英语智慧背囊09-盐一样的智慧

[00:00.00]Salted Wisdom 盐一样的智慧
[00:04.53]A story tells about a senior villager
[00:08.34]who led other villagers carrying salt day and night to a town
[00:11.98]in order to trade barley as food for the winter.
[00:15.24]One night they camped in a wilderness with a starry sky above.
[00:19.39]The senior villager, obeying the tradition passed down from ancestry,
[00:24.01]took out three blocks of salt and threw them into the campfire,
[00:28.06]presumably to foretell the changes of weather in the mountains.
[00:31.65]All eagerly awaited the old man’s “weather report”:
[00:35.59]if the salt in the fire produced crackling sound,
[00:38.99]they would have good weather in store;
[00:41.28]if no sound was produced,
[00:43.15]it then meant the good weather would soon end
[00:45.97]and a storm would come at any moment.
[00:48.40]The senior villager looked serious.
[00:51.34]The salt in the campfire made no sound at all.
[00:54.19]Convinced by this bad omen,
[00:56.59]he urged the whole team to set out immediately after daybreak.
[01:00.85]A young man in the group, however,
[01:02.94]insisted that they should not depart in such a hurry,
[01:05.55]deeming it absurdly superstitious to
[01:08.74]“forecast the weather by using salt”.
[01:10.80]It was not until the next afternoon
[01:13.44]that the young man caught up on the wisdom of the old man
[01:16.38]when the weather suddenly changed,
[01:18.47]with cold winds blowing and a snowstorm raging.
[01:21.96]In fact, the method employed by the clan head
[01:25.79]could be well explained by modern science:
[01:27.87]whether or not salt produces sound in campfire depends on air humidity.
[01:33.56]That is to say, when a storm approaches,
[01:36.73]due to high humidity,
[01:38.16]the dampened salt blocks will not produce any sound in fire.
[01:41.53]Young people often look down upon the philosophy of the old,
[01:45.60]regarding their ideas as obsolete and useless.
[01:48.87]In reality, however,
[01:50.72]some beliefs in life are just like salt blocks
[01:54.12]that are distilled from the sea;
[01:55.66]old as they are, they remain crystals,
[01:58.38]and carry with them profound memories of the sea.