跟读练习: Unlimited Resources From Space – Asteroid Mining - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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Ah, casually watching a video on YouTube,
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Ah, casually watching a video on YouTube,
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on a computer more powerful than anything humanity could build a few decades ago.
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This progress and all the wonderful machines you take for granted are built on a few rare
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and precious materials with names like terbium, neodymium or tantalum.
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Getting these rare materials from the ground into your devices is ugly.
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The mining industry is responsible for air and water pollution and the destruction of entire landscapes.
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Dangerous chemicals like cyanide, sulfuric acid or chlorine are used to extract the resources,
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harming biodiversity, workers and locals.
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And rare resources are also political tools when countries restrict access to them to get their way.
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But what if we could replace the mining industry on Earth with a clean process that can't harm anyone?
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Well, we can.
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All we need to do is look up.
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Asteroids are millions of trillions of tons of rocks,
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metals and ice, leftovers from the cloud that became the planet 4.5 billion years ago.
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They can be as small as a meter or protoplanets the size of entire countries.
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Most of them are concentrated in the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt,
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while hundreds of thousands more do their own thing between the planets.
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As space travel is becoming more feasible,
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scientists and economists have begun looking at the resources found in these asteroids.
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Even relatively small metallic asteroids may contain trillions worth of industrial and precious metals like platinum.
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And bigger asteroids like 16 Psyche could contain enough iron nickel to cover the world's metal needs for millions of years.
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At current market prices, the rare raw materials alone would be worth quadrillions of dollars.
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Well, not really, but technically.
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For example, there are more than 20 million tons of gold in the ocean's water worth roughly 750 trillion US dollars,
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but filtering out the gold would be so expensive that you'd lose money selling it.
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Right now, asteroid mining has exactly this problem.
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It's too expensive to replace mining on Earth.
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Billions of dollars worth of valuable resources in space are worthless if it costs trillions to get them.
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What makes it so hard?
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The principles behind mining an asteroid are simple.
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The basic idea is to choose an asteroid,
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move it to a place where it's easy to process,
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and then take it apart to turn into useful products.
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Unfortunately, all of this collides with fundamental problems humans have yet to solve.
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Going to space is expensive.
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It costs thousands of dollars in rocket fuel for each kilogram just to reach a low Earth orbit.
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Going further out into deep space costs thousands more.
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We need cheaper space travel to make asteroid mining profitable.
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One solution is to switch from classical rockets to electric spaceships.
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We already use electrical rocket engines for many of the space probes on science missions.
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In principle, we only need to build bigger ones.
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While electrical engines are not powerful enough to fly to space,
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they require only a tiny amount of fuel to go very far once they're in space.
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This means we don't need to spend a lot of money on fuel,
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only to transport fuel into space.
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This doesn't solve the whole cost problem,
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but it makes it easier to start our first mission.
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Now that we have an electric asteroid mining spaceship,
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we need to find the right asteroid and get it there.
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We've already successfully visited asteroids with space probes and even collected samples.
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Still, to make it easier and cheaper,
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Our first targets will probably be near-Earth asteroids.
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Asteroids that orbit, well, near Earth.
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After a few months of travel,
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our spaceship finally arrives at our asteroid.
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Weirdly formed, littered with small impact craters,
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it hasn't changed much for billions of years.
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The first thing that needs to be done is to secure the asteroid and stop it from spinning.
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There are multiple ways to do this,
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like vaporizing material with a laser or stopping the rotation with thrusters.
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Once we have a stable asteroid, we need to wait.
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Orbital mechanics are complicated, but if you push something in the right direction at exactly the right moment,
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you can move very big things with very little force.
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So, we wait for exactly the right moment.
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Our ship fires its thrusters and nudges the asteroid into a trajectory that takes it near our moon.
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The moon is useful because we can borrow its gravitational pull to put the asteroid in a stable orbit around Earth,
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which saves even more fuel.
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Again, the trip takes months,
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but all the time since our ship was launched has not been wasted.
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The first space mining and processing equipment has been installed in orbit and is now carefully moving towards the asteroid.
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The processor works very differently than on Earth.
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Giant mirrors focus sunlight and heat up asteroid rock to boil out the gases.
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Grinders break up the dried rocks into gravel and dust,
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and centrifuges separate dents from light elements.
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Even if we only extract 0.01% of the asteroid's mass in precious metals,
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this is still several times more than you'd get from the same amount of ore on the ground.
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But what now?
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How do we get our precious metals safely back to ground?
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There are a few ways,
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like loading it into reusable rockets that return to Earth from space.
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Or if our processor contains 3D printers,
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we can print a faster and cheaper delivery system.
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Heat-shielded capsules filled with gas bubbles.
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These can just be dropped into the oceans where ships tow them away.
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This could be the starting point of humanity's first real steps towards colonizing the solar system.
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As our infrastructure and experience grows,
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our missions get more and more sophisticated.
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Parts and fuel produced on asteroids don't have to be launched from Earth at all.
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The first mining operation makes the second one easier and so on.
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While the space industry grows and precious materials become cheaper,
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eventually we could stop mining on Earth.
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Even the idea of toxic mining down here might become something weird and anachronistic,
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like having an open fire in your living room.
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Landscapes ravaged by pollution will heal,
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while the technological wonders we're used to get cheaper and less toxic to make.
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None of this is science fiction.
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We don't need fancy materials or new physics to make asteroid mining happen.
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We could start building this future today.
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All we need is an initial push.
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关于本课
在本课中，学习者将通过观看和分析一个关于小行星采矿的视频，实践他们的英语听说能力。视频讨论了太空资源的潜力、采矿行业的挑战以及可持续开发的未来。通过模仿视频中的语音和演讲者的语调，学习者将增强他们的发音、流利度和自信心。这是一种有效的雅思口语练习方法，适合使用“看YouTube学英语”的学习者。
关键词汇与短语
- 小行星 (Asteroid) - 太空中一种岩石或金属的天体。
- 珍贵金属 (Precious metals) - 比如铂金等高价值的金属。
- 采矿行业 (Mining industry) - 从地球中提取资源的行业。
- 电动飞船 (Electric spaceship) - 使用电动发动机的航天器。
- 轨道力学 (Orbital mechanics) - 研究天体运动的科学。
- 提取 (Extract) - 从某物中获取资源。
- 重力 (Gravity) - 吸引物体的自然力。
- 可持续 (Sustainable) - 不对环境造成损害的。
练习技巧
在学习时，模仿（shadowing）是一种非常有效的方式。观看视频时，请注意以下几点：
- 慢动作回放：如果视频的语速对你来说太快，可以将视频速度调低（如0.75倍速），更好地跟上讲者语调和发音。
- 分段学习：尝试将视频分成几个部分进行学习，先听一小段，然后暂停来重复和模仿。这样您可以集中于每个句子的发音和音调。
- 注意情感和语气：讲者在谈论重要话题时可能会提高音调或改变语速，模仿他们的情感表达能增强您的语言自然度。
- 纪录和回放：录下您的模仿，之后与视频中的原声相比，分析自己的发音和语调，有针对性地进行改进。
这些练习不仅能提高您的口语技能，还可以帮助您在雅思口语考试中更加自信。通过“shadowspeak”和“shadow speech”，您可以提高英语的流利度和表达能力。
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。