跟讀練習: 1 7 What is Information - 通過影片學習英語口語
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77 句
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Sometimes it's useful to look at the roots of a word to figure out what it might mean.
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For example, the words will and volition both descend from the root to want in Indo-European languages.
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In many such languages you can still hear this meaning.
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In German I want is ich will, whereas in Italian it's volio.
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You can also hear the same root in our word voluntary, done of one's own free will because one wants to.
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We can also do this for the word information, which is related to the verb to inform.
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This descends directly from the roots in and formare in Latin,
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implying the formation of something new in the mind of the person who's being informed.
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It refers to teaching or instructing someone something new that they did not know before.
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In ordinary language, information is commonly thought of as a noun describing a thing
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that we can locate out there in the world whether a book in a library or a web page on a server.
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But a pattern of energy, whether a book or a web page or a compact disc,
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is only informative for an interpreter or decoder capable of decoding it.
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Change the system of interpretation from English to Mandarin
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and the pattern w-o-m-e-n goes from referring to female adults
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or women in English to meaning we or us in Chinese which is pronounced woman.
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Similarly
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if you read the word B-A-D assuming it to be an
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English word it means something very different from what a German would read bat to be
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because in German that word would be decoded to mean bath.
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So the informational content is not specified by pattern of input, but by how it is read out or interpreted.
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The meaning bad or bath is not inherent to the word BAD, but depends on how it is interpreted.
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Things like books and web pages
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and CDs should all be thought of as potential information whose potential to become information depends on whether
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and how they're decoded by decoders or interpreters that can take them as input to be decoded or interpreted.
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Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, did not think of information as a thing but as a process of informing.
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He simplified the idea to include a sender that sends an encoding
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or message along some communication channel to a receiver who decodes it like a speaker and listener in a phone conversation.
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If uncertainty is reduced from two possibilities, say zero or one, to one certainty,
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say one, say the answer is yes when we were not sure if the answer would be yes or no,
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that reduction in uncertainty from two possible outcomes to one actual outcome comprises one bit of information.
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So information is a process
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that involves a reduction in uncertainty for a receiver of inputs who gets informed by that increase in knowing.
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But Shannon's conception does not capture everything about information.
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For example, it misses out on meaning almost entirely.
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If the question I asked was, will you marry me, and the answer came back yes, I would be overjoyed, and if it came back no, I might be devastated.
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But if the question had been, do you like dogs, I might not actually care that much if the answer came back yes or no.
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meaning is central to what we live for.
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We don't want to hear yes when we ask someone to marry us because we just want a reduction in uncertainty.
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We want to hear yes because we want to be loved by the person we love
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and we want to spend the rest of our life together with them.
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Another thing
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that Shannon's possibility reduction conception of information seems to miss out on is its emphasis on acts of encoding and decoding.
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But we don't only decode or interpret encoded messages.
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Not everything is like a sentence that we decode.
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Some acts of interpretation happen in the absence of any act of encoding or sending at all.
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For example, a person can interpret a pile of rocks
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that just happened to lie in the shape of some religious symbol as a message from God.
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The pile of rocks might have been left there randomly by a glacier thousands of years ago just by chance, so lacks any objective message, intent, or meaning, but seeing
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that symbol in the pile of rocks might be very meaningful to the person who saw it as a message from God.
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So an encoder, or act of intentional encoding, is not necessary for information to come into existence through an act of decoding or interpretation.
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In our example, the person finds the random pile of rocks meaningful, so for him, it carries or conveys meaningful information, in this case for him,
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a message to him from God.
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Nor is a communication channel necessary
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because a receiver might decode internally generated hallucinations as a message from God or as ghosts or whatever.
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The crucial point is that information arises principally from acts of decoding inputs
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or interpreting signs or detecting patterns and energy that are received.
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No active encoding or sending is required.
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Note that information is fundamentally an epistemological construct.
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It's a change in the state of the knowledge of someone
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who comes to know something new who is informed by that information.
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The single best definition of information that I have ever heard was proposed by the biologist Gregory Bateson.
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He said, information is a difference that makes a difference.
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It's a detected difference that's meaningful to an animal given its needs and goals and desires.
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This definition of information is perhaps less mathematically precise than Shannon's, but it captures the centrality of meaning in the life and mind of an animal.
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It's not really so much about the reduction of possibilities to one's certainty that makes information biologically meaningful.
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There can be a huge reduction of possibility that's of no consequence, depending on what an animal is trying to do.
