【英语时差8,16】皇家格林尼治天文台（在线收听）

The Royal Observatory Neil: It’s the Prime Meridian line. Yang Li: It’s the centre of world time and space. Neil: It’s the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I’m David Rooney and I’m the Curator of timekeeping here at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Well, the Royal Observatory has been here since 1675, it’s a very old scientific institution. And it’s known throughout the world as the home of time. In fact the Prime Meridian of the world, which is the line from which all time is measured, passes through our courtyard. So we are very much the home of Greenwich Mean Time which is the basic time for the world. We are standing here at the heart of Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and we are surrounded by clocks and watches and telescopes. It’s a fantastic site that we are on and it’s full of world history and it has been around here since 1675. Yang Li: They are all in excellent condition, aren’t they? David: Yes, we look after these clocks. They need to be wound up once a day or once a week and it’s quite a long job to get around them all as we have about 200 on display. Yang Li: Are they all made in England or are they from different parts of the world? David: We’ve got clocks from around the world. Many of them were made in this country but we’ve got clocks made from as far away as Russia; we have got American clocks, European clocks and some Chinese clocks. At the moment we are welcoming 850,000 visitors a year. Later on this year we’ll be opening some new facilities: an astronomy centre and a big planetarium, and we expect that our visitor figures will be over one million a year. It’s very important that everybody who visits stands on the Prime Meridian of the world; you have one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the western hemisphere, and you stand on the line from which all time is measured.