跟读练习: This Disease is Deadlier Than The Plague - 通过视频学习英语口语
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Hi, Steve here.
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Today, I'm moving over as the voice of Kurzgesagt for something really special.
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Our dearest friend John Green would like to tell you a story that's very close to his heart.
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So, let's hear it from him directly.
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Hey John.
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Hey Steve, thanks so much.
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Let's dive right in.
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The White Death has haunted humanity like no other disease, following us for thousands, maybe millions of years.
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It was there when we tamed fire, invented culture, and ventured out of Africa to conquer the world.
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In 1815, it caused one in four deaths in Britain.
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In the last 200 years, it killed a billion people, way more than all wars and natural disasters combined.
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Even today, it's the infectious disease with the highest kill count, but do Do you even know what we are talking about?
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We're talking about Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis, or TB, our original archenemy.
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Right now, one in four humans alive are infected with the bacterium.
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You may be one of them.
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So how is it possible that we never hear about TB?
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Well, the White Death is the perfect human predator.
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infectious, but very quiet most of the time, careful not to murder recklessly, perfectly adapted to your immune system,
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and just physically incredibly hard to kill.
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What exactly makes it so powerful?
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The perfect human predator.
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Usually the bacterium enters your body through the airways and sets up home in the lungs,
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a giant living cave system defended by billions of macrophages, powerful guard cells that hunt and kill intruders.
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The TB bug is quickly attacked and devoured alive.
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Unfortunately, this is its plan.
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The White Death is the worst kind of parasite, an immune system parasite.
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Macrophages grab their victims, trap them inside a phagosome, and flood it with acid that rips them to pieces.
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TB evolved a thick, waxy coat that makes it completely immune to those acids.
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Worse, it captures and modifies the macrophage to be a perfect host.
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Like a tiny vampire, the parasite slowly consumes the cell.
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TB then replicates extremely slowly.
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Other microbes that make you sick multiply up to 60 times faster, exploding their numbers before the immune system can eradicate them.
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But the White Death is so well adapted to you, it has already won by being here.
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No need to rush things.
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When its host cell is sucked dry and dies, the bacteria infect new macrophages.
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Although these bacteria are stealthy, the decaying corpses they leave behind do activate a proper immune response.
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Your body knows something is up and mobilizes its forces.
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But once again, this is part of the plan.
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Macrophages and many other immune cells try to kill the bacteria, but that thick cell wall makes them a formidable fortress and resistant to many attacks.
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And it infects its attackers in the process.
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So when your cells can't kill them, they do the next best thing, keep the parasites from escaping.
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A granuloma is formed, a sort of white blob.
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In the center is a core of infected and dead macrophages, a pleasant home and food for the bacterium.
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Other immune cells surround this sphere of death to contain it, creating a safe space where TB can sit for years.
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Worse, it is perfectly protected from medication and releases chemicals that make it hard for your heavy immune weapons to be activated.
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This is the stalemate version of tuberculosis.
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The infection is sleeping, and the bacteria is doing its thing.
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This is going on right now in up to 2 billion people.
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But in 1 in 10 of them, the disease will become active.
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Active tuberculosis is an emergency, but again, a slow one.
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If your immune system can't contain the infection anymore, granulomas burst.
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Suddenly your lungs are filled with macrophage corpses and fresh bacteria.
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Your immune system panics and overreacts.
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Hordes of soldiers leave your blood and rush to the infected areas.
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They order inflammation and fluids flood into your lungs, but unfortunately, your lungs are not made to be a battlefield.
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In their panic, your immune cells don't care.
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They're running around with flamethrowers trying to purge the infection, but causing terrible damage.
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As fluids and dead tissue amass, it becomes difficult to breathe, and you begin coughing hard, sometimes even coughing up blood.
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And again, this is part of the plan, because now you spread millions of bacteria catching rides in tiny droplets.
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You burn a high fever and lose weight as your body is severely stressed.
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You turn into a ghost version of yourself.
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Even if you are treated, this phase can last weeks to months and is very serious.
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Insufficiently treated, TB will over months, years, or even decades slowly overtake your body.
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Especially for children or those already weakened, this can be too much and the disease wins the war.
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The bacterium spreads to other organs, lung function breaks down, and the patient dies.
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1.3 million people died this way in 2023 alone.
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The worst kind of problem.
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Tuberculosis is the worst kind of problem, a slow one.
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Instead of killing millions quickly, like COVID, scaring a panicked humanity into frantic action, TB is a smoldering fire,
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killing too slowly for our short attention span.
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The symptoms are often mild for many months, so you don't feel in danger.
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Tuberculosis doesn't want to kill you, of course, it wants to stay alive and spread.
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And to do this, it exploits human behavior.
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The people you are most likely to infect are your family and friends, co-workers, or neighbors, the people you spend a lot of time with.
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When COVID brought the world to a halt, the average patient infected two to three people.
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An active TB patient infects five to fifteen people in a year.
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Most people catch it via breathing tiny droplets from a cough or sneeze.
