跟讀練習: Why the US is Losing the Infrastructure War - 通過影片學習英語口語
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160 句
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25 years ago, America and China both started spending on a scale the world has never seen.
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The US built history's largest war machine.
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They spent trillions on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.
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Meanwhile, China spent trillions building their industrial capacity.
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Roads, railways, power grids, factories, ports, cities.
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China invested in the industries of their future.
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25 years later, the bill has come due.
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This video is going to examine the spending choices of each superpower and the implications of these, which I think will define the rest of the 21st century.
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Let's start with the United States and their spending on their post 9-11 wars.
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The story starts in October 2001 with America's invasion of Afghanistan.
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The United States military has begun strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
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Immediately, the spending started.
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Soldiers, bases, combat operations, aircraft, weapons, fuel, logistics, military contractors,
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rebuilding Afghanistan, supporting Afghan security services.
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The list goes on.
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The point is war isn't cheap.
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The fighting went on for 20 years, only ending in August 2021 with US and NATO forces withdrawing from the Afghan capital of Kabul.
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The comptroller of the US Department of Defense, these days the US Department of War, put the cost at $895 billion.
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That was only one theatre in the war on terror.
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The Iraq conflict started in March 2003 with the US invasion.
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By May 2003, George W.
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Bush was standing on an aircraft carrier declaring, In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.
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But the fighting and the spending continued for a lot longer.
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The war officially ended in 2011, but then the US were quickly drawn back into Iraq and Syria to fight Islamic State.
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By the end of 2024, the Department of Defense estimate that the US had spent $805 billion.
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Put it together, 895 billion in Afghanistan, 805 billion in Iraq and Syria,
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and so far the US has spent 1.7 trillion dollars fighting these wars.
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While the US was spending on wars, China spent a similar amount building out their transport infrastructure.
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In 2001, China was a massive country, largely disconnected.
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It had no meaningful high-speed rail or urban rail and had less than 12,000 kilometers of expressways.
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For comparison, the US in 2001 had 76,000 kilometers.
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But China started building.
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Starting with expressways, it spent $450 billion to go from 12,000 kilometers to more than 191,000 kilometers.
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For comparison, in that time, the US has gone from 76,000 to 78,000.
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Next up was massive spending on rail.
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Both urban rail in cities and then high-speed rail to connect cities.
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China spent $150 billion laying 11,000 kilometers of urban rail across 54 cities
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and then spent $1.05 trillion to lay 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail track.
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Today China has 70% of the world's high-speed rail infrastructure.
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I want to hold on high-speed rail for a moment
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because I think it really demonstrates the difference between China and America's ability to build big projects.
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Let's go back to 2008.
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That was the year that China opened its first dedicated high-speed rail line.
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It was also the year that California voters approved Proposition 1A,
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a proposal to build a high-speed rail line from San Francisco in the north to LA in the south.
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Well, fast forward to today, China has laid 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail track.
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California has laid zero.
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But that's not all.
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The scale of California's project has shrunk massively.
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Rather than connecting the north and the south of the state, it is now going to connect a small part of the Central Valley.
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Costs have blown out from $33 billion to an estimated $231 billion,
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and a project that was meant to be finished today is now expected to be finished in 2033.
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High-speed rail isn't the only mega-project that China's been able to build.
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There are three that illustrate the scale of China's ambition.
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The first, the South-North Water Transfer Project, is the largest water diversion project ever built.
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At a cost of $80 billion, China built 4,000 kilometres of canals to move 45 billion cubic
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metres of fresh water each year from the wetter south to the drier north of the country.
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To put that in perspective, that is the equivalent of 87 Sydney harbours being moved each year.
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The second mega project is the Hong Kong Zhuhai-Macau Bridge.
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At a cost of $20 billion, China built a 55-kilometre bridge that links Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China.
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To put its size in perspective, it is about 20 times the size of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.
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The third mega project that shows the scale of China's ambition is the Sheshuan-Tibet Railway.
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At a cost of 50 billion dollars, China is building more than a thousand kilometers of railway over the Himalayas.
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It is one of the most technically difficult railway projects ever can see.
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Add all of that together, the three mega projects, the expressway, the urban rail and the high-speed rail,
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and we get to roughly the equivalent of what the US have spent in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
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But here's the thing, the cost of war goes far beyond the battlefield.
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Brown University's Cost of War project has estimated the indirect Pentagon costs of these post 9-11 wars.
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These are the costs of actually administering and carrying out the wars back in America and around the world.
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It was to pay for things like higher personnel costs, recruitment and retention, additional equipment needed to fight these specific wars,
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and readiness spendings to ensure that bases around the world were ready to support the fighting in the Middle East.
