本篇是 2018年9月 上海高级口译考试，Hydrogen Energy, Dinosaur, Six Steps to Start-up。

1809 - Clean Energy

M: Professor, in the nineteen seventies, scientists predicted that the world's oil reserves would have all been used up by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

W: Those predictions were highly exaggerated. However, in a hundred years' time at the present rate of consumption, we will have used all the available oil resources. Therefore, we need to find clean renewable fuels，especially for automobiles.

M: What other fuels are being developed?

W: We're working on alternative sources of energy such as bio-diesel, solar energy, electricity, and hydrogen.

M: What will we be filling our car tanks with in twenty years' time?

W: According to the U.S. National Engineering Academy, by 2024, half of all vehicles will be running on part electricity and part gasoline. They also predict that by 2038, all the new cars produced in the U.S. will use hydrogen.

M: That's a big change in a relatively short period of time. Can you tell us more about this hydrogen fuel?

W; Certainly. Scientists have long been fascinated by the appeal of hydrogen fuel cells. Since these devices use electro-chemical reactions to generate electricity from hydrogen, emitting only heat and water in the process they offer a particularly green source of power, especially for vehicles. What has not been so fascinating, however, is how to make hydrogen fuel cells practical.

M: You mean those hydrogen fuel cells are still in the developmental stage? W: Yes, and there are setbacks and detours. In 2009, Steven Chu, then the U.S. Secretary of Energy told an interviewer that in order for hydrogen fuel-cell transportation to work, “four miracles” needed to happen.

    First, scientists had to find an efficient and low-cost way to produce hydrogen. Second, they had to develop a safe, high-density method of storing hydrogen in automobiles. Third, an infrastructure for distributing hydrogen had to be built so that fuel-cell vehicles would have ample refueling options. Fourth, researchers had to improve the capacity of the fuel-cell systems themselves, which were not as durable, powerful, and low cost as the internal combustion engine.

M: These are enormous tasks to accomplish. But scientists are people who are making miracles, aren't they?

W: Yes, they are. Well, Steven Chu then concluded that achieving all four big breakthroughs would be unlikely. Accordingly, the U.S. Department of Energy dramatically cut funding for hydrogen fuel cells, reducing its support for various programs to nearly a third of previous levels.

M: That was really bad news for our scientists.

W: Well, it looked like bad news then. But it was not necessarily a bad thing: Established scientists saw an abrupt: decrease in funding opportunities for hydrogen and refocused their research and resources on other technologies. New technologies come along all the time, pushing aside older ones that are no longer bound for the market. For example, in the case of electric automobiles, scientists had made big breakthroughs, and the technology was finally hitting the market. In the process of making electric car batteries, the industry had met the safe storing method，the charging infrastructure and the improved capacity. But they are being solved one by one.

M: What do you think of the prospect of new energy vehicles?

W; I'm very optimistic. If you look at the development of electric cars in this country, Europe and China, you realize that science nowadays advances very quickly, and changes in technology that affect people's everyday lives can occur very fast. I wouldn't be surprised when one day the traditional gasoline-powered automobiles are replaced by new energy vehicles such as solar, electric or hydrogen-powered cars.

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问题、组织管理案例

1809 - Dinosaur

Good morning, everyone. I feel it a great honor to be invited to give a talk on dinosaurs, which I chose to study as my life career at an early age. Our young students are often fascinated with dinosaurs because they are real gigantic monsters. They are nature's best special effects, produced by evolution. But, what exactly are dinosaurs? Well, when dinosaurs were first dug up in the mid-1800's, paleontologists recognized right away that these extinct animals on one hand looked like crocodiles, but also looked like rhinos or elephants and also like birds. This three-way comparison was made right away. It was a weak consensus they ought to be called reptiles. Nevertheless, paleontologists recognized that dinosaurs had many birdlike characteristics, and by 1860, most scholars accepted birds as living dinosaurs. Then between 1920 and 1940, scholars come to view dinosaurs as being cold-blooded, gray, boring animals. However, there was no evidence for it. There was no definitive scientific paper proving that. I myself had questioned this view when I was a college student.

Dinosaurs reigned on Earth for 165 million years. During that time, there were warm-blooded mammal alive, tiny little fur balls. Now does it make sense that cold-blooded, stupid animals would reign while intelligent warm-blooded animals would have stayed small? No. The dinosaurs kept on winning because they must have been fundamentally better than those little furry mammals. This made me wonder if dinosaurs were in fact warm-blooded animals. So I started to dig up relevant evidence.

