跟读练习: How worried should we be about microplastics in our homes? Norman Swan investigates | 7.30 - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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We're used to the idea that what looks and feels like fresh air can contain all sorts of dangers.
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We're used to the idea that what looks and feels like fresh air can contain all sorts of dangers.
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But the latest pollutants to concern us are actually in your home and mine.
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They're microplastics, tiny fragments of plastic that are less than five millimeters in size.
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We've come to one Sydney home to find out what lurks inside.
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Hi Eleanor.
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How are you?
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I'm great.
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I'm great.
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Would you like to come in?
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Yeah, I'll take my shoes off.
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I've come to the home of Eleanor Saxon Mills,
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a busy mum to one-year-old Sunny and four-year-old Ines.
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Cup of tea?
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I would love a cup of tea.
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Yeah, black?
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Yeah, just black, thanks.
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Thanks so much.
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That's great.
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So what have you heard about microplastics before we came along?
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I've heard only a little bit that it's everywhere,
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especially in our food, and that there's huge amounts in us,
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which is kind of a little bit terrifying.
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But it is everywhere.
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Yeah.
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You know, I thought tea was safer.
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What can be safer than tea and tea bags?
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And then I discovered that even tea bags have microplastics in them.
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You just can't escape it.
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Yeah, that's crazy.
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Do you want to show me around the kitchen?
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We'll see what you've got.
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Yeah, yeah, go right ahead.
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So let's look at the fridge.
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Yeah.
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Let's show Dr. Norman all of our plastic in here.
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I mean, it's very hard to buy stuff that's not wrapped in plastic.
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Yeah, everything.
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All sorts of plastic here,
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no glass, just plastic bottles, plastic containers.
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OK, show me your secret stash.
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Yes, the Tupperware.
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That's up here.
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Let's lift you up here.
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Here we go, the stash.
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This is all the plates in here and plastic.
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Do you put plastic in the dishwasher?
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Yes.
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Am I allowed to?
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Yeah, there should be plastic in there now.
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Oh, that's where it is, yes.
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You know what they're saying about plastic and dishwashers these days.
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Please don't tell me.
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So what was here beforehand?
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It was just grass and a hill's hoist and that was it.
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Eleanor knows and does more than most when it comes to the environment.
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She grows her own veggies and raises her own chooks.
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They give us a couple of eggs a day, which is awesome.
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So she's certainly keen to find out how to minimise potential microplastic danger inside the house.
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What are microplastics?
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Microplastics are those small bits of plastic.
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They either come from fragments of larger plastics,
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or they're intentionally added as microplastics to products.
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But they can get very small indeed, can they?
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They can.
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We're now finding plastics down to the nanoscale,
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so plastics just fragment over time.
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They don't biodegrade within our lifetime.
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They'll just get smaller and smaller under UV light or through action, fragments come off.
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How do microplastics actually get inside your body?
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Breathing it in, drinking and eating are the main sources.
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The finer particles tend to settle in the bottom of the lungs and they move through the bloodstream,
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across the membrane, because they're fine enough.
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Similarly, with what food we eat,
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you know, those smaller particles will move across the stomach wall and into the bloodstream,
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and then they're distributed around the body.
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The third major source is applying it on our skin.
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Rather than assume where the highest exposure to microplastics are in Eleanor's house,
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We're actually going to measure them over a few weeks.
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We can't measure what microplastics Elner's family is eating,
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but these petri dishes will catch the plastic fibres and particles they might breathe in from the air.
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We'll have the results back in a couple of weeks.
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It's hard to imagine a world without plastic.
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It's in the clothes we wear,
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the carpets we walk on,
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the pans we use for cooking,
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and the packaging in the supermarket.
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Plastic production has grown more than 200-fold in the last 75 years and is showing no signs of slowing down globally.
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There are around 16,000 chemicals in plastics,
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and of the few which have been tested for safety,
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a significant proportion shows signs of being harmful.
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We did have a look in the kitchen,
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but not in the cupboard.
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Dr Scott Wilson has picked up the petri dishes from Eleanor's home and is analysing them in the lab.
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Really in the home, it's the fibres.
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It's 90% of what we're seeing are fibres like this on the screen.
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And just at this fibre level,
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can that have an effect on the body?
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Yeah, I mean, we're breathing it in,
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and so it can get trapped in the lungs.
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The larger particles get expelled as we cough it out,
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but the smaller particles get caught and reside there and can move across into the bloodstream.
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He's also taken a sample from inside Eleanor's vacuum cleaner.
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It picks up lots of plastics.
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As you can see, there's some larger fragments there,
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some smaller fragments, but they're heavier particles that just fall on the ground.
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And is there any evidence that that sort of material is what we're ingesting?
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Potentially, particularly with kids and babies crawling around on the ground.
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The potential for human harm is significant.
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It's not just the thousands of chemicals that have not been tested for safety.
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There are contaminants and additives,
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some of which have already been banned.
