推荐：大学英语六级考试短文写作教材(4)

    There is urgent need to debate this issue openly. Not only in medicine, but in other professions as well, practitioners may find themselves repeatedly in difficulty where serious consequences seem avoidable only through deception. Yet the public has every reason to be wary of professional deception, for such practices are peculiarly likely to become deeply rooted, to spread, and to erode trust. Neither in medicine, nor in law, government, or the social sciences can there be comfort in the old saying, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

18．
Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a summary of the following passage. You should write about 150 words and remember to write clearly on the COMPOSITION SHEET.?
The Leaning Tower of Pisa
The leaning tower has never been straight. Not long after work began in 1173, the foundation settled unevenly, and the tower started inclining toward the north. Evidence for this initial incline can be seen in the design of the tower itself: to keep the first few stories level, worker, make the columns and arched of the third story on the sinking northern side just slightly taller than the features on the southern side. Political unrest in Pisa halted construction in 1178, in the middle of work on the fourth level. Work resumed almost 100 years later, in 1272, and by that time, the tower had tilted to the south — the direction it still points today. Again, designer hoped to correct the lean, this time by adjusting the height of the fifth story, making the southern side somewhat taller than the northern side. In 1278, with seven stories completed, work on the tower ceased once again because of political unrest. By 1292, the tower’s tilt was so obvious that a group of masons(石匠) were asked to investigate the problem — the first of many commissions to study the tower appointed over the past 700 years.
The eighth story and final addition, the bell chamber, was built between 1360 and 1370. Once more, architects attempted to correct for the southward lean, this time by angling the bell chamber northward. These efforts, combined with the slow time scale of construction, have so far prevented the tower from topping（倒塌） over.
Throughout the monument’s history, architects and engineers have attempted to halt the lean, but since regular monitoring began in 1911, the offset（偏移） at the top of the tower has increased at a fairly consistent rate of about 1.2 millimeters each year. Today the top of the tower is 5.227 meters off-center, visibly leaning south. Fears about the safety of the landmark became acute when a similarly constructed bell tower at the Cathedral at Pavia collapsed suddenly in 1989. Shortly thereafter, the tower at Pisa was closed to visitors.
In 1990, a special commission, composed of Italian and foreign experts in the fields of structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, history of art and restoration of monuments, was brought together by the Italian government to determine new ways to save the tower. The Tower of Pisa Project Consortium has supervised several projects that have stabilized the structure and slowed the rater of its incline.