英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟

A Japanese company has found a way to turn unwanted rice into plastic goods. 一家日本公司找到了一种将不需要的大米变成塑料制品的方法。 One company is working with farmers in the coastal town of Namie. Nearby is the Fukushima nuclear center, closed since a nuclear disaster there in March 2011. 一家公司正在与沿海城镇浪江市的农民合作。 附近是福岛核中心，该中心自 2011 年 3 月发生核灾难后关闭。 Jinichi...

"My dream destination is definitely Paris. I can't wait to stroll along the Seine River and visit the Eiffel Tower."(我的梦想目的地肯定是巴黎。我迫不及待地想沿着塞纳河漫步，参观埃菲尔铁塔。) "I've always wanted to go to Japan. The culture and food are so fascinating to me."(我一直想去日本。这里的文化和美食对我来说都很迷人。) "I would love to visit New York City one day. It seems like there's alway...

Georgiana Viou is self-taught chef, or cook, from the west African country of Benin. She moved to France in hopes of becoming a  translator . Georgiana Viou 是来自西非国家贝宁的自学成才的厨师。 她移居法国，希望成为一名翻译。 Instead, she opened a restaurant there. 相反，她在那里开了一家餐馆。 On Monday, her restaurant was awarded a star by the Michelin Guide. A restaurant is considered highly...

Gardeners in the Northern Hemisphere are starting to plan their summer gardens. Most are thinking about how their plants and flowers will look in the bright sunshine in the coming summer. But when the summer sun goes down in the evening, and you are sitting outside at home, you may not be able to see many flowers in the yard without artificial lighting. With some planning, you can plant a “moon ga...

No.1, Are you going to any New Year's Eve parties?  你会参加任何除夕夜派对吗？ No.2, I'm so excited about the New Year's Eve countdown!  我对除夕夜的倒数感到非常兴奋！ No.3, Do you have any plans for New Year's Day?  你有新年第一天的计划吗？ No.4, Let's have a toast to the new year!  让我们为新年干杯！ No.5, I love watching the fireworks on New Year's Eve.  我喜欢在除夕夜...

More American businesses are starting to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to come up with new ideas and to deal with customers. Mattel is known for making children’s toys. The company recently used an AI image generator called DALL-E to come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars. The used vehicle seller CarMax is using ChatGPT to gather thousands of customer comments. The social media se...

Virgin Galactic has completed improvements to its VSS Unity spaceplane. The company plans to restart a passenger flight program this year, the company said Tuesday. Virgin Galactic suspended flights of the Unity and its carrier plane, the VMS Eve, in 2021 to work on the craft. The VSS Unity launches from the surface of the Eve after that plane carries the spacecraft up. Virgin Galactic was founded...

Would you call yourself lazy? If you live in a messy house and are reluctant to lift a finger to help out, maybe you are. But laziness is a subjective thing – sloppiness to one person might be a form of relaxation to another. And if you can be bothered to read on, you'll see that opinion is divided on whether laziness is a bad thing. 你会说自己懒惰吗？如果你住在一个凌乱的房子里，不愿意伸...

Plant lovers often look at lists of plants or seeds for sale in the winter to plan their gardens for the coming year. Those lists usually have two names for each plant: a common name and a botanical, or scientific name. The botanical name is not in English, which makes a lot of people unsure about what it means or how to say it. The language is Latin. Its purpose is to help growers be sure that th...

European space officials have called for establishing a separate time zone on the moon. The European Space Agency (ESA) said the idea was discussed at a recent meeting held at the agency’s Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. ESA said the effort is part of a larger project to create a complete communication and navigation system for the moon. Space officials say such a system w...

Quaoar is a minor planet orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. It is named after a god of creation in Native American mythology. And it is creating some surprises for  astronomers  as it orbits in the cold outer parts of our solar system. Quaoar 是一颗绕太阳运行的小行星，位于冥王星之外。 它以美洲原住民神话中的创世神命名。 当它在我们太阳系寒冷的外围运行时，它给天文学家带来了一些惊喜。 Researcher...

Scientists have discovered some of the oldest stone tools ever found at a research  site  in Kenya. But the find created a mystery about which group of early humans made and used the tools. 科学家们在肯尼亚的一个研究地点发现了一些最古老的石器。但这一发现创造了一个谜团，即哪一群早期人类制造并使用这些工具。 A study recently  published  in Science suggests early humans u...

