聽力原文:

Space travel
太空旅行
Starchip enterprise
造星際芯片的企業(yè)
Flying to the stars means thinking both very big and very small

探索太空意味著可以用很大的飛行器也可以用很小的飛行器

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

重點(diǎn)詞匯：

1 starship 星際飛船；星艦
2 origin 起源；源頭；起因
3 booster助推火箭
4 propulsion 推動(dòng)力；推進(jìn)
5 arbitrary 任意的；武斷的；隨心所欲的
6 strip 拆卸；拆開
7 bare 僅夠的；最基本的；最簡(jiǎn)單的(最高級(jí)barest)
8 promises 使很可能；預(yù)示

聽力原文:

Such a split sounds impractical, but beams of light could make it work. One of the counterintuitive implications of the theory of relativity is that, although light has no mass, it still has momentum. Thus when light bounces off a mirror it exerts a tiny pressure; if the light is bright enough, and the mirror light enough, the mirror will start moving. In the 1970s Robert Forward, 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 of thousands of years. But the incredible technical challenges of such a scheme meant that Forward’s ideas were never developed in any practical way.

重點(diǎn)詞匯：

1 split 分歧；分裂；分離
2 impractical 不明智的；不現(xiàn)實(shí)的
3 beam 光線；（電波的）波束；（粒子的）束
4 counterintuitive違反直覺的
5 implication 含意；暗指
6 mass 質(zhì)量
7 momentum 推進(jìn)力；動(dòng)力；勢(shì)頭; 沖力；動(dòng)量
8 bounces off 彈回;彈開
9 bounce （使）彈起，彈跳；反射
10 exert 運(yùn)用；行使；施加
11 probe （不載人）航天探測(cè)器，宇宙探測(cè)航天器
12 scheme 計(jì)劃；方案；體系；體制

聽力原文:

That could be about to change. On April 12th, the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space, Yuri Milner, a Russian physicist and billionaire investor, announced a plan to develop the technologies such interstellar flight would need. Mr. Milner—who was named after Gagarin—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 extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

重點(diǎn)詞匯：

1 interstellar 星際的
2 bear on 和（某事物）有關(guān)；涉及
3 extraterrestrial （故事中的）天外來客，外星人，外星生物

聽力原文:

When he first looked at laser-powered interstellar travel, Mr. Milner says, the idea triggered both his scepticism as a physicist and his cynicism as a businessman. But he has concluded that, 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 a generation attempts at interstellar flight might be no more costly than today’s most ambitious scientific programmes. So he is going to spend $100m on a “Breakthrough Starshot” research programme aimed at making that dream possible.

重點(diǎn)詞匯：

1 trigger 發(fā)動(dòng)；引起；觸發(fā)
2 scepticism 懷疑態(tài)度；懷疑主義
3 cynic 認(rèn)為人皆自私的人；憤世嫉俗者
4 cynicism認(rèn)為世人皆自私的觀念;憤世嫉俗;(對(duì)成功或人的真善的）懷疑
5 boon 非常有用的東西；益處
6 microelectronics 微電子學(xué)
7 nanotechnology納米技術(shù)
8 interstellar 星際的
9 ambitious 有野心的；有雄心的

聽力原文:

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

重點(diǎn)詞匯：

1 gigawatt十億瓦特
2 newton 牛頓（力的單位 )
3 thrust（發(fā)動(dòng)機(jī)推動(dòng)飛機(jī)、火箭等的）推力，驅(qū)動(dòng)力
4 thimbleful 少量液體（尤指酒）
5 gram 克

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