新视野大学英语读写教程听力 第一册 unit08c_new

[by:和谐英语学习网|http://www.hxen.net|和谐英语||和谐英语学习网]
[00:00.00]喜欢hxen.net，就把hxen.net复制到QQ个人资料中！Great Ideas
[00:-1.00]Some of the most important inventions of the past 2,000 years may surprise you.
[00:-2.00]Want to get rich? Become famous?
[00:-3.00]You don't have to be a film star or a basketball player or a musician.
[00:-4.00]You can do it by becoming an inventor.
[00:-5.00]Over the past 2,000 years
[00:-6.00]inventors have created machines and articles that have changed the world.
[00:-7.00]And it's not just the big ideas like computers,
[00:-8.00]printing presses and steam engines (蒸汽机) that become big things.
[00:-9.00]Just think how the past 2,000 years would be different
[00:10.00]without these "small" big ideas:
[00:11.00]It's a clean sweep
[00:12.00]In 1871,American inventor Ives McGaffey
[00:13.00]realized that if you turned an air pump the opposite way,
[00:14.00]you would have a machine that could pick up dirt.
[00:15.00]He called his machine an aspirator (吸气器).
[00:16.00]The huge device was powered by a steam engine.
[00:17.00]Another American, James Murray Spangler,
[00:18.00]designed a much lighter machine in 1907 with an electric engine.
[00:19.00]He sold the idea,now called a vacuum cleaner,to a man named William H. Hoover.
[00:20.00]The company is still making Hoover vacuums and we're a little bit cleaner for it.
[00:21.00]Stuck on you
[00:22.00]Inventors get interested when they find out people don't like the way something works
[00:23.00]One day in 1923,
[00:24.00]young lab worker Richard Drew from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
[00:25.00]heard workers in an automobile body shop complaining.
[00:26.00]It seems they could not find the right kind of tape to put on cars
[00:27.00]while they painted them.
[00:28.00]Either the tape stuck too much and ruined the paint job or it fell off too soon
[00:29.00]and the paint ran onto another part of the car.
[00:30.00]Drew spent two years creating a tape that stuck just enough.
[00:31.00]We know it now as masking tape.
[00:32.00]But Drew wasn't done.
[00:33.00]In 1930,he created a see-through,water-proof,cellophane adhesive.
[00:34.00]The company called it Scotch tape and started selling it by the ton.
[00:35.00]Accidents can work wonders
[00:36.00]In the late 1940s,engineer Percy L.Spencer
[00:37.00]of the Raytheon Company was experimenting with high-frequency(高频率) radio waves.
[00:38.00]These had been used to find enemy planes and ships in World War II.
[00:39.00]Spencer noticed the waves had made a chocolate bar(块) in his pocket soft.
[00:40.00]Could these waves be used to heat food?
[00:41.00]Spencer soon invented the microwave oven(微波炉),
[00:42.00]which made millions of dollars for Raytheon
[00:43.00]and millions of bags of popcorn(爆米花) for kids everywhere.
[00:44.00]Geniuses need not apply(应用,努力)
[00:45.00]Alexander Graham Bell was a teacher of the deaf.
[00:46.00]He did not know much about electricity.
[00:47.00]That was probably a good thing because most electricity masters
[00:48.00]did not think a voice could be sent over a wire.
[00:49.00]In three years of day and night effort,
[00:50.00]Bell figured out how to send sound over a changing electric current.
[00:51.00]He got his patent(专利) on the telephone on March 7,1876.
[00:52.00]It is one of the most valuable patents ever given by the U.S.
[00:53.00]Keep your trousers on
[00:54.00]In 1907, engineer Gideon Sundback
[00:55.00]got interested in improving a "hookless (无钩的) fastener(扣件)" patented in 1893.
[00:56.00]It was supposed to do away with the tiring work of buttoning the many buttons
[00:57.00]on clothes of the day.
[00:58.00]But the fastener did not work well.
[00:59.00]For years Sundback lay awake half the night trying to solve the problem.
[-1:00.00]In 1913 he designed a hookless fastener that worked.
[-1:-1.00]But no one made much money on the invention
[-1:-2.00]until a Canadian businessman decided to call it a "zipper (拉链)".
[-1:-3.00]Soon millions were sold every year and trousers everywhere stopped falling down.
[-1:-4.00]Now that's a tiny—yet BIG—idea.