Radiocarbon dating has revealed two fake (伪造的) paintings in France — probably the first time the technique has been used in a police investigation. The paintings were supposedly works from around the early twentieth century. But a team led by scientist Lucile Beck at the University of Paris-Saclay dated them to sometime within the past 70 years.
The use of radiocarbon dating is gaining popularity, thanks to advances that require smaller samples than ever before. Removing tinier samples from artwork is becoming more palatable to museums and owners of paintings. If there is a chance that a painting is genuine — and therefore valuable — they don’t want the collection of larger samples to damage it.
All living things take in carbon, including radioactive carbon-14, from the atmosphere and from food. When a plant commonly used to make oil painting cloth dies, the carbon-14 that it contained continues to fall off. Radiocarbon dating measures what’s left to estimate the time that’s passed, says Mariaelena Fedi, a physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Florence, Italy.
Atomic-bomb (原子弹) testing, which began in the 1940s and took off in the 1950s, quickly increased the amount of carbon-l4 in the atmosphere.Carbon-l4 peaked around 1964and went down after a partial ban on nuclear tests. Researchers can easily identify materials containing modern bomb-produced radiocarbon because their carbon-14 concentrations are higher than pre-1950s levels. Beck’s team tested its samples to see whether they bore the feature of that bomb-produced radioactive carbon-14.
The canvas fiber from the paintings clearly contained carbon from either the mid-1950sor after the year 2000, the researchers reported. Beck acknowledged that, ideally, the team would do further chemical analysis to support its findings, but the researchers were limited by the tight time.
【小题1】What does the underlined word “palatable” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Impressive. | B．Acceptable. | C．Expensive. | D．Difficult. |
| A．By analyzing samples from artwork. |
| B．By removing the smaller samples. |
| C．By measuring the carbon-14 left. |
| D．By testing the carbon in the sample. |
| A．It produces more carbon-14. |
| B．It helps identify fake paintings. |
| C．it reduces carbon concentration. |
| D．It has been stopped completely. |
| A．Paintings waiting to be identified |
| B．Two fake paintings found in France |
| C．New technology in painting becomes a hit |
| D．Radiocarbon dating proves an anti-fake helper |
