大学英语视听说4第八单文本

ALS-I

Scripts:

One recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes.

Now, it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain, which have been known for over 50 years. These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action. For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire. If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object. These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time. But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I’m looking at somebody else performing the same action. So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing because it’s as though this neuron is adopting the other person’s point of view. It’s almost as though it’s performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person’s action.

Now, what is the significance of these mirror neurons? For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation, because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person’s point of view. So, this is important for imitation and emulation. Well, why is that important? Well, let’s take a look at the next slide. So, how do you do imitation? Why is imitation important? Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation. Now, let’s look at culture, the phenomenon of human culture. If you go back in time about 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, let’s look at human evolution, it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago. And that is, there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else’s mind and interpret that person’s behavior. All of that happened relatively quickly. Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very, very quickly. And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people’s actions so that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out, this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations. So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it

1

can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. And then once it’s learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population. This is the basis. The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization.

Notes for Scripts:

1. The presentation is entitled “The Neurons that Shaped Civilization”. The speaker is Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neuroscientist. In this presentation, he outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.

2. Ramachandran is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He is the author of Phantoms in the Brain (the basis for a Nova special), A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness and The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in the Neuroscience of the Human Brain. 3. mirror neuron: 镜像神经元

motor command neuron: 运动神经元

ALS-II

Scripts

To sustain our progress, we were now looking for new ways to master nature, and to feed our ever expanding population. Sixteen thousand years ago, the earth’s temperature began to rise. In the Middle East, the river Tigris carved a path that flows thousands of miles to the Persian Gulf. With the Euphrates, they formed the border of a vast expanse of land, known as the Fertile Crescent.

As the climate grew milder, our hunter-gatherer ancestors discovered a new way to make nature work for them. One of the tribes that lived here sustained itself by gathering and eating the abundant wild grains that grew on the plains, and one of them made a giant leap of imagination. She asked a simple question: How does wheat grow? And this simple question began one of the greatest revolutions in history.（以下为非英文对话）Instead of eating all the seeds of wild wheat and rye, she began setting some aside. Planting a seed is something we take for granted, but thousands of years ago, it was a leap of faith. It will turn us from hunter-gatherers into farmers and marked the beginning of humanity’s great transformation of the earth’s environment.

Our new way of life allowed us to plan ahead and take more control of our food supply. By selecting the best seeds, we also began to improve the yield of the crops we planted. We were beginning to exert our will over nature. Farming was further evidence of our potential to shape the world, rather than simply react to it.

Over the next 5,000 years, the farming revolution spread out from the Fertile Crescent. Across the world, the people of China, India, and South America were independently developing their own methods of farming. Soon, global agriculture was dominated by three staples: wheat, rice and corn. To this day, these three crops are still the basis of what we eat. Progress came at a price. Archeologists found evidence that farming was a harder life than hunting and gathering. After the first farmers settled down, humans became smaller. The average height for men fell 4

2

inches, from 5 foot 10 to 5 foot 6. For women, it fell 2 inches, from 5 foot 3 to 5 foot 1. Repetitive laboring in the fields led to joints inflamed by arthritis, and regular sugary diet of oatmeal introduced tooth decay for the first time. With farming came a population explosion. The more food we grew, the more mouths we could feed. The great farming revolution allowed us to settle down, call a place home, and that inspired another great step in our development.

Notes for Scripts

1. the Tigris: the easternmost of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia, the other being the

Euphrates. The river flows south from the mountains of southeastern Turkey through Iraq. 底格里斯河

2. the Persian Gulf: a body of water in Western Asia. An extension of the Indian Ocean (Gulf of

Oman) through the Strait of Hormuz, it lies between Iran to the northeast and the Arabian Peninsula to the southwest. 波斯湾

3. the Euphrates: the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of Western Asia.

Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia. Originating in eastern Turkey, the Euphrates flows through Syria and Iraq to join the Tigris in the Shattal-Arab, which empties into the Persian Gulf. 幼发拉底河

4. the Fertile Crescent: a crescent-shaped region containing the comparatively moist and fertile

land of otherwise arid and semi-arid Western Asia, the Nile Valley and Nile Delta of northeast Africa, it was also near Asia Minor or known as Anatolia. The term was popularized by University of Chicago archaeologist James Henry Breasted. Having originated in the study of ancient history, the concept soon developed and today retains significance in international geopolitics and diplomatic relations. The region is often called the cradle of civilization; it saw the development of some of the earliest human civilizations, which flourished thanks to the water supplies and agricultural resources available in the Fertile Crescent. 新月沃土

5. Instead of eating all the seeds of wild wheat and rye, she began setting some aside. 她没有把

野生小麦和黑麦种子全部吃掉，而是留下其中一部分。 wild wheat and rye: 野生小麦和黑麦 set aside: 留出

SLS

II. Word Bank

charcoal n. 木炭 fatal adj. 致命的；毁灭性的 inhabit v. 居住 dwindle v.（数量上）减少，缩小 scorn n. 轻蔑；鄙视 eventual adj. 最终的 societal adj. 社会的 collapse n. & v. 崩溃，垮台 extinction n.（物种的）灭绝 inadvertently adv.疏忽地；非故意地 erosion n.（气候等的）侵蚀，腐蚀 deforestation n.采伐森林 Notes

3

Vikings（8至11世纪的）北欧海盗 Inuit 因纽特人（北美的爱斯基摩人） fjord （尤指挪威海岸边的）峡湾

1. societal adj. relating to society or to the way society is organized 社会的 e.g. What is lacking is an insight into the particularity of our societal system.

缺乏的正是对我们社会制度特殊性的洞察。

Like other human undertakings, it is guided by the dominant societal ideology. 像其他的人类活动一样, 它必然会受到占主导地位的社会意识形态的支配。

2. collapse n./v. to fail or come to an end completely and suddenly（体系或机构）崩溃，瓦解，突然失败

e.g. This system has collapsed in most countries where it ruled. 这一制度在其占统治地位的大多数国家都失败了。

The coup’s collapse has speeded up the drive to independence. 那次政变的失败加速推动了进程。

3. extinction n. death or elimination, as a species（物种的）灭绝 e.g. Many species have been hunted to the verge of extinction.

很多物种已经被猎杀到濒临灭绝的边缘。

Thirty percent of reptiles, birds, and fish are currently threatened with extinction. 目前，30%的爬行动物、鸟类和鱼类面临灭绝的危险。

4. inadvertently adv. unknowingly or without intention 疏忽地；非故意

e.g. They inadvertently got mixed up in a free fight involving some 20 people.

他们无意中卷入了一场20人左右的混战。 I inadvertently pressed the wrong button. 我一疏忽按错了按钮。

5. erosion n. the gradual destruction and removal, as of rock or soil by rivers, the sea, or the

weather（气候等的）侵蚀，腐蚀

e.g. As their roots are strong and penetrating, they prevent erosion. 它们的根十分粗壮而且扎得很深，从而避免了受侵蚀。

Rainfall is the key factor to soil erosion. 降雨是土壤侵蚀的关键因素。

6. deforestation n. cutting down or destroying trees 采伐森林

e.g. He said Africa was suffering badly from deforestation: for every ten trees cut down, only

one was planted.

他说非洲的森林砍伐现象非常严重：每砍伐10棵树，仅种植1棵。

Firewood scarcity offers the most visible and dramatic example of deforestation’s effects. 薪材短缺是毁林后果的最明显和最引人注目的实例。

7. charcoal n. a black substance obtained by burning wood with little air 木炭 e.g. We need to get some more charcoal for the barbecue.

4

8. fatal adj. leading to death 致命的；毁灭性的

e.g. His party has just suffered the equivalent of a near-fatal heart attack. 他所在的政党刚刚经历了一次类似心脏病突发般几近致命的打击。

It would deal a fatal blow to his fading chances of success. 这将给他日渐渺茫的成功机会带来致命的一击。

9. inhabit v. to make one’s home or live in 居住 e.g. Wild tribes still inhabit part of the Philippines. 菲律宾部分地区仍然居住着一些原始部落。

Woodpeckers inhabit hollow trees. 啄木鸟栖息在中空的树上。

10. dwindle v. to become smaller, weaker, or fewer in number（数量上）减少，缩小

e.g. Yet, as earth’s other natural resources dwindle, nations eye the Antarctic as a final source of

supply.