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And then there's nanoplastics, which can get into the brain, perhaps causing inflammation.
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The reality with microplastics is that we're flying blind, relying on animal studies.
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If you put microplastics in the water with fish or with some invertebrates,
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they'll change their growth behaviour and or die depending on the concentration.
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There was a study done where they put microplastics in the water supply of mice
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and the ones that had been exposed to microplastics were behaving as if they had early onset dementia.
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I've come back to give Eleanor the results from the Petri dishes.
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Where do you think was highest?
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I actually think it was Sunny's bedroom
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because we had it right next to where the nappies are
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and every time I took a nappy out
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or got his clothes out I just thought there's got to be a lot of plastic floating around here.
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So it was your bedroom?
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Oh really?
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Yeah.
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Oh, I would put that right down the bottom of the list.
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I'm very surprised.
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Second was the bathroom.
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Okay.
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Yeah.
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And then in here and the play area.
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Right.
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And the kitchen, you know,
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parts of the kitchen were high,
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but the pantry was really low.
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Right.
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Okay.
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Gosh, that really surprises me.
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Yeah.
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I don't think we have a lot of plastic sort of stuff in our room,
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but maybe it's the clothes You don't,
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but it's fibres, you see.
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So what you get is the synthetic fibre off the carpet,
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off the clothes and towels and what have you.
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So it's kind of different.
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You're thinking about the kitchen,
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but in fact what you're getting there are the fibres.
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And the same as in the bathroom,
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but also in the bathroom you've got complications with cosmetics and things like that.
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And as for the play area,
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it was heaviest not so much in fibres but plastic fragments.
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So do I have to chuck out all the kids' toys or the plastic?
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How worried should I be?
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A lot of parents are worried about this.
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I'm not the expert.
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They are progressively, some of them,
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changing to wooden toys and so on.
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What our resident expert Scott says is as long as you're vacuuming regularly,
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whether it's the carpet or your wooden floor,
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floor then you're getting rid of the plastic particles from the environment and that's probably the best thing you can do.
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It's easy to get panicked about all this so it's important to remember that the evidence for harm is not solid,
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well at least not yet.
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The question is how long do you wait for proof?
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So the experts say you should do what you can.
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So here's what I've done.
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I no longer wrap food in plastic wrap.
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Certainly got rid of plastic chopping boards you just don't know what's breaking off there.
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Plastic utensils which crumble in the heat.
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Nonstick cookware has gone from my household,
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gets scratched, you don't know what's coming off there.
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Trying very hard to get rid of plastic containers.
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Certainly don't put plastic in the microwave and don't put them in the dishwasher and replacing it with glass.
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Anytime you use a high wash cycle
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or high temperatures you are basically going to be eroding like micro erosion off the surface of those plastics
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that you've got in there so you're actually creating microplastics by putting them in your dishwasher.
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So have I scared you?
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A little bit.
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A little bit.
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So what people talk about a lot is that when you're changing curtains,
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renewing carpets, you look for natural fibres rather than synthetic mixes because that increases the flux of
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microplastics into your environment in general but those are slow processes
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and the interesting thing is that if everybody does that a little bit the market will change
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should be good and protect the health of people like sunny in the years to come yeah thanks norman
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关于这节课
在这节课中，学习者将重点练习与微塑料相关的英语表达和词汇。该视频中有许多关于微塑料的讨论，涉及家庭环境以及对健康的潜在影响。通过聆听与模仿视频中的对话，学习者将能够提高其英语发音并扩展与环境和污染相关的词汇量。此外，这也为学习者提供了一个上下文丰富的背景，便于他们在实际生活中进行更自然的英语交流。
关键词汇与短语
- 微塑料 (microplastics) - 小于五毫米的塑料碎片，广泛存在于环境中。
- 包装 (wrapped) - 物品通常用塑料材料包裹的状态。
- 饮食 (food) - 食物，尤其是与微塑料相关的成分。
- 家庭 (home) - 我们日常生活的环境。
- 茶袋 (tea bags) - 决定茶的味道的包装，可能含有微塑料。
- 洗碗机 (dishwasher) - 用于清洗餐具和厨具的电器。
- 恐惧 (terrifying) - 描述微塑料对健康潜在影响的感受。
- 储藏 (stash) - 家庭中存放物品的地方，常用于描述密封的食品容器。
练习技巧
在进行英语影子跟读时，观察视频中说话者的语速和语调。建议您在观看视频时暂停，重复说出每句话。注意发音时的停顿和重音，这将帮助您提高英语发音。尤其是在讨论微塑料的部分，尽量模仿说话者的语气，以增强您的 shadow speech 技能。可以使用 shadowspeaks 的方法，通过对比您自己的发音与视频中的原声来提升自己的英语口语水平。此外，定期回顾相关的词汇，让它们在您日常对话中变得更加自然。通过 看YouTube学英语，结合实际内容，您能够以一种有趣的方式加快学习进程。
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