跟讀練習: What Dinosaurs ACTUALLY Looked Like? - 通過影片學習英語口語

選擇練習模式

每種模式都會開啟全屏練習室。

101 句

如果句子過短或過長，請點選 Edit 進行調整。

The past is a vast and mysterious land that begins at the Big Bang and ends in the present, expanding with each passing moment.

It's the home of everything that came before, the key to understanding our present.

Here, we find the most amazing creatures to ever roam our planet.

Hundreds of millions of species so diverse that our imagination cannot do them justice.

Unfortunately, the past carefully guards its secrets.

While there are a lot of things about the past we know, there are way more things we know we don't know.

And worse, there are probably even more things we don't even know that we don't know about.

Think of the wonder of life.

We now recognize about 1.5 million eukaryotic species, but there may be as many as 10 million alive today.

And although we are adding some 15,000 new species to our collective knowledge each year, the vast majority of life on Earth is still undiscovered.

This is just what is around today.

An estimated 4 billion species emerged on our planet in past eons.

but at least 99% of them died out way before humans spoke the first words.

The vast majority of all the different species that ever existed are

so utterly deleted that they have become part of the unknown unknown part of the past, lost to us forever.

Or are they?

Could we use science and imagination to glimpse a shadow of the unreachable past?

Let's start with what we do know.

To learn about creatures of the past we need fossils.

Any sort of remains preserved from past geological ages.

Bones or shells, impressions or imprints, things preserved in amber.

The totality of all fossils on Earth is called the fossil record, and it's the most important window on the past we'll ever have.

For a dead animal to fossilize, a number of things must go just right.

the right environment, timing and conditions.

And then the fossil needs to survive for millions

or hundreds of millions of years and then get back to the surface and then be discovered before natural processes dissolve it.

So it is kind of a miracle that we have what we have and know what we know.

Take the dinosaurs, since they were one of the largest

and most successful groups of animals for some 165 million years and are also a lot of fun to animate.

What were they really like and what are we missing?

In the last 200 years, we've found tens of thousands of fossils from over 1,000 dinosaur species.

Lately, we've entered a golden era of discovery, and about 50 new dinosaur species are discovered each year,

expanding what we know and what we know that we don't know about them, which is amazing.

But it also makes us aware of all the things lost to the past forever.

Imagine if we took all the animals

that lived in the last 50 million years and randomly chose 10,000 individuals from 1,000 species to fossilize.

Think about all the things that would be missed or that seemed too weird to be true.

Like the giraffe, a yellow animal with brown patterns

that looks like a horse and an antelope had a baby with a long neck and two tiny hairy horns.

How many dinosaur giraffes were there?

Animals so weird and selected for ecological niches so specific that evolution molded their bodies very absurdly.

Today they might seem made up to us.

We know a lot of species are lost forever just because of the environment they lived in.

For example, lush jungles basically prevent fossilization as the chances that an animal will be buried here are low.

Countless scavengers of all sizes break down freshly deceased animals extremely quickly, and the soil is often so acidic that bones are dissolved.

And so fossils of dinosaurs from jungles are practically non-existent.

Today, half of all known species live in the few remaining rainforests that only cover 2% of Earth's land mass.

Millions of years ago, when dinosaurs roamed Earth, jungles covered much more of the planet.

So, besides some insects and other small animals trapped in amber, there should be millions of species that emerged and vanished without leaving any trace.

Trapped deep inside the unknown unknown.

But just in general, biology trips us up.

Look at your body.

It's mainly squishy, gooey, soft stuff, which does not preserve well.

What remains the longest are the crystallized parts of your bones, and so most dinosaur fossils are bones or teeth,

usually fragments, not entire skeletons.

This means that almost all boneless or shell-less animals are practically wiped from the fossil record.

If we take a look at the stunning diversity of weird animals like worms, jellyfish, and slugs alive today, we can only speculate what we are missing.

Although thankfully, many mostly soft and gooey species also left us an incredible diversity of shells

that tell us an amazing amount about our past, so at least we have that.

Still, when we think about all the boneless species that may have existed in the last half billion years, even our best attempt at imagining them falls short.

But it's not like reimagining something based on its bones is straightforward, and so the way we envisage what dinosaurs actually looked like has changed a lot in the last few years.

In the past, many illustrations had a bony, minimalistic look, with a toothy grin to signify fierceness and danger.

But if we draw today's animals in a similar way based on their skeletons, just for the fun of it, we get the most bizarre creatures.

Elephants, swans, and baboons that look like monsters right out of nightmares.

So, similar to animals today, we should imagine dinosaurs with much more soft tissue, fat bellies or chests, weird soft parts like skin flaps,

lips and gums, and just more pronounced features that would make them seem like much more pleasant fellows.

Some soft features actually leave distinctive traces on bones that we can look for in the skeletons of extinct animals,

which is where today's animals with similar features are really helpful.

It's a similar story with colors.

Because we know what the feathers of living birds look like, modern technology combined with the exceedingly rare fossils with preserved remains of fuzzy feathers

give us a glimpse of the real colors of extinct dinosaurs.

We know that tiny Sinosauroptoryx had a striped tail, and its tiny dino buddy Ancyonis huxley was white and black, with gorgeous red feathers around its head.

Still, for the vast majority of really any ancient extinct species, we have no real clue what color they were.

But we know what modern dinosaurs, birds, look like, and here we find the most amazing variety.

So some dinosaurs will have tried to blend into the background, while others might have fielded aggressive color schemes to attract mates or to appear dangerous.

