维州精英中学考试阅读双文本比较题

Hands Off, or Hands On?

Hands Off, or Hands On?

Text 1: Why we ask you not to touch

Visitors are sometimes puzzled, even offended, when a museum asks them not to touch. Surely one fingertip can do no harm? The difficulty is that a museum does not have one visitor; it has hundreds of thousands. Human skin leaves behind oils, salts and moisture. On a polished bronze statue, a single touch is invisible, but a hundred thousand touches wear a bright patch into the metal and help it to corrode. On old paper or cloth, the damage comes faster still. A conservator's job is to make sure that an object will still be here, and still be readable, in two hundred years. That means saying no to some of the people who love it most today. Where we can, we offer something in return: replicas, digital models that can be turned on a screen, and handling sessions with objects chosen because they are tough enough to be held.

Text 2: Let them hold something

My most vivid memory from primary school is not a lesson but a rock. On an excursion, a museum guide placed a piece of meteorite in my hand and told me it was older than the Earth's oceans. It was heavier than it looked, and cold, and I have never forgotten it. Museums are right to protect fragile treasures, but I worry that too many visits now take place behind glass. Children learn with their hands as much as with their eyes, and a room full of 'Do not touch' signs can tell them that the past belongs to someone else. The answer is not to put priceless paintings at risk. It is to give touch a proper place: more handling tables, more objects set aside specifically to be held, and more guides with the time to put something remarkable into a small, careful hand.