第一页：片段欣赏

第二页：巧学口语

第三页：小小翻译家

第四页：文化一瞥

 

 

 

 

精彩对白

Jackson: Adults get hurt feelings too.

Charlie: ...tell the truth. Thank you, Bill. What is your question?

Bill: I wanted to know, where is all this gonna start?

Charlie: Well, something like this could only originate in Hollywood. They have the earth cracking under their asses already.

Bill: Our family believes in the Gospel of the lord Jesus. We have nothing to fear, Charlie.

Charlie: Good for you, Bill. Thanks for calling. This is Charlie Frost reporting live from Yellowstone National Park, soon to become the worlds largest active volcano. I'll be right back, folks.

Jackson: Do you mind if I join you? I wanted to ask you something.

Charlie: I only got a minute. Pickle?

Jackson: I was listening to the broadcast and I was wondering what exactly is it that's gonna start in Hollywood?

Charlie: It's the Apocalypse. End of days. The Judgment Day. The end of the world, my friend. Christians call it The Rapture, but the Mayans knew about it, the Hopis, The I Ching, the Bible. Beer? 

Jackson: Yeah.

Charlie: So look, I gotta eat. Why don't you download my blog? It's free. Of course, we do appreciate donations.

Man on the blog: In ancient times, the Mayan people were the first civilization to discover that this planet had an expiration date. According to their calender, in the year 2012 a cataclysmic event will unfold, caused by an alignment of the planets in our solar system that only happens every 640.000 years. Oh, not again.

Charlie: Neat, huh? I did all the animation myself.

Man on the blog: Just imagine the Earth as an orange.

Charlie: You lure them in with humor. Then you make them think.

Man on the blog: Our sun will begin to emit such extreme amounts of radiation. Screw you bastards. That the core of the earth will melt at the inside part of the orange. Leaving the crust of our planet free to shift. In 1958 Professor Charles Hapgood named it: "Earth Crust Displacement". Albert Einstein did support it. People will get it all, the forces of Mother Nature will be so devastating that it will bring an end to this world on winter Solstice 12-21-12. Always remember, folks. You heard it first from Charlie Frost.

Charlie: You'd have to keep a thing like this under wraps. Just think about it. First, the stock market would go. Then the economy: Boom! The dollar: Boom! And then pandemonium in the street. War, genocide. Boom Boom Boom!

Jackson: Bullshit. Nobody could keep that big a secret, Charlie. Somebody would blow the whistle.

Charlie: An every once in a while, some poor sucker tries. Like these guys. Boom! Boom! Every one of these guys: Dead! Dead! Dead!

Jackson: Woah, that's Professor Meyers. 

Charlie: He ran the Atlantis Shuttle Program. Did you know him?

Jackson: Yeah, he helped me out with research on my book.

Charlie: Well, that must have been before his accident.

Jackson: Meyers is dead?

Charlie: Yeah, two months ago. He was one of my most avid listeners. He had it all figured out. Everything the government was doing, where, why. He even sent me a map.

Jackson: A map for what, Charlie? What's the map for?

Charlie: They're building space ships, man.

Jackson: Shit, man, I have to go. I gotta get back to Earth. Do you have a beer?

Charlie: This is my last.

Jackson:  Alright, I really enjoyed most of this. Thank you so much.

Charlie: Guess what, they're selling seats!

Jackson: Put me down for three.

Charlie: No! Guys like you and me don't have any chance. You'd have to be Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch or some Russian billionaire.

Jackson: Keep it down, my kids are sleeping.

Charlie: Get them out of Yellowstone. It's gonna get ugly here.

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第一页：片段欣赏

第二页：巧学口语

第三页：小小翻译家

第四页：文化一瞥

 

 

 

 

 

1. active volcano: 活火山。

指的是正在喷发和预期可能再次喷发的火山，将来有可能喷发的火山称为dormant volcano（休眠火山），而不再会喷发的火山则是extinct volcano 死火山（死火山）。

例如：An active volcano may erupt at any time.活火山随时可能喷发。

2. Apocalypse: 世界毁灭, （《圣经》所述的）末世, 大动乱；大灾变。

3. Judgment Day: 末日审判。

基督宗教认为，在世界终结前，上帝将要对世人进行审判，这就是末日审判。凡信仰上帝和耶稣基督并行善者可升入天堂，不得救赎者下地狱受刑罚

4. The Rapture: 也称为Rapture Day，指审判日。

5. I Ching：易经

6. expiration date: 有效期，在这指世界末日。

7. cataclysmic：大变动的，洪水的。

例如：We always trace the disappearance of dinosaurs to a major cataclysmic event.（人们很容易把恐龙消失的原因归结为重大的灾难性事件。）

