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阅读理解
Christopher Columbus was a great sailor.He was born and grew up in Genoa, one of the oldest European seaports.As a youth he made several voyages in the Mediterranean, where the greatest seamen of ancient times were born.
At the age of twenty-four, by lucky chance, he was thrown into Lisbon, the center of European oceanic activities.There, while employed partly in making charts and partly on long voyages under the Portuguese flag, he thought over the great enterprise(事业)that few but a sailor would have planned, and none but a sailor could have completed.
His idea was to reach“The Indies”-Eastern Asia by sailing west.It took about ten years to get support for this plan, and he never did complete it because a vast continent stood in the way.America was discovered by Columbus purely by accident and was named for another man.We now honor Columbus for doing something that he never intended to do and never knew that he had done.
Yet we are right in so honoring him, for he had the persistence(坚韧),the knowledge, and the courage to sail thousands of miles into an unknown ocean to make the most splendid and most far-reaching geographical discovery in recorded human history.
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