高中英語美文摘抄帶翻譯欣賞

　　英語美文誦讀有利於培養學生的英語語感,提高學生表達的準確性,豐富學生的英語口頭表達內容,發展學生的英語聽、說、寫能力。本文是高中英語美文摘抄帶翻譯，希望對大家有幫助!

　　高中英語美文摘抄帶翻譯：Evolution of Sleep

　　Sleep is very ancient. In the electroencephalographic sense we share it with all the primates and almost all the other mammals and birds: it may extend back as far as the reptiles.

　　There is some evidence that the two types of sleep, dreaming and dreamless, depend on the life-style of the animal, and that predators are statistically much more likely to dream than prey, which are in turn much more likely to experience dreamless sleep. In dream sleep, the animal is powerfully immobilized and remarkably unresponsive to external stimuli. Dreamless sleep is much shallower, and we have all witnessed cats or dogs cocking their ears to a sound when apparently fast asleep. The fact that deep dream sleep is rare among prey today seems clearly to be a product of natural selection, and it makes sense that today, when sleep is highly evolved, the stupid animals are less frequently immobilized by deep sleep than the smart ones. But why should they sleep deeply at all? Why should a state of such deep immobilization ever have evolved? Perhaps one useful hint about the original function of sleep is to be found in the fact that dolphins and whales and aquatic mammals in general seem to sleep very little. There is, by and large, no place to hide in the ocean. Could it be that, rather than increasing an animal's vulnerability, the function of sleep is to decrease it? Wilse Webb of the University of Florida and Ray Meddis of London University have suggested this to be the case. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep. The point seems particularly clear for the young of predatory animals. This is an interesting notion and probably at least partly true.

　　睡眠的進化

　　睡眠是古老的。 從腦電圖上看，我們人類和所有靈長目動物以及幾乎所有的哺乳動物和鳥類都一樣需要睡眠;甚至爬行類動物也有睡眠。 有證據顯示，有夢睡眠和無夢睡眠這兩種型別的睡眠取決於該動物的生活方式。 從統計上看，食肉動物比被捕食動物有更多的有夢睡眠，而被捕食動物更多地無夢睡眠。 動物在有夢睡眠時，被有效地解除動作能力，並且對外界刺激缺乏反應。 無夢睡眠則要淺得多。 我們都看到過貓和狗在顯然的酣睡中，有一點響動耳朵就會豎起來。 被捕食動物很少有深度的有夢睡眠，這看來顯然是自然選擇的結果。 而且這一點是有道理的：當睡眠高度進化以後，愚笨的動物比聰明的動物更少在深度睡眠狀態下喪失動作能力。但是動物為什麼要進入深度睡眠呢?為什麼這樣的無動作狀態也會進化出來呢?海豚、鯨魚以及水生哺乳動物睡眠都極少，這一事實可以給睡眠的根本功能提供有用的線索。 海洋中是沒有藏身之處的。 會不會是這樣，睡眠不但不增加動物受傷害的可能性，反而是減少了這種可能性呢?佛羅里達大學的Wilse Webb 和倫敦大學的Ray Meddis 認為情況就是如此。 可以想像得出，在危險的時刻，那些由於太愚笨而不能自動保持安靜的動物，會不由自主地變得動彈不得。 這一點在食肉動物的幼獸身上表現得特別明顯。 這是一個很有意思的看法，它至少部分是正確的。

　　高中英語美文摘抄帶翻譯：Evolution and Wheels

　　In the past, evolutionary biologists contemplating the absence of wheels in nature agreed thatthe explanation was not undesirability: wheels would be good for animals, just as they are forus. Animals were prevented from evolving wheels, the biologists reasoned, by the followingdilemma: living cells in an animal's body are connected to the heart by blood vessels, and tothe brain by nerves. Because a rotating joint is essential to a wheel, a wheel made of livingcells would twist its artery vein and nerve connections at the first revolution, making livingimpracticable.

　　However, there is a flaw in the argument that the evolution of wheeled animals was thwartedby the insoluble joint problem. The theory fails to explain why animals have not evolvedwheels of dead tissue with no need for arteries and nerves. Countless animals, including us,bear external structures without blood supply or nerves - for example, our hair andfingernails, or the scales, claws, and ho rns of other animals. Why have rats not evolved bonywheels, similar to roller skates?Paws might be more useful than wheels in some situations, butcats' claws are retractable: why not retractable wheels?We thus arrive at the serious biologicalparadox flippantly termed the RRR dilemma: nature's failure to produce rats with retractableroller skates.

