阅读理解A story is told of Marie Curie. Her sisters once built a pyramid(金字塔) of chairs around her. Mari e was busy reading. She didn't even notice until she stood up and knocked them all over!
It would not be surprising if this story were true. As a child, Marie loved books and experiments(实验). Nothing could take her attention away from her studies. She did not lose this love of learning as she got older. In the 1880s, very few women went to college, and even fewer women became scientists. Marie did both.
After she met and married another scientist, Pierre Curie, the two of them began working together. Their studies focused on the element radium(镭元素). They had discovered it during their research.
Radium is found in some rocks. It is a white metallic element with a blue glow(微弱而稳定的光片) The glow lasts for a thousand years.
The radium glows because it produces energy. That is on c reason why the Curies were so interested in it. But studying radium is not like opening a book. Radium must be isolated(分离) from the rock around it. That is like trying to take just the chocolate out of chocolate milk.
The couple spent their life savings on eight tons of rock. ∧n old shack(棚屋) became their workplacc. They heated the rock to remove the bits of radium from it. Days of work turned into months. Finally, they spent four years in that shack studying the mysterious clement with the blue glow.
During their research, the Curics found that radium could help treat discase. That is when Marie and her husband became big news. They were written about often. This got the public interested. in radium. Soon. the Curies' work earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics. This award is one of the highest honors in the world. Maric had come a long way from the days of chair pyramids,
