跟读练习: Historical Myths That Turned Out To Be Real - 通过视频学习英语口语
加载中...
1
You know the sword and the stone.
2
Magic sword and solid rock can only be pulled out by whoever's worthy of the hammer of Thor or whatever.
3
Now, you're smart, you know how this goes.
4
Obviously fake, right?
5
Well, Italy has a real one.
6
It's in a little round chapel on a hill near Siena, and it's been there for like 800 years.
7
The story goes that in 1180, a knight named Galgano got told in the vision to just give up violence, and he scoffed at that.
8
He scoffed hard.
9
He said that quitting his sword would be as easy as splitting stone, and then he stabbed the rock to make the point, and the blade sank in like butter,
10
which seems like the opposite point to what he was trying to make.
11
Doesn't that mean that quitting the sword is going to be really easy?
12
I guess we won't be seeing him and his sword together anytime soon.
13
Anyway, it's still there.
14
Handle up, buried to the hilt in the middle of the chapel floor.
15
In case you're doubting the Legitness?
16
In 2001, a chemist actually tested the thing, and the metal matches the 1100s.
17
No modern steel, no tricks, and radar found a hollow space under the rock.
18
Maybe a tomb, or maybe a colony of giant ants.
19
But probably a tomb.
20
There's also paperwork.
21
Rome opened one of its first ever formal sainthood investigations on Galgano in 1185, four years after he died, and put sworn witnesses on record about the sword.
22
And part of that hearing is still around.
23
Receipts.
24
He also died in 1181, and the earliest King Arthur's Sword in the Stone stories show up about 20 years later.
25
So the most famous magic image in fantasy might be a knockoff of a real sword, in a real stone, that you can really go stand in front of this week.
26
And nobody's pulled it out yet, by the way, so feel free to try.
27
You'll have a better chance of pulling it out if you subscribe.
28
Just saying.
29
So the ancient Greeks were just positive that one-eyed giants used to exist.
30
Homer put one in the Odyssey, eating people in a cave and apparently regular Greeks read the Odyssey like a historical textbook.
31
For centuries, everyone laughed at them.
32
But then, fossil hunters started digging on Crete, Sicily, and Cyprus, and the islands turned out to be full of skulls.
33
Big ones.
34
Like, twice the size of yours.
35
Shaped roughly like a person's, with one giant hole in the middle of the face.
36
Look at this thing, genuinely, if you see this with no additional context, there's no way you're not assuming it's a cyclops skull.
37
Well, in reality, they're dwarf elephant skulls, and the hole is the nose where the trunk attached.
38
Oh, obviously I knew that, you say?
39
False.
40
Nobody would assume that.
41
Anyway, the Greeks collected these things.
42
They had temples showing off giant bones as the actual remains of heroes and monsters.
43
Cities traded them, underpaid teenage tour guides pointed at them.
44
They became a huge part of the culture, which I guess makes a lot of sense.
45
It's either that or pissed the cyclopie off.
46
And you saw the size of their skulls.
47
China's old records list the Shang dynasty as one of its first great royal families, like 3,000 years back.
48
But scholars in the West, and plenty in China too, pretty much thought it was fake.
49
They made up kings to give the country a cool backstory, the way every country claims its founder was raised by wolves or descended from the son or whatever.
50
Cough, Italy, cough, no evidence.
51
And separately, this whole time, for centuries, Chinese pharmacies were selling dragon bones.
52
Actual dragon bones.
53
Well, obviously not, but it's not like anyone was checking.
54
It was foolproof medicine, and it worked, I think.
55
The thing you gotta understand is dragon bones were prescribed for basically everything.
56
Pharmacies move these by the ton, like Costco.
57
And some of the bones had writing carved into them, and buyers thought that carvings made a bone look damaged.
58
So some dealers just scraped the writing off before selling them.
59
What could possibly be wrong with that?
60
Well, apparently, in 1899, a scholar in Beijing named Wang Yirong gets sick and somebody brings some dragon bones from the pharmacy.
61
But before they hit the grinder, he actually looks at them.
62
There's writing on them, writing older than any modern Chinese script they could understand.
63
These dragon bones were oracle bones, 3,000 year old ox bones and turtle shells the Shang kings would carve into to ask questions from the gods.