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Brown University estimate that $884 billion was allocated to the Pentagon above its ordinary base budget to put America on a war footing.
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We can compare that indirect cost of war to China's investment to become an energy superpower.
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Over the past 25 years, it has become the world's largest producer of electricity and today produces one third of the world's total electricity.
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To put that in context, China generates more electricity than the US, European Union and India combined.
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This hasn't been by accident.
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This has been two decades worth of investment by the Chinese government.
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Let's start with renewable energy, where they've spent $170 billion to become a solar and wind superpower.
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China is now the largest manufacturer of solar panels
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and exports them around the world but they've also installed 2 billion solar panels at home.
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Turning to wind, China now accounts for more than half the world's offshore wind turbines,
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with more than 7,700 installed in the past two decades.
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Hydropower has also been a priority for the Chinese government.
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It's already home to the world's largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, which,
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fun fact, is so big that it actually slowed the Earth's rotation 0.06 microseconds.
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But China aren't settling for that.
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They are spending $137 billion to build a hydro dam three times the size of the Three Gorges Dam in Tibet.
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The Meidong Hydropower project will produce 300 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year,
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which is enough to power all of the UK.
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Turning to nuclear energy, China has spent $60 billion to build or start construction on 89 nuclear reactors since 2001.
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Now it's all good and well to generate a lot of electricity, but China has spent $250 billion to connect the country to the electricity grid.
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Today it is home to 35 of the 37 largest high voltage direct current power transmission systems in the world.
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So while the US spent hundreds of billions projecting power around the world, China spent hundreds of billions generating more power at home.
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The final line item in the cost of America's wars is long-term veteran care.
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These are more immediate costs like veterans, medical care, PTSD and psychological care,
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and disability payments, but also factors in the long decades of medical treatment as veterans grow older.
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This estimate comes from Harvard's Linda Bilnes working with Brown University's Cost of War project.
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They estimate it will be $2.2 trillion through 2050.
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That $2.2 trillion can be compared to what China has spent to make it an industrial and manufacturing superpower.
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Let's start with electric vehicles, where China spent $230 billion to take its car industry from non-existent
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or at least not a player on the world stage to the biggest player in the global car industry.
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In 2025 BYD took over Tesla as the largest maker of battery electric cars.
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China controls 69% of the global electric vehicle battery market.
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And you only need to read the annual reports of American
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or European car makers to see how much trouble they're in facing cheaper Chinese cars.
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China also spent $95 billion on building their semiconductor industry.
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Now this one's had mixed results.
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Chinese companies still rely on cutting-edge Nvidia chips.
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There's plenty of stories about the black market for these chips and how Chinese companies try to smuggle them into mainland China.
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But the semiconductor industry in China has been okay at producing less cutting-edge chips for more consumer or general applications.
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One area where China has excelled is 5G.
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They spent $173 billion building more 5G towers than the rest of the world combined.
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That hasn't just been to help Chinese people get better phone
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internet It's also to lay the groundwork for the embodied AI and robotics revolution that China expects to lead
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Things like AI connected robots walking the street,
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Internet of Things devices, all of that relies on consistent internet connections enabled by 5G.
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So after that 5G investment we've seen a recent announcement from the Chinese government for a hundred
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and thirty eight billion dollars to to supercharge their robotics and AI industry.
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China's ambition for the future of technology is really encapsulated in Shoyan,
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which was a 145 billion project to build a new city.
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Situated 100 kilometers south of Beijing, it is China's city of the future that they're building from scratch.
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But China's ambitions go far beyond their borders.
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They go far beyond the Earth.
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China has spent $40 billion becoming a power in space.
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This really started in 2011 with the Wolf Amendment, where US Congress banned Chinese astronauts from going on the International Space Station.
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So China said, screw you, we'll build one ourselves.
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They built their own space station.
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They also landed a rover on Mars and became the first country to collect samples from the far side of the moon.
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And finally, the biggest project that we've covered today, the most ambitious of China's development, is the Belt and Road Initiative.
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China has spent $1.4 trillion to fund more than a thousand projects across 150 countries to build modern trade routes for Chinese goods.
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They have tried to absolutely reshape global trade.
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These projects have been everything from an economic corridor down into Pakistan so Chinese goods can avoid the South China Sea,
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or a freight rail to Europe to find another way to get Chinese goods to the European market.
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So, let's bring it all together and tally it all up.
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Starting with America, all in, the US spent more than four trillion dollars on these post 9-11 wars.
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And that estimate could be low.
