字神帝國英語天地

今日主題：Ants Could Help Warming Cry Uncle
螞蟻可以為地球降溫

洪欣老師推薦：托福聽力最好的課外教材：60-Second Science
康康精選托福會考的主題，堅持每天精聽一定會進步的哦!!

建議方法：
1. 先聽兩三遍 (不看文稿)
2. 再一句一句聽寫 (每句都要聽寫數遍，直到寫出85%以上的字)
3. 最後check文稿，看哪聽不出來，單字沒背過，還是發音不熟。
4. 堅持天天聽，就能每天進步哦。

MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：喜歡的同學，幫忙推或按讚哦~~
http://online1.tingclass.net/voas…/2014/20140722sa_earth.mp3

只有音檔怎夠，聽不懂地方，不用怕，康康幫你準備好中英文稿了：

中英文稿：
The meek may not just inherit the Earth, they could help keep the planet cool. The meek in this case being ants. For a quarter-century, geographer Ronald Dorn of Arizona State University and his students have studied how ants, termites and tree roots affect rock weathering.
溫順的事物可能不只是繼承大地，他們也可以幫助地球降溫。這裡所指的溫順的事物是螞蟻。25年來，亞利桑那州立大學的地理學家羅奈爾得•多恩和他的學生研究了螞蟻、白蟻和樹根對岩石風化的影響。

Rocks like plagioclase and olivine that contain calcium and magnesium naturally absorb carbon dioxide to become limestone or dolomite. The more rock that’s exposed, the more CO2 gets trapped. You can find more 60-Second Earth on chinavoa.com
像斜長石和橄欖石類的岩石內部含有鈣和鎂，可以自然的吸收二氧化碳變成石灰岩和白雲石。暴露的岩石越多，吸收的二氧化碳也就越多。

And ants apparently greatly speed up that process. At Dorn's six test sites in Arizona and Texas, eight different kinds of ants were found to accelerate the absorption of atmospheric CO2 by as much as 335 times compared with ant-free areas. The research is in the journal Geology. [Ronald I. Dorn, Ants as a powerful biotic agent of olivine and plagioclase dissolution]
很顯然，螞蟻大大加速了這一進程。在美國亞利桑那州和德克薩斯州的多恩的6個實驗場地，發現有8種不同種類的螞蟻可以加速對空氣中二氧化碳的吸收，而且大約是沒有此類螞蟻地方的335倍。這項研究被發表在《地質學》雜誌上。

Exactly how ants enhance this carbon dioxide trapping remains unclear. The activity could even be due not to the ants, but to the microbes they carry.
而對於螞蟻是如何加速二氧化碳吸收的，仍然不太清楚。這個加速吸收甚至可能不是因為螞蟻自身，而是因為他們所攜帶的微生物。

Regardless, there are a lot of ants on Earth, as many as 10 trillion individuals by one estimate. Dorn even speculates that the proliferation of ants some 66 million years ago might be why this recent Cenozoic era has been, until very recently, so much cooler than earlier epochs.
無論如何，在地球上有很多螞蟻，據估計大約有10萬億多。多恩甚至推測大約6600萬年前螞蟻的增殖可能就是最近新生代所形成氣候的影響原因，一直到更近一點的最近，要比早期的時代氣溫低很多。

Aesop gave ants a reputation for being hard workers. A lot of that effort may have been for a moderate climate's benefit.
—David Biello
伊索稱讚螞蟻是辛勤的工人，它們的辛勤努力可能會有益於溫和氣候的形成。—大衛•別洛