跟讀練習: Why Is Blue So Rare In Nature? - 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。
83 句
如果句子過短或過長，請點選 Edit 進行調整。
1
There are no blue tigers.
2
No blue bats, no blue squirrels, or blue dogs.
3
Even blue whales aren’t that blue.
4
Animals come in pretty much every color, but blue seems to be the rarest.
5
What’s cool, though, is when we do find a blue animal, they’re awesome looking.
6
Nature doesn’t do halfway with blue.
7
To understand why this is, we’re gonna journey through evolution, chemistry, and some very cool physics.
8
But, first we’re gonna need to understand why animals are any color at all, and to do that, we need to go look at some butterflies… because butterflies are awesome… and if you don’t think so, you’re wrong This is Bob Robbins.
9
He’s curator of Lepidoptera at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.
10
Butterflies ARE awesome.
11
Make no mistake about it.
12
They’re a group of moths that evolved to be active during the day, and if you’re active during the day, you have an advantage: You can use light to communicate.
13
You probably realize this, but out of all insects, butterflies display the brightest and most detailed patterns.
14
And there’s a good reason for that: The colors in butterfly wings deliver messages, like “I’m toxic”, or “I’m a male and this is my territory”, but not all butterfly colors are created equal.
15
If we zoom way in on a butterfly wing, we see the colors come from tiny scales.
16
It’s actually how moths and butterflies get their scientific name.
17
Oranges, reds, yellows browns…those scales all contain pigments, organic molecules that absorb every color except what we see.
18
Black scales absorb all colors.
19
Animals, from butterflies to birds to you and me, don’t make these pigments from scratch, they’re made from ingredients in our diet.
20
You might know this thanks to flamingos: They’re born gray, but turn pink thanks to pigments called carotenoids in crustaceans they eat.
21
So when it comes to these colors: You are what you eat.
22
But not so for blue.
23
Blue is If you move the camera, you can see that the color changes as you move the camera.
24
It does. It’s like a hologram thing.
25
This is because there’s no blue pigment in these butterflies Wait… so they’re blue, but they’re not really blue?
26
That’s correct!
27
Yes. You’re lying to me butterflies!
28
These are Blue Morpho butterflies, maybe the prettiest butterflies of all.
29
I mean… they did make it the butterfly emoji.
30
The blue color isn’t from a pigment.
31
The blue comes from the shape of the wing scale itself, and when I learned how this works, it kinda blew my mind.
32
If we zoom way in on a blue wing scale, we see these little ridges.
33
If we slice across the scale, and look closer, we see those ridges are shaped like tiny Christmas trees.
34
The arrangement of the branches is what gives Morpho wings their blue color.
35
When light comes in, some bounces off the top surface.
36
But some light passes into the layer and reflects off the bottom surface.
37
For most colors of light, waves reflecting from the top and bottom will be out of phase, they’ll be canceled out, and that light is removed.
38
But blue light has just the right wavelength: the reflected light waves are in sync, and that color makes it to our eye.
39
This hall of mirrors only lets blue light escape.
40
There’s even a pigment at the base that absorbs stray red and green light to make the blue even more pure.
41
That’s how we get this awesome iridescent blue.
42
The microscopic structure of the wing itself.
43
All of this happens because of the way light bends when it moves from air into another material.
44
So if we fill all those tiny gaps with something other than air, like alcohol, the blue disappears.
45
Technically, this “changes the index of refraction”, but in plain English that means blue light is no longer bent the right way.
46
The microscopic light filter is broken.
47
Until the alcohol evaporates.
48
And the color returns.
49
But these butterflies live in the rainforest.
50
You think they’d lose their color any time they got wet, right?
51
Well watch this.
52
These wing scales are made of a material that’s naturally water-resistant.
53
What about this blue jay feather?
54
If we look through it, the color completely disappears.
55
No blue pigment.
56
Each feather bristle contains light-scattering microscopic beads, spaced so everything but blue light is canceled out.
57
Unlike the highly-ordered structures we find in butterfly wings, these feather structures are more messy, like a foam, so instead of changing as we move, the color’s more even from every direction.
58
Peacock tail feathers?
59
Again it’s the shape of the feather, not pigment.
60
But the light reflecting structures here are more ordered, like a crystal, so it’s brighter from certain angles.
61
There’s even a monkey–WHOA let’s keep this PG!!–even that color is made by the adding and subtracting of light waves thanks to structures in the skin… not pigment.
62
And yes, even your blue eyes, are colored by structures, not pigments.
63
Outside of the ocean, almost exclusively, the bluest living things make their colors with microscopic structures, and each one’s a little different.
64
No vertebrate, not a single bird or mammal or reptile that we know of, makes a blue pigment on its body.
65
In fact, there’s only one known butterfly that has cracked the code for making a true blue pigment.
66
Blue as a pigment in nature is incredibly rare.
67
But there’s one exception so far that we know about, and these are over here called the olivewings.
68
They have evolved a blue pigment.
69
They’re not very common and we don’t know much about them, and I don’t know of any other blue pigment.
70
That’s a really special butterfly.
71
Why is almost all of nature’s blue made from structures and not pigments like everything else?
72
I’ve asked this question to several scientists that study color, and here’s their best theory so far: At some point way back in time, birds and butterflies evolved the ability to see blue light.
73
But they hadn’t yet evolved a way to paint their bodies that color.
74
But if they could, it’d be like going from early Beatles to Sgt.
75
Pepper’s Beatles.
76
it meant new opportunities for communicating and survival.
