The Rainbow Passage
Fairbanks, G. (1960). Voice and Articulation Drillbook, 2nd edn. New York: Harper & Row. pp 124-139.
Cambridge University Press, 2012.
| 1. | When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. | |
| 2. | The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colours. | |
| 3. | These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. | |
| 4. | There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. | |
| 5. | When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. | |
| 6. | Throughout the centuries people have explained the rainbow in various ways. | |
| 7. | Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation. | |
| 8. | To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal floods. | |
| 9. | The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. | |
| 10. | The Norsemen considered the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from earth to their home in the sky. | |
| 11. | Others have tried to explain the phenomenon physically. | |
| 12. | Aristotle thought that the rainbow was caused by reflection of the sun's rays by the rain. | |
| 13. | Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection, but refraction by the raindrops which causes the rainbows. | |
| 14. | Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. | |
| 15. | The difference in the rainbow depends considerably upon the size of the drops, and the width of the coloured band increases as the size of the drops increases. | |
| 16. | The actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of super-imposition of a number of bows. | |
| 17. | If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, | |
| 18. | since red and green light when mixed form yellow. | |
| 19. | This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow, with little or no green or blue. |
Content owner: Department of Linguistics Last updated: 13 Nov 2024 9:59am