實用英語口語(高等級) 1.Predicting the future

NEWSCASTER:

Humans can be impatient sometimes. We just can't wait to see what will happen in the future, so we're constantly trying to predict it. Wouldn't you like to know what the world will be like in the year 2100? Will technology have changed people's lives for the better or worse? Who knows?

NEWSCASTER:

But it's fun to imagine .... We're going to look at three people from history who did justthat, visionaries whose imaginations were far ahead of their time and whosepredictions, although not always accurate, were certainly always interesting. LeonardoDa Vinci is most famous for works of art such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper.However, Da Vinci wasn't just a painter, he was also an engineer, a musician, abiologist, a writer, a mathematician and an inventor. Despite living in the sixteenthcentury, Da Vinci was able to predict some of the twentieth century's major inventions,even though it would have been impossible, at the time, to have built them.

NEWSCASTER:

By studying the flight of birds, Da Vinci designed rudimentary 'flying machines'' which, inthe twentieth century, would become airplanes, hang gliders and helicopters. In hisefforts to help defend the cities in which he lived, he came up with the idea of a tank, amachine gun and a cannon. Four hundred years later, as the Industrial Revolutioncompletely changed the face of the western world. HG Wells had only to look around himto think of the possible implications for the future. Regarded as the Father of ScienceFiction, Wells became famous for his futuristic stories, such as The War of the Worlds, inwhich Martians attack London, or The Time Machine, about a man who time travels to theyear AD 802701..

NEWSCASTER:

It was in his 1901 book Anticipations, however, that HG Wells made his more realistic,and accurate, predictions about the future. He wrote, for example, that in the future everycountry in the world would have huge highways on which thousands of cars and trucksdrove back and forth. This prediction has certainly come true. Another writer whopredicted the impact technology would have on the world was Philip K. Dick.

NEWSCASTER:

Since his death in 1982,, Dick has become famous due to many of his stories beingmade into science fiction movies. In the film Bladerunner, for example, robots who lookjust like humans, begin to learn human emotions and try to find out about the origin oftheir life. In Total Recall, travel companies give you an adventure holiday by implantingsynthetic memories into your brain. And, in A Scanner Darkly, the government uses stateof the art surveillance equipment to monitor the lives of its people. It seems unlikely that we'll see UFO's invade the earth, a time machine, or robots that look exactly the same as humans - at least in our lifetime - but as the drawings of Da Vinci prove, given enough time, and the right technology, even the most fantastic of ideas can come true.

想看到飛碟入侵地球、時間機器或機器人不太可能，至少在我們有生之年不會實現(xiàn)。但正如達芬奇的圖紙所證明的，如果給予足夠的時間和正確的技術，即使是最天馬行空的想法也能成真。