Everyone knows a stone bounces best on water if it's round and flat, and spun towards the water as fast as possible. Some enthusiasts even travel to international stone-skimming competitions, like world champion Jerdone Coleman-McGhee, who made a stone bounce 38 times on Blanco River, Texas, in 1992. Intuitively, a flat stone works best because a relatively large part of its surface strikes the water, so there's more bounce. Inspired by his eight-year-old son, physicist Lyderic Bocquet wanted to find out more. He tinkered with some simple equations describing a stone bouncing on water in terms of its radius, speed and spin, and taking account of gravity and the water's drag.The equations showed that the faster a spinning stone is travelling, the more times it will bounce. To bounce at least once without sinking, Bocquet found the stone needs to be travelling at a minimum speed of about 1 kilometre per hour. The equations also backed his hunch (直觉) that spin is important because it keeps the stone fairly flat from one bounce to the next. The spin has a gyroscopic (陀螺的) effect, preventing the stone from tipping and falling sideways into the water. To match the world record of 38 bounces using a 10-centimetre-wide stone, Bocquet predicts it would have to be travelling at about 40 kilometres per hour and spinning at 14 revolutions a second. He adds that drilling lots of small pits in the stone would probably help, by reducing water drag in the same way that dim pies on a golf ball reduce air drag.
单选题 Which of the following could be the best title for this passage?
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】解析:文章主要讲述了一位物理学家通过对如何更好地进行打水漂这个游戏所做的研究。故选C。
单选题 In order to make a stone bounce best on water, one needs to________.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】解析:根据文章的第一段第一句可知,旋转越快,石头弹跳越好。故选B。
单选题 According to Lyderic Bocquet, which of the following is NOT mentioned as a factor influencing the bounces of a stone on water?
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】解析:文中提到了很多影响水漂次数的因素(石头的形状、大小、转速、重力因素、水的阻力等),但没有提到水的清澈度对打水漂次数的影响。
单选题 Which of the following is not the reason why Lyderic Bocquet supposed that spin is important?
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】解析:根据第四段的相关内容“because it keeps the stone fairly flat from one bounce to the next.The spin has a gyroscopic effect,preventing the stone from tipping and falling sideways into the water.”可知D项未提及。
单选题 Lyderic Bocquet drilled lots of small pits in the stone in order to________.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】解析:根据最后一段最后一句的描述“在石头上钻很多小坑可能会有所帮助,因为这样可以减少水的阻力,就像高尔夫球上有坑用来减少空气阻力一样。”可知B项正确。