シャドーイング練習: What's The Most Expensive Thing Ever? - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ
レッスンを作成中...
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If you saved a billion dollars every single day for your entire life,
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you still wouldn't come close to affording the most expensive thing ever.
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But to find out what that is, we'll be going on a journey through the most valuable things in existence, all starting with you.
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The raw ingredients needed to make a human cost only $152,000, but if that's out of budget you could just boil down a pig,
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because chemically you're pretty much the same, they're just slightly tastier.
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Since you're already fully assembled, the government officially values you at 14.2 million.
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And they're lowballing you, because if someone hypothetically harvested all your organs, they could make 45 million.
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You're pretty expensive.
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But to find the most expensive thing ever, we need to look at much costlier items, with the next being a well-known painting that became famous for all the wrong reasons.
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It's 1503 in Italy.
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A rich silk merchant goes up to a painter and says, Could you make me a painting of my wife?
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Sure.
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Give me like, uh, like two weeks.
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Leonardo da Vinci never fully finished that painting, but he actually sold it right before he died to the king of France.
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And it stayed in the bedrooms of powerful guys until ending up at a museum where no one cared.
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Until it got stolen, then found, then taken on a PR campaign, and now this 30-inch plank of wood smeared with colored oil is valued at $1 billion.
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But nature's greatest work of art was found by complete accident.
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Sir Thomas Major Cullinan dug a hole in the ground and filled it with Africans to mine rocks for him.
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And in 1905, a diamond was found.
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And it happened to be the biggest diamond ever.
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colorless, zero imperfections, the most chemically perfect rock produced by the planet.
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And the guy who found it was this guy, the mine's manager.
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He was just going for a stroll
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when he randomly saw it in the wall and he got a nice check for it.
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Then the rock got cut up and shipped in a literal postal box to more white people.
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The total value of this rock is estimated at $2 billion, making it the most expensive luxury item ever thanks to its rarity and prestige.
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But the most expensive land ever is something you would never expect.
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France.
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Owned all this land in 1803, and the United States wanted a little piece of it.
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So they went over to France with 10 million dollars and said, Can we buy a little piece of your land?
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France's leader and conqueror of Europe, Napoleon, was like, How about you pay me 15 million?
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For the whole thing.
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Y-yes?
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The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States at the cost of 4 cents per acre.
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This land today is worth thousands per acre, making it widely considered the single greatest land purchase in history.
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As long as you don't ask the people originally living there.
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But the Louisiana Purchase wasn't the most expensive in history.
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There was a piece of land that cost way more than the entire American Midwest, and it's this.
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This plot of land with a parking lot that cost 3 billion dollars.
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Why did this parking lot cost more than a fifth of the United States?
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Well back then, the Louisiana Purchase was a gamble on an uncharted frontier.
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This modern-day plot of land in the center of one of
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the most valuable financial districts on earth where the government artificially restricts the land supply was just a much safer investment.
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Land is valued for its potential, but the houses we put on top of the land are somehow even more expensive.
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In 2019, a finance guy spent $240 million on a high-altitude hollow brick in New York City that he doesn't even live in.
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All these buildings are half empty
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because the rich people buying them are just treating them as investments
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If they actually needed a place to stay they would just do what the richest guy in India did
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and spend two billion dollars Erecting their own personal monument
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that has a dark secret This is Antilia the most expensive
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private residence in the world valued today at 4.6 billion It
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has a 168 car garage three helipads a snow room
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and the entire thing was built on an orphanage And if you're wondering where the orphans went, the house also has 600 servants.
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There are investments, there are status symbols, but the most expensive house ever is the hardest to truly value.
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Its purchase price?
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21,000 pounds in 1761.
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When King George III bought Buckingham House, it was just a little shack for him to store his wife.
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But after a few hundred years of renovations and millions in state funding, it became a 775 room palace.
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Its value is estimated at 4.9 billion pounds, but this is just a guess based on its prime location and historical significance.
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To find something more valuable than any house, we just need to scale up to the most impressive and disastrous structures in the world.
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Megaprojects The US Interstate Highway System is the most expensive megaproject in history, costing an inflation adjusted $634 billion.