The first thing I did was to review history. I summarized the fossil history of dinosaurs and found that, for 165 million years on land, all meat eaters or plant eaters bigger than 10 pounds were dinosaurs. There was wave after wave of evolutions, extinctions, and evolutions. Every time, the big meat eaters and plant eaters that emerged were dinosaurs -- different kinds of dinosaurs, but they were dinosaurs. The fact that the dinosaurs won over mammals again and again proved they were superior to mammals. In a paper I wrote called “The Superiority of Dinosaurs”, I pointed out that the limbs of dinosaurs are not like those of a lizard, frog, or crocodile. Instead, they were extremely sophisticated, adapted for moving a large animal fast for long periods of time. You can scare a lizard and it will run very fast for 10 seconds. You can scare a horse, a zebra, or wolf and they can run for 20 minutes to an hour. Big warm-blooded animals tend to have endurance. From their leg construction, you can tell when an animal is made to be an endurance runner. I studied how dinosaur legs were constructed and concluded that they were endurance runners.

The second evidence comes from my studies on predator-prey relationships. We know that the maximum population of a warm-blooded predator is a l0th or 20th that of a cold-blooded predator in relation to the population size of their prey. This is because cold-blooded animals require much less meat. In Africa, on the average, there is 1 lion per 100 wildebeests, on which lions prey. If you made that lion cold-blooded, it would have 10 or 20 lions per 100 wildebeests. What happens with dinosaur fossil samples? You go out to dig up dinosaurs. Fossils of Allosaurus, a meat-eating dinosaur, are rare, while fossils of Brontosaurus, a plant eater, are very common. Dinosaurian meat eaters are as rare as lions and tigers and saber-toothed cats. That's exactly what they should be if dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

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问题

1809 - Six Steps to Start-up

I want to move on now and take a look at the entrepreneurial process. There are six basic steps that will put you an the fast-track to startup success and business growth when you start your businesses. In the first step, you need to prepare a unique business plan. This means looking at things like financing, marketing, equipment, location, and so on. There are thousands of details to think about when you start a new business; as a result, this stage can take months or even years. First, it takes money to start a business, so you need to be able to convince investors that your idea has value. You also need to define your product, target audience and customer acquisition plan, and you need to have more than a basic understanding of the costs involved. You can't recruit employees or sway investors-not to mention add customers--if you can't quickly make them appreciate your dream and understand how it could become a reality. There are tons of online resources that can help you polish and develop your plan，so start researching now.

Then, in the second step, you must understand the legal issues around starting a business. Even if you have a genius idea, you still have to work through some legalese to get started. First thing's first; think of a unique name and watch out for trade mark issues. Next, establish the structure as a sole proprietorship, partnership or corporation, and secure the appropriate business license. You'll also need to look into things like business insurance--you may not be required by law to have it, but in most cases it's a good idea to have at least enough to cover your assets. Not every legal concern needs a lawyer, but you need to do your research to be sure.

Step three is to set up health insurance and human resources. If you want to attract and retain good people, you have to take care of them. Start by educating yourself about what you have to do. The Small Business Administration can tell you what's required like Social Security and workers' compensation and what's optional health care insurance coverage and retirement benefits. and how this varies from state to state. But to be competitive and keep employees happy, you may want to offer more than the minimum. It is very important for your business to put together an entrepreneurial team; in other words, hiring the right people to work with you in the new business.

The next step, the fourth step is to set up your finance systems for growth. The first thing you need to do is to open a business checking account. Things to look for: competitive interest rates, mobile banking and options fir bill and payroll. But managing your business financials requires more than just an account. If you're not a numbers person, you may want to hire an accountant before you go too far down the road of setting up your systems. In many cases, an accountant can help you set up a tool to track costs and revenues so that you can do it yourself on an ongoing basis.

After that, the fifth step is to market yourself on the Web. These days a business isn't “real“ unless it has a website. So try your best to find talented designers who can quickly and cost-effectively get your job done online. It's also important to make sure you're listed in local business directories. Create your own page so you can control the message; or if your business is already listed, make sure you claim it so you can manage communications with customers and prospects.

Then, finally, you go to the sixth step, i.e., manage your customer relationships in the cloud. A recent survey found that while small businesses recognize the importance of building close personal customer relationships, 31 percent listed word-processing or spreadsheets as their only way of managing them--and another 25 percent reported having no CRM system at all. Many of these companies worry that CRM systems are too complex to set up and difficult to maintain; however, that's no longer the case. With cloud-based solutions. it's easier than ever to get a CRM solution up and running. With CRM systems, you can bring all of your customer data together in one place, making it easy to find, win and keep customers--and grow your business faster than ever.

点击阅读 《 听力训练：六步创业法 》。