☊ 碧瓏司の→ßeℒongŚ

👯 MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：
http://static.iyuba.com/sounds/minutes/1037.mp3

👯 中英文稿：
Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I’m Neil…
大家好，歡迎收聽六分鐘英語，我是尼爾。
… And I’m Alice. My chair feels [audibly shifts about in her chair] uncomfortable today. How does yours feel?
我是愛麗絲。今天我的椅子坐起來很不舒服。你的怎麼樣？
Um… mine is fine - very comfortable, thank you.
我的椅子很好，很舒服，謝謝。
Well, it would be nice if you offered to give me your chair, Neil.
如果你能把你的椅子給我坐就更好了，尼爾。
What? No chance. Well, I would be uncomfortable then, wouldn’t I?
什麼？不可能。那我坐起來也不舒服。

🗽矛盾修辭，讓你的口語瞬間出彩🗽

並不是只有作家擅用各種修辭手法，普通人也可以輕鬆掌握。簡單的兩個修飾小詞，也許會碰撞出不一樣的矛盾火花。

1. Big baby 行事幼稚的成年人
雖然外形是大人樣，但行事作風卻如小baby一般幼稚，用Big baby（巨嬰）形容這樣的人再恰當不過了。
例句：
The teacher told James not to be such a big baby when he complained about having too much homework.
詹姆斯抱怨作業太多時，老師批評了他，讓他不要像小孩似的不成熟。
2. Act naturally 表現得自然一點
“表現（act）”就是要去表演、擺姿態，但同時又要naturally（自然地）——某些特殊情況下，我們可能不得不這麼做。
例句：
When you meet your new boss, just act naturally.
見到新老闆以後，你要表現的自然一點。
3. Organised mess 混亂中的條理
混亂中會有條理嗎？答案是肯定的。在製造這個混亂的那個人眼中，這個混亂可能就是有條理的。

🚹保持自己的節奏🚹
Who is setting your standards for you?
A true story has it that one elder man decided to jog around the local high school football field. As he huffed and puffed along, the team was in practice. The players soon started running sprints up and down the field. The man told himself, “I’ll just keep running until they quit.”
So he ran. And they ran. And he ran some more. And they kept running. And he kept running until he could finally run no more. He stopped in exhaustion. One of the players, equally exhausted, approached him and said, “Boy, I’m glad you finally stopped. Coach told us we had to keep running as long as the old guy was jogging!” He was watching them. They were watching him. He was letting them set his standard. They allowed him to set theirs.
My question is this: Are you keeping pace with somebody else? Are you allowing other people to set your standards for you? What about your standards, or principles, for moral behavior? Or guidelines for what kind of attitudes you want? Do you keep pace with those around you, or do you decide yourself just how you will live your life? The truth is... only you are qualified to determine what your standards will be.
Set your standards too low, and you’ll know only discontent. But set high standards and you can live an immeasurably full and worthwhile life. For only when you reach for the best that is within yourself, will you experience great living.
Who is setting your standards?
🌄是誰來為你制定你的生活標準呢? 🌄

🎁 MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：
http://online1.tingclass.net/voas…/2016/20160504sa_earth.mp3

🎁 中英文稿：
The floor of Yosemite Valley is littered with piles of rocks that crumbled off the park’s iconic cliffs. These rockfalls happen all the time, becauseYosemite’s granite walls are riddled with cracks produced by geologic stress. Scientists know the rockfalls can be triggered by things like earthquakes, rainfall, and freezing and thawing ice. But many falls occur without an obvious cause. Now researchers think that heat may be the culprit.
Yosemite Valley山谷的地面散落著成堆的從公園內特有的懸崖峭壁上崩裂下的岩石。這些散落岩石之事時有發生，因為Yosemite山谷上的花崗岩峭壁因為地質上的壓力造成了許多斷裂的空洞。科學家們知道這些岩石散落的原因可以是地震，暴雨以及凍融的冰河。但是，多數情況下岩石墜落的毫無徵兆。現在研究人員認為熱能也許是罪魁禍首。
“We noticed that there had been a bunch of rockfalls that were happening in the summertime, on particularly hot days.” Brian Collins, a research civil engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey. “And we noticed when we looked at the timing that they were happening in the afternoon, when we thought the temperatures were at their hottest.”
我們已注意到，當在夏季的時候，會有許多的岩石墜落，特別是很熱的那幾天。這是Brian Collins，美參與國地理調查的城市工程研究人員。我們還注意到，發生岩石墜落的事件往往是下午，我們過去認為此時是一天中最熱的一段時間。
Collins and Greg Stock, Yosemite’s park geologist, wanted to know if small rock movements, induced by changing temperatures, might weaken cracks and contribute to rock falls. So the researchers—who are both climbers—found a suitable fracture near the base of a 500-meter-tall cliff and installed instruments called crack meters, which monitored the width of the crack over time.
Collins 和 Greg Stock, Yosemite公園中的地理學家，他們希望知道是否由於溫度的變化引發的小型岩石移動事件，會使山體的裂縫變得脆弱，從而最後導致岩石墜落。所以這些研究人員們——他們還都是登山愛好者——在接近500米高的山崖底部發現了的 一塊小片地區，並且安裝了被稱為裂縫儀的設備，用於檢測不同時間下岩石裂縫的寬度。
The devices revealed that the crack grew almost a centimeter wider during the warmest part of the day. It shrank again when temperatures cooled off, for instance, at night and during the winter. But overall, the scientists found that the average width of the fracture grew over the course of a summer and over the entire three and a half-year study period, bringing the crack closer to breaking.
應用這些設備顯示出，裂縫在一天中最溫暖的時段裡幾乎被拓寬了一釐米。當溫度再次變低後它又收縮回去了，比如，在晚間和冬季時段。但是，總體上講，科學家們發現斷裂處的平均寬度是在整個夏季是增加的，並且在他們整個3.5年的研究期間也是增加的，這些都造成了裂縫增加岩石趨於斷裂。
“We think that what happened was that every cycle — as the rock goes back and forth and back and forth — you’re getting to a part that we call subcritical crack growth. And that means that the crack where the rock is attached to the cliff is actually fracturing at a microscopic level. And so if you do that over the course of a year, then eventually you’re going to do some permanent damage to those points of attachment.” The study is in the journal Nature Geoscience.
我們認為發生了迴圈——隨著岩石來來回回滾動——你正處一個我們稱之為臨界裂縫增長的階段。這就意味著，岩石連接著山崖的裂縫部分實際上正在以微小的幅度斷裂著。所以，如果你在一年中的這個階段這麼做，那麼最後，你就在對那些連接點進行永久性的破壞。該研究結果已經發表在《自然地理科學》雜誌上。