77
Creating some blue pigment–out of the blue–would have required inventing new chemistry, and there was no way to just add that recipe to their genes.
78
It was much easier for evolution to change the shape of their bodies, ever so slightly, at the most microscopic level, and create blue using physics instead.
79
They solved a biology problem with engineering.
80
What I love about this is these colors have fascinated curious people for hundreds of years.
81
After looking at peacock feathers through one of the first microscopes back in the 1600’s Robert Hooke wrote: “these colours are onely fantastical ones” Even Isaac Newton noticed there was something unusual about these blues, and scientists have been studying it ever since.
82
Not only because the science is interesting, but because it’s beautiful.
83
Thanks for watching, and stay curious.
同頻道
B218
Why don't you remember being a baby?
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B29
How Habits Can Change Your Life (and Your Brain)
American AccentBusiness EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
Scientists Finally Figured Out What Love Is For
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B24
Mars Used to Be Blue... Then Something Happened
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C14
The Unbelievable Science of How We Read
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C19
The Strange Science of Why We Dream
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B25 Weird Involuntary Behaviors Explained!
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2Evolution FAILS in the Human Body
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1How Feathered Dinosaurs Accidentally Invented Flight (We Tested It!)
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
FOR YOU
推薦影片
B130
37 句
SEtalk: Why Children Ask Why
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
77 句
Color in Nature – Quiz Edition
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
34 句
Echolocation: How Dolphins and Bats See with Sound
American AccentBritish AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
337 句
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
115 句
5 Gross Gifts Animals Give Their Mates
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B15
91 句
Why is the sky blue?
American AccentTeensDaily ConversationHigh School Students
B21
172 句
Why The Entire Ocean Is Terrified of Sperm Whales
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
62 句
A mind-blowing explanation of symmetry | Frank Wilczek for Big Think
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
34 句
The American Bullfrog
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
34 句
You're Not Hallucinating. That's Just Squid Skin. | Deep Look
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
B23
122 句
Colorful eyeshadow Do's and Don'ts
TeensDaily ConversationHigh School Students
本課的詞彙與口語要點
這段影片共有 83 個句子、1184 個單詞可供跟讀。 講話部分時長為 7:31。 說話人語速自然，每分鐘約 158 個詞，接近日常對話。 只有 80% 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 個不太常見的單詞，附發音和釋義：
- butterfly /ˈbʌ.tə(ɹ).flaɪ/ (名詞) — хўте, 蝶仔. A flying insect of the order Lepidoptera, distinguished from moths by their diurnal activity and generally brighter colouring.
- feather /ˈfɛðə/ (名詞) — 羽毛, 羽. A branching, hair-like structure that grows on the bodies of birds, used for flight, swimming, protection and display.
- reflect /ɹɪˈflɛkt/ (動詞) — 反映, 反射. To bend back (light, etc.) from a surface.
- absorb /æbˈsɔɹb/ (動詞) — 吸收. To include so that it no longer has separate existence; to overwhelm; to cause to disappear as if by swallowing up; to incorporate; to assimilate; to take in…
- curious /ˈkjʊɹ.i.əs/ (形容詞) — 好奇, 有好奇心. Tending to ask questions, or to want to explore or investigate; inquisitive; (with a negative connotation) nosy, prying.
- evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/ (名詞) — 演變 /演變, 變遷 /變遷. A manoeuvre of troops or ships.
- physics /ˈfɪz.ɪks/ (名詞) — 物理學 /物理學. The branch of science concerned with the study of the properties and interactions of space, time, matter and energy.
- chemistry /ˈkɛm.ɪ.stɹi/ (名詞) — 化學 /化學. The branch of natural science that deals with the composition and constitution of substances and the changes that they undergo as a consequence of alterations…
- scientist /ˈsaɪəntəst/ (名詞) — 科學家 /科學家. One whose activities make use of the scientific method to answer questions regarding the measurable universe. A scientist may be involved in original research…
- cancel /ˈkæn.sl̩/ (動詞) — 劃, 勾. To cross out something with lines etc.
- bend /bɛnd/ (動詞) — 彎 /彎. To cause (something) to change its shape into a curve, by physical force, chemical action, or any other means.
- ridge /ɹɪd͡ʒ/ (名詞) — 背脊. The back of any animal; especially the upper or projecting part of the back of a quadruped.
- disappear /dɪsəˈpɪɹ/ (動詞) — 消失. To vanish.
- gap /ɡæp/ (名詞) — 間隙 /間隙. An opening in anything, made by breaking or parting.
- mirror /ˈmiɹɚ/ (名詞) — җинзы, 鏡 /鏡. A smooth surface, usually made of glass with reflective material painted on the underside, that reflects light so as to give an image of what is in front of it.
影片中出現的短語動詞
- come from (動詞) — 來自 /來自. To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
- look at (動詞) — 觀察 /觀察, 看. To observe or watch.
需要注意的發音
說話人用了 29 次縮略和弱讀形式，例如 they're, don't, you're。請按聽到的簡短形式來說。
- “th” 音: feather /ˈfɛðə/, moth /mɔθ/, wavelength /ˈweɪvˌlɛŋ(k)θ/
- “sh” 和 “zh” 音: evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/, exception /əkˈsɛpʃən/, crustacean /kɹʌsˈteɪʃən/, refraction /ɹəˈfɹækʃən/
- 長單詞——注意重音位置: evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, communicate /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪt/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/
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 butterfly, feather, reflect 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 | are created · are shaped · be canceled |
| 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 | has cracked · have evolved · I've asked |
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。