普特英语听力必备资料

普特听力文章：吸烟的害处你知道吗？

People give all kinds of reasons for why they started smoking, but none of them are good — not even supposedly altruistic ones.

While some claim that you’re actually saving our overburdened healthcare system money in the long run by smoking because it reduces life expectancy, it’s nowhere near a watertight argument.

First of all, you’re certainly not doing your family and friends a favor by deliberately lowering your life expectancy. In fact, your family will have to absorb the losses incurred when you miss work due to smoking-related illnesses. Second, there is a lot of debate over the best way to measure the economic costs of smoking.

Every study is based on different assumptions, and uses different data and methods. For example, should you measure the cost of smoking by looking at the cost of treating major illnesses like lung cancer and heart disease, or should you also measure the cost of less serious illnesses? Should you take into account the fact that people who live longer also pay more taxes and insurance premiums? Should you look at the overall cost to the healthcare system, or at the cost per individual?

Anyway, regardless of how you calculate them, the economic costs of smoking are inconsequential when compared to smoking’s real price: the misery caused by the deaths of over 400,000 people each year and the illnesses of several million.

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人们总是为开始抽烟找各种理由，但是没有一种是好的，没有所谓的利他理由。

有这样一种声音，从长远利益来说你抽烟是在拯救我们不堪重负的医疗系统资金，减少预期寿命，但严密的论证我们尚未掌握。

首先，刻意降低你的预期寿命，并不是在帮你家人和朋友的忙。事实上，当你患上了抽烟的相关性疾病，你的家人便不得不承受造成的损失。其二，通过的方式去衡量抽烟的经济成本还存在很多争议。

各项研究都基于不同的假设，而且使用了不同的数据和方法。例如，通过观察治疗如肺癌，心脏病等重大疾病的成本，你估量到抽烟的成本了吗?你同时估量到不严重疾病的成本了吗?你考虑到活得更加长久人同时需要付更多的税费和保险的事实了吗?你考虑过医疗系统的总成本吗?或者是每个人的成本吗?

总之，不管你怎样计算，与抽烟实际代价相比，它的经济成本便微不足道了，抽烟酿成了每年40万人的死亡以及数百万人患病的悲剧

普特英语听力

Saving the World from Asteroids

Okay, so there’s an asteroid heading toward the Earth. What do we do? Does our future really rest in the hands of Hollywood, Bruce Willis and a ragtag team of miners like in the movie Armageddon?

Early Warning

Sure, we could wait until danger is imminent and then hope that a well placed nuclear explosion would shatter or deflect the monster asteroid threatening humanity, but is this our only option? The answer is that it depends on how big the asteroid is, how far away it is, and How much time we have before impact?

Because there’s lots of space debris out there, odds are that the threatening object won’t be one of the giant Earth-destroying asteroids that NASA is already tracking, but a smaller meteoroid capable of causing regional devastation.

With enough warning, though, we could crash a robotic spacecraft into the object and change its trajectory so that it’ll sail by Earth. We know we have the technology for this, because NASA has already successfully rammed a spacecraft into a comet to study the comet’s composition.

Deflection

There are also rare instances when space objects pass close by several years before returning on a collision course with Earth. Here even a tiny change in trajectory during the first pass would result in big payoff later. In these cases, we could use a spacecraft’s mass and gravitational field to nudge the space object off course without shattering it and creating potentially dangerous fragments.

Obviously, early warning is key, which is why NASA has issued a grand challenge to scientists in various disciplines, institutions and agencies to work together to uncover ways of detecting, characterizing and interacting with asteroids. Because when it comes to the future of the Earth, Bruce Willis can only do so much.

普特英语听力：动物可以欣赏音乐吗？

Musical Mammals

Think humans are the only creatures capable of grooving to a beat? Think again. Turns out a growing number of animals are just as musically inclined.

Beyond Parrots

Now, you may already know that parrots and other birds that mimic human speech are also good at keeping time to a musical beat. Scientists think it’s a side effect of repeating human speech sounds.

But researchers have found that both sea lions and bonobos are also capable of bopping to a beat. Researchers beat a drum at around 280 beats per minute and found that bonobos were able to pick up the beat and play it on a specially designed drum.

Now, given that bonobos are closely related to humans, their rhythmic ability might not sound very surprising. In the wild, bonobos are known to beat on hollow trees. But sea lions are a different story they’re not known to follow or pick up a beat.

So it was surprising when researchers working with a sea lion they named Ronan were able to train her to bob her head in time to different tempos.

More Widespread

Beyond the fact that teaching a sea lion to groove to a beat is pretty cool, it also suggests that the ability may be much more widespread in the animal kingdom than we’ve assumed, and that keeping time to a beat is not limited to animals able to mimic human speech.

So we may not yet be at the point where we’ll see rock bands with seals or apes on drums, but when it comes to music, humans and other animals appear to have more in common than meets the eye.

懂音乐的动物有哪些?

人类是能够随着节拍起舞的生物吗?不是。事实上，越来越多的动物显示出音乐天赋。

除鹦鹉之外

你可能已经知道鹦鹉和其他一些能够模仿人类语言的鸟类也擅于把握音乐节拍。科学家认为这是它们重复人类语言声音而产生的副作用。

但是，研究人员发现，海狮和倭黑猩猩也有乐感。研究人员以每分钟约280次的速度击鼓，发现倭黑猩猩能够跟上节奏，并在一个特制的鼓上演奏出来。

由于倭黑猩猩是人类的“近亲”，它们具有节奏感也许并不稀奇。在野外，倭黑猩猩以能在中空的树上击打出节奏而闻名。但海狮却不一样，人们可从不知道它们能跟上节拍。

因此当研究人员同一只名叫罗南的海狮共同协作，训练它能够随着不同的节拍摇头晃脑就十分令人惊奇了。

更多有乐感的动物

训练海狮“闻拍起舞”十分有范儿，但也这表明动物王国中有乐感的动物也许要比我们想象的多，能跟上节拍的动物也不仅限于能够“学舌”的动物。