　　進化與輪子

　　從前，研究自然界沒有輪子的進化論生物學家都同意不能用無此需要來解釋這種現象：輪子對於動物會像對於我們人類一樣有好處。 生物學家們推論，動物沒有進化出輪子是由下述困難所致：動物身上的活細胞通過血管與心臟相連，通過神經與大腦相連。 因為一個旋轉的接頭對輪子來說是至關重要的，由活的細胞構成的輪子在第一次轉動時便會扭傷其上的動脈和神經的連結，因而不現實。

　　不過，動物未能進化出輪子是受阻於無法解決接頭問題的說法有一個缺陷。 這種理論無法解釋為何動物沒有進化出由死組織構成的而無需動脈和神經的輪子。 包括人在內的無數動物都有一些沒有血液供應和神經的體外構造，例如，我們的頭髮和指甲，或者鱗片、爪子和其它一些動物的角。為什麼老鼠沒有進化出類似於滑輪溜冰鞋的骨質的輪子呢?在某些情況下，爪子可能比輪子更有用，但貓的爪子是可以伸縮的： 為什麼不能有可以伸縮的輪子呢?這樣，我們便得出了一個被戲稱為RRR 的嚴肅的生物學悖論：大自然未能產生出有可伸縮的滑輪溜冰鞋的老鼠。

　　高中英語美文摘抄帶翻譯：Electricity

　　The modern age is an age of electricity. People are so used to electric lights, radio, televisions,and telephones that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them. When there is apower failure, people grope about in flickering candlelight, cars hesitate in the streets becausethere are no traffic lights to guide them, and food spoils in silent refrigerators.

　　Yet, people began to understand how electricity works only a little more than two centuriesago. Nature has apparently been experimenting in this field for millions of years. Scientists arediscovering more and more that the living world may hold many interesting secrets of electricitythat could benefit humanity.

　　All living cells send out tiny pulses of electricity. As the heart beats, it sends out pulses ofrecord; they form an electrocardiogram, which a doctor can study to determine how well theheart is working. The brain, too, sends out brain waves of electricity, which can be recorded inan electroencephalogram. The electric currents generated by most living cells are extremelysmall -- often so small that sensitive instruments are needed to record them. But in someanimals, certain muscle cells have become so specialized as electrical generators that they donot work as muscle cells at all. When large numbers of these cells are linked together, theeffects can be astonishing.

　　The electric eel is an amazing storage battery. It can send a jolt of as much as eight hundredvolts of electricity through the water in which it lives. ***An electric house current is only onehundred twenty volts.*** As many as four-fifths of all the cells in the electric eel's body arespecialized for generating electricity, and the strength of the shock it can deliver correspondsroughly to the length of its body.

　　電

　　當今時代是電氣時代。 人們對電燈、收音機、電視和電話早已司空見慣以致很難想象沒有它們生活會變成什麼樣。 當停電時，人們在搖曳不定的燭光下暗中摸索; 因沒有紅綠燈的指示，汽車在道路上遲疑不前;冰箱也停止工作，導致食物變質。人們只是在兩個世紀前一點才開始瞭解電的使用原理，自然界卻顯然在這方面經歷過了數百萬年。 科學家不斷髮現許多生物世界裡可能有益於人類的關於電的有趣祕密。所有生物細胞都會發出微小的電脈衝。 當心髒跳動時，把它發出的脈衝記錄下來就成了心電圖，這可讓醫生了解心臟的工作狀況。大腦也發出腦電波，這可在腦電圖上記錄下來。 許多生物細胞發出的電流都是極微小的，小到要用靈敏儀器才能記錄和測量。 但一些動物的某些肌肉細胞能轉化成一個個發電機，以致完全失去肌肉細胞的功能。 這種細胞大量地連線在一起時產生的效果將是非常令人吃驚的。電鰻就是一種令人驚異的蓄電池。 它可以在水中發出相當於 800 伏特電壓電流***家庭使用者的電壓只有 120 伏特***。 在電鰻的身體裡，多至五分之四的細胞都專門用來發電，而且發出的電流的強度大約和它身體的長度成正比。