flourished in water of different salinities and temperatures. In addition, the cultivated oysters tasted better! RefiningAn important new industry, oil refining, grew after the Civil war. Crude oil, or petroleum – a dark, thick ooze from the earth – had been known for hundreds of years, but little use had ever been made of it. In the 1850’s Samuel M. Kier, a manufacturer in western Pennsylvania, began collecting the oil from local seepages and refining it into kerosene. Refining, like smelting, is a process of removing impurities from a raw material.Kerosene was used to light lamps. It was a cheap substitute for whale oil, which was being harder to get. Soon there was a large demand for kerosene. People began to search for new supplies of petroleum.The first oil well was drilled by . Drake, a retired railroad conductor. In 1859 he began drilling in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The whole venture seemed so impractical and foolish that onlookers called it “ Drake’s Folly”. But when he had drilled down about 70 feet(21 meters), Drake struck oil. His well began to yield 20 barrels of crude oil a day.News of Drake’s success brought oil prospectors to the scene. By the early 1860’s these wildcatters were drilling for “ black gold” all over western Pennsylvania. The boom rivaled the California gold rush of 1848 in its excitement and Wild West atmosphere. And it brought far more wealth to the prospectors than any gold rush.Crude oil could be refined into many products. For some years kerosene continued to be the principal one. It was sold in grocery stores and doortodoor. In the 1880’s refiners learned how to make other petroleum products such as waxes and lubricating oils. Petroleum was not then used to make gasoline or heating oil. Tectonics and Seafloor SpreadingThe theory of plate tectonics describes the motions of the lithosphere, the paratively rigid outer layer of the Earth that includes all the crust and part of the underlying mantle. The lithosphere(n.[地]巖石圈)is divided into a few dozen plates of various sizes and shapes, in general the plates are in motion with respect to one another. A midocean ridge is a boundary between plates where new lithospheric material is injected from below. As the plates diverge from a midocean ridge they slide on a more yielding layer at the base of the lithosphere.Since the size of the Earth is essentially constant, new lithosphere can be created at the midocean ridges only if an equal amount of lithospheric material is consumed elsewhere. The site of this destruction is another kind of plate boundary: a subduction zone. There one plate dives under the edge of another and is reincorporated into the mantle. Both kinds of plate boundary are associated with fault systems, earthquakes and volcanism, but the kinds of geologic activity observed at the two boundaries are quite different.The idea of seafloor spreading actually preceded the theory of plate tectonics. In its original version, in the early 1960’s, it described the creation and destruction of the ocean floor, but it did not specify rigid lithospheric plates. The hypothesis was substantiated soon afterward by the discovery that periodic reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field are recorded in the oceanic crust. As magma rises under the midocean ridge, ferromagnetic minerals in the magma bee magnetized in the direction of the magma bee magnetized in the direction of the geomagnetic field. When the magma cools and solidifies, the direction and the polarity of the field are preserved in the magnetized volcanic rock. Reversals of the field give rise to a series of magnetic stripes running parallel to the axis of the rift. The oceanic crust thus serves as a magnetic tape recording of the history of the geomagnetic field that can be dated independently。 she hooks up her telephone modern connections and does office work between calls to the doctor.These are powerful images, but they are a limited reflection of reality. Telemuting workers soon learn that it is almost impossible to concentrate on work and care for a young child at the same time. Before a certain age, young children cannot recognize, much less respect, the necessary boundaries between work and family. Additional child support is necessary if the parent is to get any work done.Management too must separate the myth from the reality. Although the media has paid a great deal of attention to telemuting in most cases it is the employee’s situation, not the availability of technology that precipitates a telemuting arrangement.That is partly why, despite the widespread press coverage, the number of panies with workathome programs or policy guidelines remains small.30 The origin of RefrigeratorsBy the midnineteenth century, the term “icebox” had entered the American language, but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals, and by some forwardlooking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the Civil War( 18611865),as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, it also came into household use. Even before 1880,half of the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and onethird of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had bee possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator, had been invented.Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the early nineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science of refrigeration, was rudimentary. The monsense notion that the best icebox was one that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the ice that performed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to econo