8. Earth Crust Displacement：地壳移位。

哈普古德教授在研究古代南极地图时，曾经提出了地壳移位假说：某种状况下，整个地球的外壳可能会整体转动位移，如同一个空松的桔子的厚皮，松脱后就会整个转动移位。

9.Mother Nature: 大自然，自然界。

10.under wraps: 受限制，受约束。查理在这里说keep it under wraps指的是“保守秘密”。

11. blow the whistle：揭发某事。而告密者则被称为whistle-blower。

例如：When he discovered his boss was taking bribes, he blew the whistle and wrote his congressman about it.（当他发现他的上司受贿以后，他就告发了。他写信把情况告诉了来自他居住地区的国会议员。）

12. avid: 热衷的，酷爱的。

例如：An avid stamp collector, John rides the subject pretty hard whenever it is introduced.（约翰是个热心的邮票收藏家，只要有人提起集邮，他就会滔滔不绝。）

[page]

第一页：片段欣赏

第二页：巧学口语

第三页：小小翻译家

第四页：文化一瞥

 

 

 

 

 

1.基督徒说是审判日，但是玛雅人很早就预言了。

 _______________________________________________

2.这种事你一定要保密。

_______________________________________________

3.总会有人泄露出来。

_______________________________________________

4.他就是我的忠实听众之一。

_______________________________________________

答案见下期

《2012》精讲之二参考答案

 

1.You usually go digging with machine guns?

2.The very same.

3.Do you think those people would behave so selflessly knowing that their own lives were at stake?

4.Mayor, could you escort these good people to the camp grounds, please.

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第一页：片段欣赏

第二页：巧学口语

第三页：小小翻译家

第四页：文化一瞥

 

 

 

 

 

       在去年上映的《先知》和《2012》两部有关世界末日的影片中，地球最终都是被太阳毁灭的。那么，太阳辐射或者大爆发真的能毁灭地球吗？来看看天文学家的观点吧。

Why the sun didn't destroy earth: Astronomers' new theory

When astronomers began spotting planets around distant stars in the mid-1990s, they were baffled. Many of these early discoveries involved worlds as big as Jupiter or even bigger - but they orbited their stars so tightly that their "years" were just days long. Nobody could imagine how a Jupiter or anything like it could form in such a hostile location, where the radiation of the parent star would have pushed the light gas - which makes up most of such a planet's mass - out to the farthest reaches of the solar system before it could ever coalesce.

But a handful of theorists already had a better explanation at hand. The giant planets could have formed in a much more sensible location, like Jupiter did, and then migrated inward, establishing a stable orbit there. It all made sense, except for one tiny problem: this same model also suggested that a little world like Earth shouldn't exist at all; it (or more precisely, the moon-size proto-planets that eventually assembled into Earth) should have spiraled into the sun more than 4 billion years ago. A star might not gobble a Jupiter whole when it moves close enough, but it could surely swallow a canapÉ like proto-Earth.

 

 

"It's a problem," admits Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, an astronomer at New York's American Museum of Natural History. Or, rather, it was a problem - but Mac Low and his collaborators may have solved it. In a paper recently submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, they say that the old, Earth-destroying theory was generally accurate but lacked some key details - ones that both reshape theories about how planets form and, oh yes, allow the planet we know best to exist.

Here's the basic difference: when the planets in our solar system first formed, they were swimming through a disk-shaped cloud of gas. Their passage roiled and compressed the gas, and the gravity of the compressed gas in turn pulled on the proto-planets. The original models suggested that the net effect would have been to drag the proto-planets inward - and while the drag would have stopped as the gas eventually dissipated, it would have been too late. They would long since have fallen into the sun.

But those early models didn't take into account the fact that compressed gas heats up, which limits how dense it can become, and in turn limits how hard its gravity can pull on the proto-planets. Beyond that, the planets' own gravity would fling gas around - the same sort of phenomenon NASA counts on, say, when a spacecraft en route to Saturn gets a slingshot velocity boost from Jupiter on the way. By adding in both effects, Mac Low's collaborator Sijme-Jan Paardekooper, now at Cambridge, found that there are places where the net force pushes a planet inward, but other places where it pushes outward. And in between those are places where the net force is pretty much zero. "Once planets move into these regions," he says, "they stay." And that includes small planets like ours.

Eventually, the disk of gas dissipates, and the proto-planets are fixed in their permanent orbits. Exactly where those orbits lie depends on all sorts of factors peculiar to a given planetary system - how much material there is in the original proto-planetary disk, how much of that is dust and how much is gas, how big the dust grains are, how hot the star is and more. That's one reason we should expect each solar system to look a little bit different. Which, as it turns out, they do.

The new theory is one that has deep appeal to planet geeks but perhaps not as much to folks who don't ordinarily contemplate these things. But consider this: if the theory weren't right, it's possible that none of us would be here to contemplate anything at all.