Some might have had impressive decorations or colorful beaks.

Some may have been striped or patterned.

Similarly, we don't know that much about dinosaur behavior, although once again we can draw conclusions from existing animals.

For example, even apex predators like lions spend a lot of their time lying around

and cuddling and licking each other and playing and playing.

Why would dinosaurs be so different?

When we first found the skull of T-Rex with its mighty teeth and probably the strongest bite of any land animal ever, we imagined a fierce and stupid beast.

But modern scanning technology has revealed that T-Rex had a larger brain-to-body ratio than some earlier giant meat-eaters.

And it probably had very sharp hearing, vision, and a sense of smell, and was in all likelihood not a stupid animal.

So maybe T-Rex was a cuddly fellow

that spent a lot of time playing around or impressing potential mates when it was not hungry.

Likewise, while their horns and shields might have made Ceratopsids appear to be natural born fighters, they were probably much more than that.

Based on the behavior of modern animals and the complex dances some have to go through to mate, maybe their shields were amazingly colorful.

Maybe it danced for its mates like many birds do today.

How How intensely amazing these creatures must have been.

And what a loss it is to us that we don't get to experience them first hand.

What an even greater loss that there is so much we will never know about them and, even more tragic, all the absurd and beautiful beings that disappeared without a trace.

But such is life.

Time marches on without any concern for our feelings, and the past expands with every moment that passes.

wild animals alive today will in all likelihood not leave fossils behind and also just disappear forever.

We can do something about that though.

Instead of accelerating the extinction we are witnessing, we could become the guardians of life and preserve it where we find it.

If possible in the wild, if not then in museums, movies and in our minds.

Because as amazing as our imagination is and as fascinating to think about the animals that are part of the unknown unknown,

100

it is even better to witness them in the present.

101

The land that we actually inhabit, where we get to experience life as it happens.

下載應用

流利口語所需的一切

AI 發音評分逐句打分

音標練習掌握每個音

詞彙學習建立你的詞庫

詞彙遊戲邊玩邊學

掃碼

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

同頻道

FOR YOU

看YouTube學英語：從恐龍影片學影子跟讀

你是否曾邊看YouTube邊想「這麼有趣的內容，怎麼用來練英語？」這支關於恐龍真實樣貌的影片就是絕佳素材！它的語速適中，內容生動，既有科學知識又有想像力，非常適合練習雅思口語或影子跟讀。想像一下，當你能用流利的英語講述「化石形成的奇蹟」或「恐龍的未知物種」，是不是很有成就感？

必學實用短語&搭配

fossil record（化石記錄）：「The fossil record is our window to the past.」（化石記錄是我們窺視過去的視窗。）
golden era of discovery（發現的黃金時代）：「We're in a golden era of dinosaur discovery.」（我們正處於恐龍發現的黃金時代。）
ecological niches（生態位）：「Animals adapt to specific ecological niches.」（動物會適應特定的生態位。）
soft stuff（柔軟組織）：「Most of our body is soft stuff that doesn't fossilize.」（我們身體的大部分是不會形成化石的柔軟組織。）

你的影子跟讀挑戰（shadowspeak）

現在就開啟影片，找到「For a dead animal to fossilize...」這段（大約從化石形成條件開始），跟著做3步練習：1. 先聽2遍，注意語調和停頓；2. 開啟字幕，跟讀1遍，模仿語速；3. 關閉字幕，進行影子跟讀（英語影子跟讀），盡量同步。完成後，錄下自己的聲音對比，你會發現「fossilize」「scavengers」這些詞的發音變得更自然！這不僅能提升口語流利度，還能積累雅思口語素材。快試試吧，shadowspeak就是這麼簡單！

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	is still undiscovered · is called · be discovered
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 become · we've found · we've entered

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。

影子跟讀法: 閱讀完整分步指南 →

跟讀練習: What Dinosaurs ACTUALLY Looked Like? - 通過影片學習英語口語

選擇練習模式

下載應用

Queen Ant Clones Another Species

How Caffeine Works

Your Skeleton Is Electric

Your Brain Peaked at Birth

The Beginning of Everything -- The Big Bang

Could Humans Evolve Flight?

Would You Upload Your Mind?

Your Brain on Magic Mushrooms

You Will Only Like Half of This Video

Why Ebola Keeps Coming Back

What If You Never Slept?

Let’s Steal a New Moon

What Happens AFTER Nuclear War?

3 Reasons Why Nuclear Energy Is Awesome! 3/3

Nuclear Energy Explained: How does it work? 1/3

What Falling in Love Does to You

YOU Own the Moon. And Mars. And Venus.

What Is Life? Is Death Real?

How Antidepressants Work

We Won’t Explore the Galaxy...

Before We Became the Last Humans:The Lost Species That Once Shared Our World|Prehistoric Documentary

How Fossilization Works 🤔

What Actual Aliens Might Look Like

The Most Dangerous Woman in Science Says We Got the Dinosaur Extinction Totally Wrong

What if the world runs out of sand? | The Royal Society

We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe

The CRAZIEST Survival Methods Used by Ancient Humans During Ice Age

Fossils of a Giant Superpredator Found in Antarctica

What is Archaeology? (Explained in 2 Minutes)

Spending a Day on Earth 200 Million Years Ago

Every Dodo You’ve Ever Seen Is Probably Wrong. These Aren’t.

看YouTube學英語：從恐龍影片學影子跟讀

必學實用短語&搭配

你的影子跟讀挑戰（shadowspeak）

影片中的語法

什麼是跟讀法？