👯 MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：
http://static.iyuba.com/sounds/minutes/68.mp3

👯 中英文稿：
Hello, I’m Finn, welcome to 6 Minute English. With me in the studio today is Neil.
大家好，我是Finn。歡迎收聽本期BBC六分鐘英語。今天我的搭檔是Neil。
Hi there, Finn.
你好，Finn。
Hello Neil. Today we have a royal story about Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge – or as she is still often known – Kate Middleton.
你好，Neil。今天我們要講述的是皇家故事，主角和劍橋公爵夫人凱薩琳，即眾所周知的凱特•米德爾頓有關。
Yes, Prince William’s wife has been in the news this week after a well-known British novelist compared her to a “shop-window mannequin with no personality of her own”.
沒錯，自英國一位著名小說家把她比作“毫無個性的櫥窗模特”後，威廉王子的妻子便出現在了本周新聞中。
Yes, now the novelist in question is a woman called Hilary Mantel. She has won a number of awards for her books set during the rule of Henry VIII - he’s an English king from the Tudor period.
是的，上述小說家是一個女人，叫做Hilary Mantel。她曾因以亨利八世（都鐸時期的一位英國國王）統治為時代背景的書籍而贏得了多項獎項。

工作狀態不佳？都怪二氧化碳

The air in your office is probably damaging your health
☀You might think it's your colleagues or the pressures of work that's getting you down at the office, but new research suggests it could well be the air you're breathing instead. Scientists in the US have found that the concentration of carbon dioxide inside the confined spaces we use every day could be high enough to damage our health.
你也許會認為是你的同事或者是工作壓力讓你在辦公室裡萎靡不振，但是新的研究說明可能只是辦公室裡的空氣在作祟。美國的科學家發現我們每天所處的密閉空間中的高濃度二氧化碳會損害我們的健康。
☀Of course, it's well established that high levels of CO2 are dangerous, not just for human beings but for the planet as a whole, but the new research raises questions about carbon dioxide concentrations that were previously considered harmless.
當然，地球人都知道二氧化碳濃度過高是危險的，不僅對人是這樣，對地球也是如此。但是新的研究提出了這樣一個問題，那就是之前被人們當作人畜無害的辦公室二氧化碳的濃度問題。
☀The researchers gathered together 24 volunteers and tested their performance in three different simulated office environments. The key metric here is parts-per-million (ppm) of CO2: 5,000 ppm is currently considered the safe limit for an 8-hour workday, while 90,000 ppm will kill you within 5 minutes.
研究者們找來了24名志願者，把他們分在三個不同的模擬環境下測試他們的反應。這裡有個關鍵的標準，那就是對於8小時工作而言，5000 ppm的二氧化碳目前被人認是安全標準，如果是90000 ppm，那麼你5分鐘內就會死。
☀The team experimented with three different levels over the course of a standard 9-to-5 routine: 550 ppm (similar to outdoor levels), 945 ppm (what you would expect in most offices) and 1,400 ppm (denser but still plausible for many offices).
團隊按照標準的朝九晚五工作時間準備了三個不同級別的環境：550 ppm(跟室外的濃度差不多)，945 ppm(跟大多數辦公室差不多)，和1400 ppm(更濃，但是相當多的辦公室都是這樣)。
☀By giving the participants a cognitive test at the end of the day, they were able to spot a clear trend between CO2 levels and brain function. Those working with 945 ppm of carbon dioxide in the air averaged scores that were 15 percent lower than those in a 550 pm room. The unfortunate workers who had to handle levels of 1,440 ppm, meanwhile, performed 50 percent worse than the 550 ppm group. People's ability to use information, respond to a crisis and strategise were hit particularly hard, the researchers said.
在一天結束後，參與者要進行認知測驗。在測驗中，不同的二氧化碳濃度對大腦功能產生了明顯的影響。在二氧化碳濃度為945 ppm環境中工作的人的平均分比550 ppm的要低15%。那些不幸呼吸著1440 ppm的傢伙的平均分只有550 ppm的50%。研究者們說，尤其是使用資訊，應對危機和策略分析的能力被極大影響了。
Indoor concentrations are affected by many different factors: not just the ventilation installed inside the building and how many windows are open, but also the number of people in the room - because we breath out carbon dioxide - and even how much CO2 is floating around in the neighbouring streets.
有很多因素可以影響室內二氧化碳濃度：除了建築內的通風設備，打開的窗戶數量，還有房間裡的人數——因為我們都在呼出二氧化碳——甚至在周圍街區的二氧化碳含量。