出国留学首选一诺留学

　　听力原文:

　　Space travel

　　太空旅行

　　Starchip enterprise

　　造星际芯片的企业

　　Flying to the stars means thinking both very big andvery small

　　探索太空意味着可以用很大的飞行器也可以用很小的飞行器

　　Power to the stars SPACEX and Blue Origin, twoAmerican space companies, can now return theirrockets to Earth and reuse them, which promises to reduce launch costs. But what if, instead ofbringing the boosters back to Earth, you could build one that never leaves it? Your propulsionsystem could be arbitrarily large and powerful, since you wouldn’t have to lift it; yourspacecraft, no longer needing engines or fuel, could be stripped down to its barest essentials.

　　重点词汇：

　　1 starship 星际飞船;星舰

　　2 origin 起源;源头;起因

　　3 booster助推火箭

　　4 propulsion 推动力;推进

　　5 arbitrary 任意的;武断的;随心所欲的

　　6 strip 拆卸;拆开

　　7 bare 仅够的;最基本的;最简单的(最高级barest)

　　8 promises 使很可能;预示

　　听力原文:

　　Such a split sounds impractical, but beams of light could make it work. One of thecounterintuitive implications of the theory of relativity is that, although light has no mass, it stillhas momentum. Thus when light bounces off a mirror it exerts a tiny pressure; if the light isbright enough, and the mirror light enough, the mirror will start moving. In the 1970s RobertForward, a physicist, showed that very powerful lasers could push a spacecraft with a reflecting“sail” to a tenth the speed of light or more. Moving thousands of times faster than rockets can,such probes might reach planets round other stars in decades, rather than in hundreds ofthousands of years. But the incredible technical challenges of such a scheme meant thatForward’s ideas were never developed in any practical way.

　　重点词汇：

　　1 split 分歧;分裂;分离

　　2 impractical 不明智的;不现实的

　　3 beam 光线;(电波的)波束;(粒子的)束

　　4 counterintuitive违反直觉的

　　5 implication 含意;暗指

　　6 mass 质量

　　7 momentum 推进力;动力;势头; 冲力;动量

　　8 bounces off 弹回;弹开

　　9 bounce (使)弹起，弹跳;反射

　　10 exert 运用;行使;施加

　　11 probe (不载人)航天探测器，宇宙探测航天器

　　12 scheme 计划;方案;体系;体制

　　听力原文:

　　That could be about to change. On April 12th, the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flightinto space, Yuri Milner, a Russian physicist and billionaire investor, announced a plan todevelop the technologies such interstellar flight would need. Mr. Milner—who was named afterGagarin—is devoting himself to the challenges of deep space. Last year he said he would spend$100m to bring recent advances in computing to bear on the search for extraterrestrialintelligence (SETI).

　　重点词汇：

　　1 interstellar 星际的

　　2 bear on 和(某事物)有关;涉及

　　3 extraterrestrial (故事中的)天外来客，外星人，外星生物

　　听力原文:

　　When he first looked at laser-powered interstellar travel, Mr. Milner says, the idea triggeredboth his scepticism as a physicist and his cynicism as a businessman. But he has concludedthat, as in the case of SETI, technological capacities developed for other reasons will be a boon.Given current trends in microelectronics, nanotechnology and lasers, he thinks that within ageneration attempts at interstellar flight might be no more costly than today’s mostambitious scientific programmes. So he is going to spend $100m on a “BreakthroughStarshot” research programme aimed at making that dream possible.

　　重点词汇：

　　1 trigger 发动;引起;触发

　　2 scepticism 怀疑态度;怀疑主义

　　3 cynic 认为人皆自私的人;愤世嫉俗者

　　4 cynicism认为世人皆自私的观念;愤世嫉俗;(对成功或人的真善的)怀疑

　　5 boon 非常有用的东西;益处

　　6 microelectronics 微电子学

　　7 nanotechnology纳米技术

　　8 interstellar 星际的

　　9 ambitious 有野心的;有雄心的

　　听力原文:

　　The basic problem with using light to drive a spacecraft is low efficiency. A gigawatt laserbeam—1GW being a billion watts, roughly the power output of a large nuclear plant—provides abit less than seven newtons of thrust: a force equivalent to that required to lift a glass ofbeer. For such thimblefuls of thrust to amount to anything much, they have to be applied to avery light spacecraft indeed: ideally one with a mass not much larger than a gram.

　　重点词汇：

　　1 gigawatt十亿瓦特

　　2 newton 牛顿(力的单位 )

　　3 thrust(发动机推动飞机、火箭等的)推力，驱动力

　　4 thimbleful 少量液体(尤指酒)

　　5 gram 克

　　更多热点资讯欢迎关注：

　　新浪官方微博：@北京诚品一诺教育咨询

　　http://weibo.com/yinuoedu

　　微信订阅号：留学圈 (微信帐号：yinuoliuxue )