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But it was worth it.
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For every $1 of that cost, it's returned $6 in economic output.
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This project had a clear problem, a clear plan, and a clear result.
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Pretty straightforward.
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In 2021, Saudi Arabia started building a 110-mile line-shaped city made out of Empire State building tall glass mirrors.
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It was supposed to cost $500 billion and be done by 2030.
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But now the date is maybe 2080, and the cost is maybe 8.8 trillion.
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The line will be the most expensive megaproject ever, if it actually gets built. If.
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45 Mount Everest's above all of this is the International Space Station, the most expensive single object ever built by humans.
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But its cost is the least impressive thing about it.
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See legendary megaprojects like the pyramids represent what one civilization could do.
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The ISS represents what every civilization together could do.
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It took hundreds of thousands of experts from all over the world to manufacture parts
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that fit together perfectly when assembled in an empty void that would kill a human in 90 seconds.
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This is the greatest masterpiece ever built by humans, and it shows what can be accomplished when the world comes together.
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But it's way more costly when the world comes apart.
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War is pretty expensive.
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The American Civil War cost so much that to fund it, the government had to invent paper money and the federal income tax.
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God damn it!
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World War I cost so much that Germany was still paying it off until 2010, and World War II was the most expensive conflict in history.
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The full global cost of this war has never been calculated, but it involved every major power devoting a majority of their entire economy to destruction.
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By the end of the war, 70 million were dead, a majority being civilians, and most of the involved countries were in shambles.
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Military spending as a percentage of GDP has never come close to World War 2 level since, and if it ever does, we probably won't be aware.
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War is pretty expensive.
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World War 2 military spending was 25 trillion in today's dollars, but the cost of its destruction is unknown.
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All the things in this video have value for different reasons, but the most expensive thing ever is the most unusual.
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Every single particle has an antiparticle with an opposite charge.
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When they touch, they annihilate and release energy.
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A single gram of antimatter could release more energy than three Hiroshima bombs.
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Bananas.
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Every 75 minutes, an atom in a banana decays, producing one single particle of antimatter.
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But the particle is so small that if you had one banana for every human that has ever existed,
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you would have to wait 97 times the age of the universe to produce one gram of antimatter.
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But that still wouldn't work, because the banana antimatter particles only exist for 125 picoseconds, which is one billionth of a blink.
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The only way to make a meaningful amount of antimatter is
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by firing tiny particles at almost the speed of light into a metal rod, then catching the debris in a vacuum.
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There's currently only one facility that does this, and in its entire existence, it's made less than 10 billionths of a gram of antimatter,
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which would make enough energy to power a light bulb for 4 hours.
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Antimatter could be the most efficient energy source ever, and studying it could answer questions about how the universe was formed.
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But it's so difficult to make that NASA estimates one gram would cost 62.5 trillion.
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But if we ever somehow managed to get a gram of antimatter, wouldn't the most expensive thing be whoever owns the antimatter?
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Which would probably be a country, maybe the United States, which is already worth 180 trillion.
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But then, the Earth is worth 5 quadrillion.
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And now that we're in space, there are asteroids floating around with quintillions worth of gold and platinum, and the sun is made of gas worth 30 no-nillion.
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The universe is filled with an infinite amount of wealth, all of which we got for free.
