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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Ray: Well so Shirley, tell me about your career as a Customs inspector1.
Shirley: Yes, many years ago in a previous lifetime, I worked as a Customs Officer in Australia. And, I don’t know if you know but that means … basically taking control or monitoring our borders and checking what comes in and out of the country.
Ray: Well that sounds pretty interesting.
Shirley: Yeah, it had its moments.
Ray: Like for example
Shirley: Well, Australia has very strict quarantine regulations so we’d often get people trying to smuggle2 in prohibited food or seeds or plants and I remember one time there was a man who had an entire sapling, a small tree strapped3 to his body. He had the roots kind of in his shoe and it was strapped to his leg all the way up his body and along his arm and of course his clothes on top so that we couldn’t see them.
Ray: Well that’s a, are now you sure he was a person and not an “ent”?
Shirley: I don’t know. He was doing a good disguise if he was in fact a walking “ent”.
Ray: That’s true, so what’d you do to this poor guy?
Shirley: We didn’t do so much to the poor guy, I think he probably
Ray: so what did you do to his poor tree then I guess.
Shirley: Well his tree was confiscated4 and would be destroyed. Probably he was fined and went to court and would have to pay a fine.
Ray: What other things do people smuggle?
Shirley: All sorts of strange things. Sometimes they smuggle things that they don’t even realize are prohibited. So for example canned foods like pate5 or canned meats are also completely prohibited
Ray: Oh boy
Shirley: Yeah, I mean a lot of those things they can hold, for example foot and mouth disease, I think, is resistant6 to very high temperatures and it’ll last for about seven or eight years. So those things are also prohibited. Birds, which is pretty sad because when people bring in something like birds or small animals the death rate for the animals is extremely high so
Ray: Goodness, yes.
Shirley: Usually only about ten percent (10%) survive and if they get caught, then they can’t have them anyway.
Ray: Can’t imagine how, if you were trying to smuggle a bird I have visions of somebody anasthetizing the poor thing and, stuffing it into their backpack or something of that sort and
Shirley: Yeah
Ray: that can’t be good
Shirley: there’s lots of imaginative ways to do that but all in all, none of them are very good for the birds.
Shirley: Yeah well, people do smuggle them in, although actually in the case of Australia I think we have a bigger problem with them going out because Australia has, I think, the highest number of venomous reptiles in the world and also different types of reptiles so people taking them out illegally is a big problem. I personally never saw any, fortunately. I actually quite like snakes but I have a healthy respect for them so I don’t really want to be, you know, engaging with them on a one-to-one personal level.
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1 inspector | |
n.检查员,监察员,视察员 | |
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2 smuggle | |
vt.私运;vi.走私 | |
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3 strapped | |
adj.用皮带捆住的,用皮带装饰的;身无分文的;缺钱;手头紧v.用皮带捆扎(strap的过去式和过去分词);用皮带抽打;包扎;给…打绷带 | |
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4 confiscated | |
没收,充公( confiscate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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5 pate | |
n.头顶;光顶 | |
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6 resistant | |
adj.(to)抵抗的,有抵抗力的 | |
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7 reptiles | |
n.爬行动物,爬虫( reptile的名词复数 ) | |
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