C1Reading and Use of Englishパート 7
Gapped text
You are going to read an extract. Six paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap (1-6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Waiting for the Dark
For most of my adult life, I have been looking for things that are very faint. I teach chemistry at a secondary school in Newcastle, and on clear nights I take a small telescope into the back garden and try to find galaxies through the orange glow of the city. So when a comet discovered in the spring was predicted to become visible in October, low in the western sky just after sunset, I booked three nights in a cottage on the edge of a dark-sky reserve in Northumberland and told my students I was going comet hunting. Several of them assumed I was joking.
I arrived on the first afternoon under a sky the colour of wet cement. The cottage owner, a retired forester called Hamish Gillespie, looked up at the clouds and shook his head. Cloud, he told me, was the single most common reason visitors to the reserve went home disappointed; the darkest sky in England is no use to anyone if it is hidden. I set up the telescope in the garden anyway and pointed it hopefully at a sky with nothing in it.
On the third evening, about an hour before sunset, the cloud began to break up from the west. By the time the Sun had gone down, the sky was clearing fast, and I had my first proper look at what a truly dark sky means. It is not, as I had imagined, simply a black background with more stars on it; it is crowded, almost untidy, with light. But I had no time to admire it. The comet would set barely an hour after the Sun.
It was not, it has to be said, a spectacular sight. There was no great glowing tail of the kind you see in old paintings, only a faint grey patch that seemed to vanish if I looked straight at it. And yet I found myself unexpectedly moved. The light reaching my eyes had been reflected from ice that had spent thousands of years in the cold outer regions of the solar system, and the comet would not come back this way for thousands more.
We stayed outside long after the comet had dropped behind the trees. Through the binoculars, the Milky Way broke up into countless separate stars, and Hamish pointed out the satellites crossing the sky, more of them every year, he said. It struck me that the darkness around us was not entirely natural. The reserve exists because people decided that a dark sky was worth protecting, and protecting it, I learned, is hard work.
I drove home the next morning thinking about that argument. Back in Newcastle, the sky that evening was its usual dull orange, and from the garden I could see perhaps two dozen stars. The comet was still up there, of course, fading as it moved away from the Sun, but for me it might as well not have existed. On Monday morning, my students wanted to know whether I had found it.
What I wanted to tell him, and could not quite put into words at the time, was that the comet itself was not really the point. The point was the waiting, the patience, and the experience of standing in the cold under a sky that most people alive today have never seen. In the spring, I am taking a minibus of students to Northumberland. Hamish has promised to switch off his porch light.
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