Я учил по Scientific American, всё еще помню вот это, например:
Цитата:
Thousands of years ago many people thought the earth was flat. The flatness of the earth's surface must have seemed self-evident to anyone who looked out across an ocean or a prairie, and it was argued, not entirely unreasonably, that the surface of the earth must either be infinite or have an edge. It is now understood, of course, how such a basic misconception could have come about: even from a few thousand meters above the ground a small part of the roughly spherical earth looks like a small part of a plane. What is less often appreciated is that an unlimited number of terrestrial shapes would give rise to the same local observations. For example, it would be consistent with such local observations for the earth to have the shape of an irregular blob or of a doughnut.
У нас была методичка, составленная из таких текстов, и мы их разбирали. Не думаю, что язык Scientific American с тех пор сделался менее академичным, хотя журнал, конечно, стал значительно тоньше.