An Italian project on the social media service Instagram is aiming to bring attention to women who do not look like usual fashion models. Carlotta Giancane started L’Imperfetta modeling agency in 2020. The name means “imperfect” in the Italian language. And the agency aims to redefine ideas about beauty in Italy. The agency works with models who are unusual for the industry in many ways. The model...

esearchers in Norway say they have found what they believe is the world’s oldest runestone – a stone with ancient writing on it. 挪威的研究人员表示，他们发现了他们认为是世界上最古老的如尼文石——一块刻有古代文字的石头。 Runes are the  characters  in several Germanic alphabets. These characters were used in northern Europe from ancient times until the change to the Latin alphabet. The exact...

Adverts are designed to persuade us, but which techniques have been shown to be effective in enticing us to buy things? One way is simply to portray something as normal. Former advertising professional Dan Parker explains that 'normalisation', showing people happily eating unhealthily, can lead to higher sales of junk food as people start to see these habits as normal. This is like product placeme...

Twenty-six words were included in what is known as Section 230 of the 1996 law setting telecommunication policies in the United States. Those words have enabled companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google to grow into the giant technology companies they are today. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing challenges to the law on whether those companies are responsible for what users posted on...

Over three thousand years ago, several important  civilizations  in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean collapsed or decreased in power. This event is called the Bronze Age collapse. 三千多年前，中东和地中海东部的几个重要文明崩溃或衰落。 这个事件被称为青铜时代的崩溃。 One of the strongest to disappear was the Hittite  empire  in what is now Turkey and parts of Syria and I...

The man who made the first call from a wireless phone is now 94 years old. The year was 1973. Martin Cooper operated a large, heavy new communication device on a street in New York City. The device was not physically connected to phone lines. But, Cooper was able to make use of it --- he called a technology business competitor. Fifty years later, the inventor says he hopes wireless phones can make...

Gardeners in the Northern Hemisphere are starting to plan their summer gardens. Most are thinking about how their plants and flowers will look in the bright sunshine in the coming summer. But when the summer sun goes down in the evening, and you are sitting outside at home, you may not be able to see many flowers in the yard without artificial lighting. With some planning, you can plant a “moon ga...

A team of Russian scientists recently examined something extremely unusual: the frozen body of a brown bear that lived thousands of years ago. The cold preserved the body almost perfectly in the frozen lands of eastern Siberia for almost 3,500 years. Maxim Cheprasov is the laboratory chief at the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, eastern Siberia....

At least three times a week, Mexico City bus driver Nicolás Cuatencos purchases a kind of tamale known as “guajolota,” or “turkey.” The food is made of corn dough and filled with meat, bean and cheese. Tamales are then wrapped in corn husks, the green leaves outside an ear of corn, or banana leaves for cooking. Cuatencos has loved the dish since childhood. “The flavor, the dough, all of that is re...

Astronomers have discovered what appear to be huge galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the Big Bang. The findings suggest the early universe may have quickly produced these extremely large galaxies. The new James Webb Space Telescope has seen even older galaxies, dating to within 300 million years of the beginning of the universe. But it is the size and maturity of these six galaxi...

A sea creature known as the sunflower sea star was once plentiful in the Pacific Ocean along the coast of North America. They used to be found in the waters along the coast of Mexico’s Baja peninsula all the way to Alaska. But in the last 10 years, about 90 percent of them have died. Scientists at the University of Washington are trying to understand why the sea stars died. To do so, the...

You know the feeling – your ears start to warm up, your tongue goes numb, you start sweating and taking deep breaths. You've just eaten something spicy knowing it would be painful, and, yet, you chose to do it anyway. Are humans just masochistic, or is there something else going on? The answer lies in both science and history. 你知道那种感觉——你的耳朵开始变暖，你的舌头变得麻木，你开始出汗并深呼吸...

An 11-year-old girl has died in Cambodia of bird flu. Health officials say it was the country’s first known human infection of bird flu since 2014. The virus, officially known as H5N1, usually spreads among different kinds of poultry. Most human cases of bird flu have involved direct contact with infected poultry. The girl who died lived in a rural part of southeastern Cambodia. She became sick on...