64
I don't know how they got a response, but they kept doing it so it obviously worked.
65
So then, scholars followed the pharmacy supply chain backwards to a field near Anyang, and dug up the Shang capital.
66
Palaces, royal tombs, and tens of thousands of carved bones, which named the mythical kings in order, which matched to the old lists almost exactly.
67
Which is insane by the way, the proof of an entire dynasty was sitting in medicine jars.
68
Great for headaches I assume.
69
Now, hearken back to the dealers who would scrape the bones clean.
70
That was so messed up.
71
Thousands of years of history was just obliterated.
72
Nobody knows how much of Chinese history went through the weed whacker.
73
Atlantis.
74
A guy named Plato writes it down in 360 BC.
75
A rich, arrogant island city that annoyed the gods and sank into the sea in a single day and night.
76
People have been hunting for it ever since, and the discoveries so far include about 40 documentaries and zero cities.
77
Solid ratio.
78
I'll save you the suspense.
79
Atlantis, as written, is made up.
80
Gasp. Who knew?
81
But everything surrounding it was real.
82
So like 10 or 20 years before Plato wrote about Atlantis, an actual Greek city called Helic sank.
83
One winter night, an earthquake turned the ground to liquid, which is not ideal when your city's next to the sea.
84
The ground dropped, a wave came in, and by morning, the city, which by the way, had a temple of the ocean god Poseidon in it, was gone.
85
Along with everyone in it.
86
Greek tourists later swore that you could just sail over the spot and see statues in the water.
87
Historians actually called it a myth as well, But then, in 2001, archaeologists dug the city out of a lagoon near the Gulf of Corinth.
88
Walls, streets, coins, the whole city starter pack.
89
And it goes deeper, because more than a thousand years before Plato, there really was a rich island empire, the Minoans, and their island just blew up.
90
Santorini, one of the biggest volcanic explosions that humans have ever been around for, and it killed the entire Minoan civilization in the blast.
91
But the crazy part is, it didn't.
92
I lied.
93
Diggers later found Akrotiri, which was a Minoan town buried under all that ash, with three-story houses, paved streets, and zero skeletons.
94
Everyone got out.
95
Clean getaway.
96
That's kind of insane.
97
I guess they've learned from Pompeii.
98
Was Pompeii before that?
99
No, I think it was after.
100
Actually, I think Pompeii was later on.
101
So, everyone knows the Terracotta Army, the 8,000 clay soldiers buried with China's first emperor.
102
Those soldiers are just the parking lot.
103
The actual tomb of Qin Shi Huang is a hill nearby, and it's never been opened.
104
Actually, hold on.
105
Quick note on the man himself first, because it explains everything.
106
He spent his last years drinking mercury potions that his doctors promised would make him immortal.
107
As my more intelligent viewers have already realized, that did the opposite.
108
You know what mercury is.
109
His doctors apparently didn't.
110
So like, a hundred years after the burial, a Chinese historian wrote down what's supposedly inside the tomb.
111
Bro, it sounds like a fantasy book.
112
It has a whole miniature china, palaces, a ceiling of pearls for stars, crossbow traps rigged to shoot anyone who breaks in,
113
and of course, flowing rivers and seas of liquid mercury that used machines to keep flowing.
114
For 2,000 years, the thought was basically that he never saw it, because why would the river of poison metal exist?
115
Until scientists actually went and explored.
116
They walked the burial mound with instruments and tested the soil.
117
The ground above the tomb was brimming with mercury, way above natural levels.
118
And depending on which survey you read, it spread in a pattern that some researchers say matches where China's rivers and seas sit on a map.
119
Sick.
120
So, why is it still sealed?
121
Couple reasons.
122
1. Everything inside is fragile.
123
The terracotta soldiers came out painted and the paint flaked off within minutes of hitting air.
124
the inside might genuinely be full of mercury fumes, which means that the crossbow traps are genuinely not even the most dangerous thing in there.
125
Okay, one more detail from the historian.
126
When the funeral ended, the workers who'd built the inner tomb, the ones who knew the layout and where the traps were, got sealed inside with it.
127
R.I.P bro.