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If it's looking for food, it might not matter very much that the sky has just gone from cloudy to sunny.
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What matters is finding food.
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In comparison to a change in the whole sky, the appearance of a tiny little fly,
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say for a frog, might be more meaningful in terms of fulfilling its needs for food.
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Conversely, a tiny detected difference can have enormous implications depending on the context.
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For example, a detective might find a tiny piece of hair and on the basis of that, solve the case and identify the perpetrator.
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So for purposes of this course, we'll think of information not as a thing, but as a process of informing where some difference is detected by a detector,
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such as a neuron, and if it is a difference that makes a difference,
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that detector will cause other events to happen in a cascade of such acts of informing.
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Thank you.
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本課的詞彙與口語要點
這段影片共有 77 個句子、1165 個單詞可供跟讀。 講話部分時長為 7:13。 說話人語速自然，每分鐘約 161 個詞，接近日常對話。 只有 78% 的單詞屬於英語最常用的 3,000 詞，詞彙難度較高。
影片中的重點詞彙
影片中 15 個值得學習的單詞，附發音和釋義：
| 單詞 | 發音 | 釋義 |
|---|---|---|
| inform 動詞 | /ɪnˈfɔɹm/ | 通知, 告知 |
| reduction 名詞 | /ɹɪˈdʌk.ʃən/ | 還原 /還原, 還原作用 /還原作用 |
| meaningful 形容詞 | /ˈmiː.nɪŋ.fl̩/ | 有意義 /有意義 |
| input 名詞 | /ˈɪnpʊt/ | 輸入 /輸入 |
| depend 動詞 | /dɪˈpɛnd/ | 信任, 信賴 /信賴 |
| pile 名詞 | /paɪl/ | 堆 |
| detect 動詞 | /dɪˈtɛkt/ | 察覺 /察覺, 發覺 /發覺 |
| uncertainty 名詞 | /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/ | 不確定性 |
| interpretation 名詞 | /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/ | 翻譯 /翻譯 |
| receiver 名詞 | /ɹəˈsi.vɚ/ | 收件人 |
| refer 動詞 | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | 談到 /談到 |
| bath 名詞 | /bɑːθ/ | 浴缸, 浴盆 |
| capture 動詞 | /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/ | 捕獲 /捕獲, 佔領 /佔領 |
| marry 動詞 | /ˈmæɹi/ | 結婚 /結婚, 嫁 |
| symbol 名詞 | /ˈsɪmbəl/ | 符號 /符號 |
影片中出現的短語動詞
| 單詞 | 釋義 |
|---|---|
| come back 動詞 | 回來 /回來, 返回 |
| figure out 動詞 | 弄清楚 |
需要注意的發音
說話人用了 4 次縮略和弱讀形式，例如 don't, they're, we'll。請按聽到的簡短形式來說。
- “sh” 和 “zh” 音: reduction /ɹɪˈdʌk.ʃən/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/, conception /kənˈsɛpʃən/, crucial /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/
- 長單詞——注意重音位置: uncertainty /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, interpreter /ɪnˈtɝ.pɹɪ.tɚ/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, similarly /ˈsɪm.ə.lə.li/
如何用這段影片練習
- 先完整聽一遍影片，不要開口，記下不認識的單詞。
- 先用 0.75 倍速逐句跟讀，熟練之後再回到正常速度。
- 錄下自己的聲音並與原聲對比，特別注意 inform, reduction, meaningful 這類單詞。
影片中的語法
說話人最常用的結構，並附上影片中的原話：
| 結構 | 影片中的用法 |
|---|---|
| 被動語態 be + 過去分詞 — 強調發生了什麼，而不是誰做的 | being informed · is pronounced · would be decoded |
| 定語從句 who / which + 從句 — 補充說明人或事物 | information, which is · Chinese which is · person who saw |
| 現在完成時 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去發生但與現在仍有關聯的事 | have ever heard · has just gone |
什麼是跟讀法？
跟讀法 (Shadowing) 是一種有科學依據的語言學習技巧，最初開發用於專業口譯員的培訓，並由多語言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。這個方法簡單而強大：您在聽英語母語原聲的同時立即大聲重複——就像是一個延遲1-2秒緊跟說話者的影子。與被動聽力或語法練習不同，跟讀法強迫您的大腦和口腔肌肉同時處理並模模擬實的講話模式。研究表明它能顯著提高發音準確性，語調，節奏，連讀，聽力理解和口語流利度——使其成為雅思口語備考和真實英語交流最有效的方法之一。