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このレッスンの語彙とスピーキングのポイント
このB2レベルのスピーキングレッスンは、動画「What's The Most Expensive Thing Ever?」を教材にしています。 繰り返し出てくる語は次のとおりです：expensive, cost, land, antimatter, billion。 この動画には、シャドーイング用の文が106文、単語が1526語あります。 音声の長さは9:28です。 話す速さは1分あたり約161語で、日常会話に近い自然なペースです。 単語の84%は英語の頻出3,000語に含まれます。残りは練習の前に確認しておきましょう。
この動画の重要語彙
動画の中で特に難しい単語15語を、発音と意味つきで紹介します。
| 単語 | 発音 | 意味 |
|---|---|---|
| antimatter 名詞 | /ˈæn.tiˌmæt.ɚ/ | 反物質 |
| gram 名詞 | /ˈɡɹæm/ | グラム |
| particle 名詞 | /ˈpɑɹtək(ə)l/ | 粒子 |
| banana 名詞 | /bəˈnænə/ | バナナ, 甘蕉 |
| assemble 動詞 | /əˈsɛm.bəl/ | 集める, 組み立てる |
| acre 名詞 | /ˈeɪ.kɚ/ | エーカー |
| civilization 名詞 | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | 文明 |
| annihilate 動詞 | /əˈnaɪ.ə.leɪt/ | 撲滅する, 殲滅する |
| antiparticle 名詞 | /ˈæntiˌpɑ(ɹ)tɪkəl/ | 反粒子 |
| colourless 形容詞 | /ˈkʌlə(ɹ).ləs/ | 無色の |
| conqueror 名詞 | /ˈkɑŋˌkɚ.ɚ/ | 征服者 |
| orphanage 名詞 | /ˈɔː(ɹ)fənɪd͡ʒ/ | 孤児院 |
| shambles 名詞 | /ˈʃæmbəlz/ | 落花狼藉 |
| devote 動詞 | /dɪˈvəʊt/ | 凝る |
| stroll 動詞 | /stɹoʊl/ | 散歩する |
動画に出てくる句動詞
| 単語 | 意味 |
|---|---|
| boil down 動詞 | 煮詰める |
| find out 動詞 | 見出す, 調べる |
この動画の文法
話し手がよく使っている文型を、動画の実際の表現とともに紹介します。
| 文型 | 動画での表現 |
|---|---|
| 条件文 if + 節, will/would + 動詞 — 条件とその結果 | if it ever does, we probably won't be |
| 受動態 be + 過去分詞 — 誰がするかより、何が起きるかに焦点を当てる | is valued · was found · is estimated |
| 現在完了形 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去の出来事が今も関係している | has never been calculated · has never come · has ever existed |
| 関係詞節 who / which + 節 — 人や物について情報を加える | guy who found · picoseconds, which is · States, which is |
注意したい発音
話し手はyou're, wouldn't, they'reなど、短縮形や弱形を15回使っています。聞こえたとおりの短い形で発音しましょう。
- 「sh」と「zh」の音: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, imperfection /ɪmpɚˈfɛkʃən/, shambles /ˈʃæmbəlz/, renovation /ɹɛnəˈveɪʃən/, accomplish /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ/
- 長い単語（アクセントの位置に注意）: antimatter /ˈæn.tiˌmæt.ɚ/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, annihilate /əˈnaɪ.ə.leɪt/, antiparticle /ˈæntiˌpɑ(ɹ)tɪkəl/, imperfection /ɪmpɚˈfɛkʃən/
日本語話者が苦手な音：
- /r/ と /l/ の区別 — /l/ は舌先を歯茎につけ、/r/ はどこにもつけない: particle /ˈpɑɹtək(ə)l/, antiparticle /ˈæntiˌpɑ(ɹ)tɪkəl/, colourless /ˈkʌlə(ɹ).ləs/, stroll /stɹoʊl/, literal /ˈlɪt(ə)ɹəl/
- /v/ — /b/ にならないように、上の歯を下唇に当てる: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, devote /dɪˈvəʊt/, invent /ɪnˈvɛnt/, renovation /ɹɛnəˈveɪʃən/, void /vɔɪd/
- /f/ — 「フ」ではなく、上の歯と下唇で出す: imperfection /ɪmpɚˈfɛkʃən/, orphanage /ˈɔː(ɹ)fənɪd͡ʒ/, orphan /ˈɔɹfən/, straightforward /ˌstɹeɪtˈfɔː(ɹ)wə(ɹ)d/, float /fləʊt/
この動画での練習方法
- まず声を出さずに動画を最後まで聞き、知らない単語をメモします。
- まず0.75倍速で一文ずつシャドーイングし、慣れてきたら通常の速度に戻します。
- 自分の声を録音して元の音声と比べます。antimatter, gram, particleなどの単語に特に注意しましょう。
シャドーイングとは？英語上達に効果的な理由
シャドーイング（Shadowing）は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的：ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影（shadow）」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。