然而, 由于地球上其他自然资源的减少, 一些国家视南极洲为最后的资源供应地。 The factory’s workforce has dwindled from over 4,000 to a few hundred. 该厂的工人总数已从四千多减少到了几百人。

11. scorn n. contempt 轻蔑；鄙视

e.g. He became the object of ridicule and scorn. 他成了嘲弄和鄙视的对象。

Her fellow teachers greeted her proposal with scorn.

别的老师对她的提议不屑一顾。

12. eventual adj. happening over a period of time; final 最终的

e.g. There are many who believe that civil war will be the eventual outcome of the racial

tension in the country.

有许多人认为内战将是该国种族关系紧张的最终结果。

Several schools face eventual closure. 几所学校面临最终关闭。

Scripts:

In analyzing societal collapses, I’ve arrived at a five-point framework — a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I’ll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society. This is a European society with literate records, so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation. In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland, settled Greenland, and around 1450 they died out — the society collapsed, and every one of them ended up dead.

Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five-point framework, the first item on the

5

我们烧烤需要更多的木炭。 Charcoal is used to filter water. 木炭是用来过滤水的。

framework is to look for human impacts on the environment: people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron. So they ended up an Iron Age European society, virtually unable to make their own iron.

A second item on my checklist is climate change. Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter. In the case of the Vikings — in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn’t necessarily fatal, because the Inuit — the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time — did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn’t the Greenland Norse, as well?

The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country — with Norway — and that trade dwindled: partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway.

The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies. In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit — the Eskimos sharing Greenland — with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year.

And then finally, the fifth item on my checklist is the political, economic, social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems. In the case of the Greenland Norse, cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were: their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society; and their scorn for the Inuit, from whom they refused to learn.

So that’s how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse. Notes for Scripts:

1. This is an excerpt from a TED speech by Jared Diamond, in which he investigates why cultures prosper or decline — and what we can learn by taking a broad look across many kinds of societies.

2. In his books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse (and the popular PBS and National Geographic documentaries they inspired), big-picture scholar Jared Diamond explores civilizations and why they all seem to fall. And in his latest book, The World until Yesterday, Diamond examines small, traditional, tribal societies — and suggests that modern civilization is only our latest solution to survival. Diamond’s background in evolutionary biology, geography and physiology informs his integrated vision of human history. He posits that success — and failure — depends on how well societies adapt to their changing environment.

3. Greenland: Greenland is located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been ethnically, politically and culturally associated with Europe (specifically Norway and Denmark, the colonial powers, as well as the nearby island of Iceland) for more

6

than a millennium. In 2008, the people of Greenland passed a referendum supporting greater autonomy; 75% of votes cast were in favor.

4. Vikings: Vikings were Germanic Norse seafarers, speaking the Old Norse language, who raided and traded from their Scandinavian homelands across wide areas of northern and central Europe, as well as European Russia, during the late 8th to late 11th centuries. The term is also commonly extended in modern English and other vernaculars to the inhabitants of Viking home communities during what has become known as the Viking Age.

5. Eskimo: The Eskimo are the indigenous peoples who have traditionally inhabited the northern circumpolar region from eastern Siberia (Russia), across Alaska (United States), Canada, and Greenland. The two main peoples known as “Eskimo” are: the Inuit of Canada, Northern Alaska (sub-group “Inupiat”), and Greenland, and the Yupik of Alaska and eastern Siberia.

6. fjord: a strip of sea that comes into the land between high cliffs, especially in Norway（尤指挪威海岸边的）峡湾

7. ... their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society ...

In this context, the phrase “chiefly society” refers to a society organized around chiefs or chieftains. So the sentence can be paraphrased as “their being a society organized around chiefs strongly competing for power”.

7