英语阅读翻译-天才养成攻略

英语阅读翻译-天才养成攻略

Part car, part jet fighter, part spaceship, Bloodhound SSC aims to be the first land vehicle to break the 1,000mph barrier. One of the key challenges has been to design the wheels. How do you create the fastest wheels in history, make them stable and reliable at supersonic speeds, and with limited resources?

部分汽车、部分喷气式飞机、部分宇宙飞船，猎犬号超级汽车的目标是做世界上第一辆时速突破1000英里的汽车。而这面临的一项关键挑战是车轮的设计。如果换做是你，你会如何在有限的资源下发明出超音速汽车上用的轮子呢?

After much deliberation, and devising ideas that pushed the boundaries of material technology, Mark Chapman, chief engineer of the Bloodhound project said the team decided to take a step back and change the way they were trying to solve problems. “There’s very little we’ve actually developed that’s new,” he says, “what’s unique is how w e apply technologies.”

猎犬号项目的总工程师马克·查普曼思来想去，觉得材料还是不够好。最后他和他的团队决定退回一步、换个角度看有没有别的办法。“我们实际创新的东西并不多”，马克说：“我们的独特之处在于应用技术的方式别具一格。”

They adopted an approach called the design of experiments –a mathematical technique of problem solving through doing lots of

little experiments and then looking at the statistics all glued together. “All of a sudden, where we’d been knocking our head against the wall for maybe two, three, four months, we came up with a wheel design that would hold together and was strong enough,” h e says.

他们采用实验设计的方法做了很多的小实验，综合所得的数据再得出精确设计。“花了三四个月绞尽脑汁做尽各种实验之后，很突然地我们做出了一个大胆的设计：把各种可用的(飞机、飞船所用的)技术都融合在一辆车上，从而使它足够强大。”马克说。Lesson two: Let evidence shape your opinion

观点要用证据来证明

Like his peers, geophysicist Steven Jacobsen from Northwestern University believed that water on Earth originated from comets. But by studying rocks, which allow scientists to peer back in time, he discovered water hidden inside ringwoodite, which lies in the Earth’s mantle, and which suggests that the oceans gradually made its way out of the planet’s interior many centuries ago.

美国西北大学地球物理学家史蒂文·雅各布森曾认为，地球上的水源于彗星。但通过对岩石的研究，他发现地幔的林伍德石里面也藏有水，这一发现表明或许在N个世纪之前，海洋是从地球内部自己慢慢溢出来的。

“I had a pretty hard time convincing others,” he admits. Yet two key pieces of evidence uncovered this year seem to support his point of

view. Time will tell whether the new theories are true, and there may be further twists to the tale. “But thinking about the fact that you may be the first person to see something for the first time doesn’t happen very often,” he says. “When it do es it’s thrilling.”

“那时候我难说服别的学者相信这个。”史蒂文说。但是今年新发现的两个关键证据似乎支持了他的理论。所以，一个新理论的正确与否可能需要时间来慢慢印证，在被世人接受前可能会经历很多曲折。“但是如果你发现你是第一个发现这个规律的人，且时间又证明你是对的之后，你会倍受鼓舞的。”史蒂文说。Lesson three: It really is 99% perspiration

天才的99%确实是汗水

Sheila Nirenberg at Cornell University is trying to develop a new prosthetic device for treating blindness. Key to this was cracking the code that transmits information from the eye to the brain. “Once I realised this, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep – all I wanted to do was work,” says Nirenberg.

康奈尔大学希拉·尼伦伯格正在研究治疗失明的新型假体，其中破解眼睛与大脑的信息交流密码是最关键的。“我意识到这一点之后，就吃不下饭、睡不着觉，只想全身心投入工作。”尼伦伯格说。

“Sometimes I’m exhausted and I get burnt out,” she adds. “But then I get an email from somebody in crisis or somebody who’s getting