128
In the islands off Thailand and Myanmar live the Mokin, sea nomads, people who spend most of their lives on boats and know the water better than anyone alive,
129
and they carry an old myth about the laboon, the wave that eats people.
130
The story goes, when the sea suddenly runs away from the shore, when the water pulls back and the fish are flapping on bare sand, the laboon is coming to devour the land,
131
and you run to high ground or you get far out to deep water.
132
Right now.
133
Researchers thought it was folklore.
134
And then, guess what?
135
December 26, 2004, the sea off those islands suddenly ran away from the shore.
136
Tourists all over the region walked out into the exposed seabed to look at the stranded fish.
137
The Mokan elders saw it, said the word, and everyone got out.
138
Multiple, whole entire villages walked up the hills, boats turned and drove into deep water, which is exactly right because a tsunami barely bumps you out there,
139
and then the Indian Ocean tsunami came in and killed almost a quarter of a million people, one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
140
But in the Mokan villages that listen to the myth, Almost nobody died.
141
On the Surin Islands, the wave flattened the entire village, stilts, boats, everything.
142
The people were standing on a hill, watching their whole world get eaten alive.
143
Which is insane, because kids who'd heard a spooky story about a hungry wave did better than an entire national warning system.
144
Mithridates was a king in what's now Turkey, and Rome spent like 25 years trying to kill him.
145
Fair enough, he killed somewhere in the ballpark of 80,000 Romans in a single day.
146
That's a full football stadium him, but that's a different video.
147
He grew up watching his own family get poisoned, dad included, so he came up with a plan.
148
And the plan sounds like something a five-year-old invented.
149
He would poison himself a little bit every day until none of the poisons worked on him.
150
A little arsenic, a little hemlock, a little viper venom, a little expired milk.
151
Ancient writers wrote that down, and historians were skeptical for a while because are we really expected to believe a guy took poisoned for years, and then became resistant to it.
152
Except, yeah, I guess.
153
It's called mithridatism now.
154
Named after him, and for a whole whack of poisons and venoms, tiny doses really do work to become invulnerable.
155
It's basically how anti-venom gets made.
156
You dose an animal a little at a time until its blood learns the trick.
157
And there's a modern example.
158
It comes from the US.
159
Can you make a wild guess which state the dude who poisoned himself for years was from.
160
That's right, Colorado, Florida.
161
Yeah, it's obviously Florida.
162
A snake guy in Florida named Bill Host injected himself with snake venom every week for over 60 years,
163
got bitten by deadly snakes about 170 times, which for a man grabbing venomous steaks on purpose every day is honestly a decent safety record,
164
and lived to 100 years old.
165
One, zero, zero years old.
166
Hospitals flew his blood around the world to save bite victims.
167
Bro, the goat.
168
My body just gives up after gas station sushi.
169
Nowhere to keep a stomach in here.
170
My life is hell.
171
Europe kept selling a version of the king's recipe called mithridadium as a cure-all in the 1700s.
172
And we also have to talk about how he died.
173
When Rome finally cornered him, he'd tried to go out on his own terms with poison.
174
However, he'd spent his whole life making sure poison couldn't kill him.
175
And then one day, he really needed it to.
176
So he had to ask a soldier to run him through with a sword instead.
177
Awkward.
178
In 132 AD, a Chinese inventor named Zhongheng walks into the emperor's court with this big bronze jar.
179
Eight dragons around the outside, each holding a ball in its mouth, and under each dragon, a little bronze toad looking up, mouth open.
180
His pitch, when an earthquake happens, anywhere, even one that nobody in the room can feel,
181
a dragon drops its ball into a toad and the clink tells you a quake happened and which direction it came from.
182
This is like 1700 years before the seismograph, and he's proposing an earthquake alarm.
183
Zhang Hang, buddy.
184
You knew what they were going to say.
185
Half the court thinks that it's nonsense, but the emperor keeps it installed.
186
Worst case, it's a fancy vase.
187
And the empire genuinely needed it, because China is like huge.
188
Earthquakes kept flattening far provinces, and news would take weeks to crawl to the capital.
189
No report, no relief for the people.
190
People starved waiting for the government to find out that they existed.
191
And then one day in 138, a ball drops.
192
Clink.
193
An earthquake had just hit the Capitol.
194
I'm lying, nothing hit the Capitol.
