美国国家公共电台 NPR StoryCorps: 6-Year-Old Shares His Obsession With Outer Space

 

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And it's time for StoryCorps on this Friday. Six-year-old Jerry Morrison is obsessed¹ with outer space. So of course his favorite person to talk to is his uncle, Joey Jefferson, a mission operations engineer at NASA. When they get together, their conversations always revolve² around one thing.

JOEY JEFFERSON: Why do you like space so much?

JERRY MORRISON: There's so much sights to see - nebulas³, hot Jupiters and supernova remnants.

JEFFERSON: Yeah.

MORRISON: They look so beautiful.

JEFFERSON: You know how I fell in love with space? My mom gave me a really cool space shuttle. You would wind it back, and then...

MORRISON: Oh, I have that.

JEFFERSON: You have that? So I remember playing with that all the time. And I wanted to become a pilot. I used to fly planes when I was 17 years old. And then after that, I started commanding spacecraft in NASA.

MORRISON: Have you ever been to space?

JEFFERSON: I have not, but it's a dream of mine.

MORRISON: I want to live on another planet.

JEFFERSON: Another planet?

MORRISON: Like, what kind of planet would you live in?

JEFFERSON: Of course everybody's going to say Mars, right? Are you going to say Mars?

MORRISON: No. Kepler-452b.

JEFFERSON: Oh, yeah. So Kepler-452b is your favorite planet. You know what we call those?

MORRISON: Exoplanets.

JEFFERSON: And there's actually, we estimate, to be trillions of galaxies⁴ out there. So there's a lot of stars and a lot of exoplanets that we got to find. And so we need people like you to keep doing what you're doing. And it's one thing to get to this place where you know all this knowledge, but it's another thing to teach a knowledge.

MORRISON: Yeah.

JEFFERSON: So you were in kindergarten and you taught the fifth graders, right?

MORRISON: Yeah.

JEFFERSON: How did you like that?

MORRISON: It was a big opportunity for me. I, like, taught all the planets. It was awesome⁵.

JEFFERSON: (Laughter) How do you feel when we visit each other and we get to talk about space?

MORRISON: It feels good. I learn from you a lot, like, more than I could imagine.

JEFFERSON: You're my favorite person to talk about space to, you know that?

MORRISON: Yeah.

JEFFERSON: And you're learning so much by yourself, too, that you're teaching me as well...

MORRISON: (Laughter).

JEFFERSON: ...And that's really cool. The more you learn, the more we realize the little things in life we take for granted are the very things that make life possible. So when I look up in the stars, I think about that.

MORRISON: That is pretty cool.

JEFFERSON: My hope is that you are always going to be doing and learning about the things that you love the most. You can do whatever you want. But in the future, I think you're going to go to Kepler-452b.

(SOUNDBITE OF BLUE DOT SESSIONS' "LAHAINA")

GREENE: Oh, StoryCorps, I love you. That's Joey Jefferson and his nephew Jerry Morrison dreaming of the stars at StoryCorps here in Los Angeles. That conversation is going to be archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

1 obsessed   

adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的

参考例句：

• He's obsessed by computers. 他迷上了电脑。
• The fear of death obsessed him throughout his old life. 他晚年一直受着死亡恐惧的困扰。

2 revolve   

vi.(使)旋转；循环出现

参考例句：

• The planets revolve around the sun.行星绕着太阳运转。
• The wheels began to revolve slowly.车轮开始慢慢转动。

3 nebulas   

n.星云( nebula的名词复数 )；星云状的星系

参考例句：

• The investigation of dark nebulas has been facilitated by a new discovery. 对暗星云的研究被一种新发现所推进。 来自辞典例句
• This suggest that the nebulas are aggregates of stars. 这说明星云是恒星的聚集体。 来自辞典例句

4 galaxies   

星系( galaxy的名词复数 )； 银河系； 一群（杰出或著名的人物）

参考例句：

• Quasars are the highly energetic cores of distant galaxies. 类星体是遥远星系的极为活跃的核心体。
• We still don't know how many galaxies there are in the universe. 我们还不知道宇宙中有多少个星系。

5 awesome   

adj.令人惊叹的，难得吓人的，很好的

参考例句：

• The church in Ireland has always exercised an awesome power.爱尔兰的教堂一直掌握着令人敬畏的权力。
• That new white convertible is totally awesome.那辆新的白色折篷汽车简直棒极了.