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This is especially common in crowded, poorly ventilated housing or workplaces, which is why TB exploded during the Industrial Revolution.
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And indeed, wherever we see new, unplanned, and overcrowded urbanization from Lagos to St. Petersburg, we tend to see a rise of the White Death alongside it.
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Today, most cases of active tuberculosis, the version that spreads the disease further, can be cured with a four-month regimen of four different antibiotics.
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But if that's the case, how is this still the deadliest infectious disease on Earth?
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Between 1940 and 1965, humans developed several drugs to fight TB, finally making it curable.
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It was a true achievement of human ingenuity, but we didn't do a great job of distributing the cure.
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While tuberculosis is almost extinct in much of Europe, the US, and the Middle East, it is still a very real threat in most of the world.
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TB kills people primarily in Africa, South America, and Asia.
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In 2022, two-thirds of all TB cases were in just six countries,
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India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Nigeria.
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Almost half of all tuberculosis deaths happened in Southeast Asia.
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But as it is a slow problem like climate change, it was ignored instead of fought aggressively,
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which enabled more and more strains of TB to develop antibiotic resistance.
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Which is a problem because we kinda stopped making new drugs.
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In the first 25 years of the antibiotic era, we developed eight different classes of drugs to treat TB.
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And then, in the 47 years between 1965 and 2012, we developed none.
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Developing new drugs is extremely expensive, and there was no concentrated effort to eradicate TB, and there simply wasn't enough profit incentive.
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There is a vaccine, but it's over a hundred years old and not particularly effective.
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But beginning in 2012, we did finally develop two new classes of drugs that treat TB, and We may finally be at an inflection point again,
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as better vaccines are on the horizon.
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Companies that made COVID tests also developed a quick test for TB.
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So we now have a real opportunity to push this disease back until it dies forever.
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But only if we get enough people to know about TB, like you do now, and to care about it.
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A century ago, in the United States,
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there were almost as many hospital beds for TB patients as for treating all other illnesses and injuries combined.
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The White Death was a leading cause of death in the US, and then one day, it just wasn't anymore.
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And we can do this again.
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4,000 people died of tuberculosis yesterday.
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And we simply don't have to accept a world where
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so many of us still die of a disease we know how to cure.
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The White Death has been with us for millions of years.
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It is time to continue our journey without it.
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If you want to learn more about tuberculosis and the folks working to fight it through clinical trials and care delivery, and also learn how you can help,
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check out the organization Partners in Health at pih.org slash programs slash tuberculosis.
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We've put a link in the description for you.
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Also if this wasn't enough TB for you, there's a crash course lecture on the history and presence of tuberculosis.
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We'll include a link to that as well.
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Steve, I'll see you on fri- nope, this isn't Vlogbrothers.
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Soon.
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I'll see you soon, Steve.
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Thank you.
📺 同频道
✨ 推荐视频
背景与上下文
在这段视频中,Steve与John Green进行了一次富有深度的对话,讲述了一种被称为“白色死亡”的疾病——结核病(TB)。这段视频不仅向我们介绍了结核病的历史及其对人类健康的影响,同时也提醒我们现代社会中对这一疾病的忽视。了解这些背景对于提高英语发音和参与相关对话是非常有帮助的。
日常交流的五个短语
- Haunted humanity(困扰人类)- 这是一个形象的表达方式,传递出疾病对人类的长期影响。
- Perfect human predator(完美的人类捕食者)- 描述一些疾病如何有效感染人类,适合用在关于健康或科学的讨论中。
- Caught a ride(搭乘)- 用于形容细菌通过飞沫传播,非常适合日常语境中的描述。
- Granuloma is formed(形成肉芽肿)- 了解这类专业术语可以帮助提升医学相关对话的能力。
- Antibiotic resistance(抗生素耐药性)- 这个术语在现代医学中非常重要,适用于许多讨论健康的场合。
逐步影子跟读指南
为了提升你的英语口语练习效果,建议使用以下步骤进行影子跟读:
- 选择片段:从视频中选择一些你觉得具有挑战性的片段,特别是包含以上短语的句子。
- 初次观看:完整观看一次视频,了解整体内容,并记录发音和语调。
- 慢速跟读:将视频的播放速度调慢,逐句跟读,注意模仿每个单词的发音和语调。也可以使用“看YouTube学英语”的方法,配合视频字幕进行练习。
- 逐字影子:播放视频时暂停,尝试在没有字幕的情况下逐字跟读,同样是为了提高英语发音。
- 录音对比:录下你的声音,与原视频进行对比,找出发音的差异,持续调整与修正。
这个影子跟读技巧非常适合想要提高雅思口语练习的学习者,通过跟随原声的节奏和语调,可以大幅提升英语口语能力。
什么是跟读法?
跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧,最初开发用于专业口译员的培训,并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大:您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同,跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性,语调,节奏,连读,听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。






























