英语听力文摘 English Digest 167、Don’t Try This at Home!

　　Don’t Try This at Home!
Here’s a hypothetical scenario¹ that is to remain hypothetical. In other words, don’t do this.
Okay. You’re cruising along a desert highway in your souped-up roadster, leaving the roadrunners in the dust. Unfortunately, you are not paying attention to the signs and zoom² off the edge of an enormous mesa. Now here comes the physics.
When you left the edge of the mesa you were moving forward at sixty miles an hour. It seems pretty clear your car will continue moving out for a considerable distance before falling.
But wait a minute, is that right?
The answer is NO. You begin falling the instant your car leaves the mesa, no matter how fast it’s traveling. If you got this one wrong, don’t worry: almost everybody does. For some reason the out-and-then-down scenario seems more sensible to us. But let’s look at it again.
Gravity is always pulling your car downward, even when it’s sitting still on the road. Send the car over a cliff and gravity doesn’t need any time to start acting³. It’s already pulling, just as it was before you left the road. But in this case, the car also has a forward velocity⁴.
That velocity will indeed send it flying outward — but not at the expense of falling downward. The result is that your free-falling car will make a graceful⁵ arc in the air, moving both downward and outward at the same time.
By the way, you had a parachute and dove out just in time. Close one.

1 scenario   

n.剧本，脚本；概要

参考例句：

• But the birth scenario is not completely accurate.然而分娩脚本并非完全准确的。
• This is a totally different scenario.这是完全不同的剧本。

2 zoom   

n.急速上升；v.突然扩大，急速上升

参考例句：

• The airplane's zoom carried it above the clouds.飞机的陡直上升使它飞到云层之上。
• I live near an airport and the zoom of passing planes can be heard night and day.我住在一个飞机场附近，昼夜都能听到飞机飞过的嗡嗡声。

3 acting   

n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的

参考例句：

• Ignore her,she's just acting.别理她，她只是假装的。
• During the seventies,her acting career was in eclipse.在七十年代，她的表演生涯黯然失色。

4 velocity   

n.速度，速率

参考例句：

• Einstein's theory links energy with mass and velocity of light.爱因斯坦的理论把能量同质量和光速联系起来。
• The velocity of light is about 300000 kilometres per second.光速约为每秒300000公里。

5 graceful   

adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的

参考例句：

• His movements on the parallel bars were very graceful.他的双杠动作可帅了!
• The ballet dancer is so graceful.芭蕾舞演员的姿态是如此的优美。