195
So the scholars do what scholars do best, and start calling the machine junk and the inventor of fraud, out loud, in court, while he's standing right there.
196
It says an earthquake happened.
197
Yes.
198
Nobody felt an earthquake.
199
The dragon pointed west.
200
Oh, the dragon pointed west.
201
Well then.
202
But a few days later, a messenger comes galloping in, half dead from hundreds of kilometers west.
203
An earthquake had flattened the region.
204
on the day the ball dropped, in the direction the dragon pointed.
205
Okay, crazy, it works.
206
So, what was inside the jar?
207
Nobody knows.
208
The design is lost.
209
Of course it is.
210
Seems to be a recurring theme on this channel.
211
But modern rebuilds of what it maybe looked like with a hanging pendulum inside actually work, because a faraway earthquake sends waves through the ground that a hanging weight will feel before your legs do.
212
When Europeans reached the Pacific, they found people living on specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open water, and it blew their minds.
213
They didn't have any compasses, maps, not even like metal or anything.
214
The island dwellers said that their ancestors crossed the distances just by using their memories.
215
The official answer until the 1960s was impossible.
216
They must have drifted there by accident.
217
Storms flew them around and they got lucky.
218
But the islanders kept explaining.
219
They said that they had navigators who were trained from childhood to steer by stars, by birds, by the color of clouds over land.
220
And this is the part I love.
221
By lying down in the bottom of the canoe and just feeling the waves.
222
As waves hit land, the land bends the ocean around its shape, and apparently, a trained navigator can feel islands beyond the horizon through his back.
223
So in 1976, a crew built a traditional double-held canoe called the Hokula, and sent out to figure it out for themselves.
224
Hawaii to Tahiti, like 4,000 kilometers of open Pacific, guided by a navigator.
225
He was from a Micronesian island a couple kilometers wide, and one of the last men alive who'd had the skill.
226
He had a mental map in his head of where more than the hundred stars rose and sat, and he stayed on watch for basically a month straight at sea.
227
Zero instruments on board.
228
No compass, no charts, no little arrow on a screen telling him when to turn.
229
Just vibes.
230
And 33 days later, they hit Tahiti bang on, and half the island was waiting on the beach screaming.
231
So yeah, the drift theory died.
232
The greatest navigators in human history were these guys.
233
Anyway, if you liked this video, you'll like this one even more.
234
Subscribe,
为何这个视频是绝佳的口语练习素材？
这个讲述“真实历史神话”的视频节奏明快、用词生动，充满了日常对话中的自然表达，非常适合用来练习英语影子跟读。视频里既有像“scoffed hard”这样的口语化短语，也有“sworn witnesses”这类正式表达，能帮助学习者熟悉不同场景下的语言风格。更重要的是，故事本身充满趣味性，跟读时不容易感到枯燥，轻松就能沉浸其中，提升听力和口语的同步反应能力。
拆解自然表达，掌握地道口语
- “Well, Italy has a real one.” 这里的“well”不是“好”的意思，而是口语中常用的语气词，用来转换话题或引起注意，让对话更自然。影子跟读时要注意弱化这个词的发音，体现出随意感。
- “Doesn't that mean that quitting the sword is going to be really easy?” 反问句的使用让对话更具互动性。跟读时要注意升调，模仿说话者的疑惑语气，这样才能说出地道的英语。
- “In case you're doubting the Legitness?” “Legitness”是“legitimacy”的口语简化版，这种缩写形式在日常对话中很常见。影子跟读后要记住这种非正式表达，让自己的口语更接地气。
简单高效的影子跟读练习法
利用这个视频练习shadow speak，只需三步：首先，完整观看视频，熟悉内容和节奏；然后，逐句播放，每句暂停后立即跟读，注意模仿发音、语调和重音；最后，用录音设备记录自己的跟读内容，对比原视频，找出差异并反复练习。每天坚持15分钟，一周就能明显感受到口语流畅度的提升。想要找到更多类似的练习素材，可以访问专业的shadowing site，比如“shadowspeaks”，那里有丰富的视频资源供你选择。
记住，影子跟读的关键是“同步”和“模仿”，不要害怕犯错，只要坚持，就能让自己的口语越来越地道！
什么是跟读法？
跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。