英语单词大师：Heated Words

 Welcome to this week's Wordmaster. I'm Adam Phillips.

That is the sound of a wild fire. Although late September and early October usually signal the end of forest fire season in North America, 2006 has been far worse than usual in terms of the number of fires reported, and the extent of the damage they have caused. In the western United States, where the most severe fires are, it is common to have anywhere from five hundred to a thousand firefighters and other personnel working on a blaze.

Not surprisingly, firefighters have developed their own special ways of describing the fires they fight and the techniques they use.

For example, says Dan Buckley, a fire specialist at the National Park Service in Boise, Idaho, firefighters often speak of the large, out-of-control blazes called GOBBLERS.

DAN BUCKLEY: "We call it a gobbler because it's gobbling up hectares. Another one would be 'the fire is blowing and going,' or the fire is 'misbehaving.' That means the fire behavior is so extreme that it is impossible to predict where it might go."Buckley says that firefighters will often speak of fire as if it had a personality, or feelings.

DAN BUCKLEY: "Yeah. You find people who try to apply human or animal descriptions [to fire]. They call it the DRAGON, the BEAST. There are a lot of different terms that folks use."Wildfires certainly behave in strange and dangerous ways. Often, a low-grade fire is said to be SKUNKING AROUND, that is, burning low, keeping to weeds and other ground-level vegetation. But firefighters who drop their guard against such a fire can risk injury or death. According to Jeb Voskamp, a medical expert at the Rattlesnake River fire in central Idaho, SKUNKERS can become BURNOVERS in mere¹ minutes.

JEB VOSKAMP: "Burnovers are when a fire overruns a crew or a location so you can have a burnover of a camp or a burnover of a structure or you can have a burnover of a crew. It means the fire moved onto them too fast for them to retreat. In that case, they take shelter in a safety zone or a fire shelter."That's when it's an excellent idea for fighters to pull out their portable SHAKE and BAKEs, quickly! Shake and Bake is actually the brand name of flour and seasoning-filled bag for coating meats before cooking. Dan Buckley explains what firefighters mean by the term:

DAN BUCKLEY: "Shake and bake is a nickname you might hear someone call a fire shelter, an aluminum² pup tent that is used as a last resort by fire fighters if all their escape routes and safety zones away from the fire zone are compromised, they will use the fire shelters to give themselves a little bit of a chance to survive a burnover."Firefighters use many techniques to contain fires they cannot put out right away. One of these is called a BURNOUT, which can help prevent the spread of fires that could damage local logging operations or recreational areas. Merrill Saleen, the Incident Commander at Rattlesnake River, explains.

MERRILL SALEEN: "A burnout is where we back off to a road or some kind of natural barrier from the fire edge to close the gap between the fire and the natural barrier that we want to use as the control line."A lot of fire suppression activity is done by flame retardants using aircraft like this giant Hercules C-130 transport plane. After stopping to load up on fuel in what aviators³ call the PITS, the aircrafts' loading bays are filled with the red powdery retardant chemical, called MUD, thanks to hardworking ground crews called MUD DOGS.

Still, most firefighting is done by humans, on the ground, close enough to feel the heat. Dale Jablonski, a fire behavior specialist from Utah, says there are several names for the "fire behaviors" one typically encounters.

DALE JABLONSKI: "A CROWN FIRE is where it's burning actively⁴ through the crowns. GROUP TORCHING is a clump⁵ of trees that will burn up like a candle. TORCHING is one tree. 'Group torching' is maybe two or three trees."Jablonski adds that there are several ways a fire crew can attack a fire, depending both on local conditions and overall strategy. One can HOTSPOT, that is, concentrate one's forces on the most intense portions of the fire itself. Or one can PUT UP A SCRATCH LINE - surround a fire with just enough water with a fire hose to check its advance. And there is SNAGGING.

DALE JABLONSKI: "Snagging is a term we use where we are taking out dead trees that pose a threat to firefighters taking out a fire line. If you're STINGING the fire - you can't fully⁶ suppress it, but you want to KNOCK IT BACK [retard it], you'll go ahead and knock it with some water or some dirt and 'sting' it."Whatever the firefighters might call the fires they fight and the gear they fight them with, one words truly says it all: HOT! At the Rattlesnake River fire complex in south central Idaho, I'm Adam Phillips reporting.

1 mere   

adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过

参考例句：

• That is a mere repetition of what you said before.那不过是重复了你以前讲的话。
• It's a mere waste of time waiting any longer.再等下去纯粹是浪费时间。

2 aluminum   

n.(aluminium)铝

参考例句：

• The aluminum sheets cannot be too much thicker than 0.04 inches.铝板厚度不能超过0.04英寸。
• During the launch phase,it would ride in a protective aluminum shell.在发射阶段，它盛在一只保护的铝壳里。

3 aviators   

飞机驾驶员，飞行员( aviator的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Analysis on Sickness Status of 1149 Aviators during Recuperation. 飞行员1149例疗养期间患病情况分析。
• In America the whole scale is too big, except for aviators. 在美国整个景象的比例都太大了，不过对飞行员来说是个例外。

4 actively   

adv.积极地，勤奋地

参考例句：

• During this period all the students were actively participating.在这节课中所有的学生都积极参加。
• We are actively intervening to settle a quarrel.我们正在积极调解争执。

5 clump   

n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走

参考例句：

• A stream meandered gently through a clump of trees.一条小溪从树丛中蜿蜒穿过。
• It was as if he had hacked with his thick boots at a clump of bluebells.仿佛他用自己的厚靴子无情地践踏了一丛野风信子。

6 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。