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Harvard's Linda Bilmes estimates between four and six trillion dollars,
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and Brown University's Cost of War project actually puts all the post 9-11 wars at eight trillion dollars.
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And America didn't get nothing for this investment.
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They built the largest and strongest army history has ever seen.
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They solidified their status as the world's superpower by having an army that no one could rival.
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And it's not like the US economy didn't grow in that time.
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An 11 trillion dollar economy in 2001 turned into a 32 trillion dollar economy today.
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Almost three times growth in the US.
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But that pales in comparison to China.
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China spent more than four trillion dollars building out electricity, transport and trade infrastructure and then supporting the industries to make the most of that infrastructure.
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It became the world's largest manufacturing economy, the largest exporter of goods, and the largest producer of electricity,
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steel, cars, batteries and solar technology.
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In 2001 GDP was 1.3 trillion, today China's GDP is 19 trillion, almost 15 times growth.
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So 25 years later, which country made the right decisions?
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It's easy to look at China and to see what they've built and think those were the best investments.
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But Americans would argue that their economy is still almost twice the size of China,
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They are home to the most cutting edge technology and they have a much larger military.
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It's too early to say which investments will pay off for China and what the long-term implications of America's spending will be.
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What we do know is the past 25 years has seen spending on a scale the world has never seen before.
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Both of these superpowers have been transformed and the way that they've transformed is going to define the competition between them
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for the rest of the 21st century.
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Let me know in the comments which country you think has made better spending decisions
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and which mega projects or investments I didn't cover in this video.
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Now I've got good news for you, if you've enjoyed this video, we've got plenty more like it on the Equitymates Explains YouTube channel, so go over and check it out.
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本課的詞彙與口語要點
這段影片共有 160 個句子、2174 個單詞可供跟讀。 講話部分時長為 15:12。 說話人語速平穩，每分鐘約 143 個詞，很適合跟讀。 84% 的單詞屬於英語最常用的 3,000 詞，其餘的詞建議在練習前先學一下。
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 |
|---|---|---|
| rail 名詞 | /ɹeɪ(ə)l/ | 軌 /軌, 鐵軌 /鐵軌 |
| estimate 名詞 | /ˈɛs.tɪ.mət/ | 估計 /估計 |
| connect 動詞 | /kəˈnɛkt/ | 連線 /連線 |
| infrastructure 名詞 | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | 基礎設施 /基礎設施 |
| railway 名詞 | /ˈɹeɪlˌweɪ/ | 鐵路 /鐵路, 鐵道 /鐵道 |
| ambition 名詞 | /æmˈbɪʃ.ən/ | 奢望, 抱負 /抱負 |
| chip 名詞 | /t͡ʃɪp/ | 籌碼 |
| veteran 名詞 | /ˈvɛ.tə.ɹən/ | 經驗豐富的人 /經驗豐富的人, 老手 |
| producer 名詞 | /pɹəˈdjuːsə/ | 製作者 /製作者 |
| define 動詞 | /dɪˈfaɪn/ | 界定 |
| rely 動詞 | /ɹɪˈlaɪ/ | 依賴 /依賴, 依靠 |
| invasion 名詞 | /ɪnˈveɪʒən/ | 侵佔, 佔領 /佔領 |
| maker 名詞 | /ˈmeɪk.ɚ/ | 製造者 /製造者 |
| grid 名詞 | /ɡɹɪd/ | 網格 /網格, 格子 |
| combine 動詞 | /kəmˈbaɪn/ | 結合 /結合, 組合 /組合 |
影片中出現的短語動詞
| 單詞 | 發音 | 釋義 |
|---|---|---|
| carry out 動詞 | /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ | 進行 /進行 |
| take over 動詞 | 接管, 接手 |
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 |
|---|---|
| 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 never seen · has come · has begun |
| 被動語態 be + 過去分詞 — 強調發生了什麼，而不是誰做的 | was meant · being moved · was allocated |
需要注意的發音
說話人用了 20 次縮略和弱讀形式，例如 they've, didn't, we've。請按聽到的簡短形式來說。
- “th” 音: thirty /ˈθɝti/, withdraw /wɪðˈdɹɔ/
- “sh” 和 “zh” 音: ambition /æmˈbɪʃ.ən/, invasion /ɪnˈveɪʒən/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, transmission /tɹænsˈmɪʃən/, rotation /ɹoʊˈteɪʃən/
- 長單詞——注意重音位置: electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, semiconductor /ˌsɛmikənˈdʌktə/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/
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。
- 用正常速度逐句跟讀，每句重複到你的節奏與說話人一致為止。
- 錄下自己的聲音並與原聲對比，特別注意 rail, estimate, connect 這類單詞。
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。