听播客学英语 02 学校晚餐

This is one of the school meals which Martha Payne photographed for her blog. She had carrot soup, pasta with meat and vegetables and more carrot, and yoghurt. 　　

Today we visit Scotland¹, to find out what a Scottish schoolgirl thinks of her school meals. And because the European Cup Football matches have reached an interesting stage, and poor old England have been knocked out by Italy, this might be a good time to learn a new football expression.

　　Martha Payne is 9 years old. She lives in a small community in Scotland called Lochgilphead. Like many British schoolchildren, Martha has a meal at school in the middle of the day. In English, we often call these meals “school dinners”. Everyone remembers the school dinners at their school – perhaps they loved their school dinners, or they hated them, or they remember funny things about them. At my school, way back in the 1950s, we sometimes got bilberry tart² and custard for dessert. I remember that the bilberries made our tongues blue. We used to go around sticking our blue tongues out at each other.

　　Martha is interested in the food at her school. She is interested in how good it tastes, and how healthy it is, and whether it contains any hairs! A few months ago, she started to write a blog about her school dinners. She took her camera into school, to photograph her school dinner, and then she posted the picture in her blog and told us what she thought about the food. Most days, she thought the food was OK, and on some days she thought it was really good.

　　Children in other schools, and in other countries, started to read Martha’s blog. Some of them left comments to say what they thought about Martha’s school dinners. And some sent Martha pictures of their own school dinners, and Martha published these on her blog. Then Martha started to use her blog to raise money for a charity called Mary’s Meals, which provides school meals for children in poor communities in developing countries.

　　And at this point, the bureaucrats³ who run the education system in the part of Scotland where Martha lives became aware of her blog. And they did not like it. They did not want publicity⁴ about the food in their schools. Perhaps they were afraid that people would start to criticise⁵ their school dinners and say that they were unhealthy. They decided⁶ that Martha’s blog had to stop.

　　Martha’s headteacher told Martha the bad news, and Martha was sad and wrote a final blog post to say goodbye to her many readers.

　　At this point, we will make a little diversion⁷ to talk about football. In football, you try to kick the ball into the other team’s goal. It is a big mistake to kick the ball into your own goal. Of course, sometimes, by accident, footballers do put the ball into their own goal. When this happens, we call it an “own goal”. We can use this expression outside football as well. Imagine that you do something, and it goes spectacularly⁸ wrong. It has completely the opposite effect of what you intended. You hoped that it would make things better, but actually it makes things a lot worse. We call that an “own goal”.

　　Well, the bureaucrats who decided that Martha had to stop her blog did not want people talking about the school dinners in their schools. But you can imagine what actually happened. The newspapers, the radio and the television all carried stories about Martha’s blog. People wrote about it in Facebook, and sent tweets about it in Twitter. This was not at all what the bureaucrats wanted. Banning Martha’s blog was an “own goal”. A day later, after everyone had told them what idiots⁹ they were, they decided that – after all, and now they had thought about it a bit more – Martha could continue writing her blog about her school dinners, and taking pictures of them. You can find Martha’s blog at http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk. You could tell her about the meals in your school if you like, and contribute to Mary’s Meals to help provide meals for school children in poor communities throughout the world.

　　I like stories with a happy ending. Don’t you?

1 Scotland   

n.苏格兰

参考例句：

• He has been hiking round Scotland for a month.他围着苏格兰徒步旅行了一个月。
• Scotland is to the north of England.苏格兰在英格兰之北。

2 tart   

adj.酸的；尖酸的，刻薄的；n.果馅饼；淫妇

参考例句：

• She was learning how to make a fruit tart in class.她正在课上学习如何制作水果馅饼。
• She replied in her usual tart and offhand way.她开口回答了，用她平常那种尖酸刻薄的声调随口说道。

3 bureaucrats   

n.官僚( bureaucrat的名词复数 )；官僚主义；官僚主义者；官僚语言

参考例句：

• That is the fate of the bureaucrats, not the inspiration of statesmen. 那是官僚主义者的命运，而不是政治家的灵感。 来自辞典例句
• Big business and dozens of anonymous bureaucrats have as much power as Japan's top elected leaders. 大企业和许多不知名的官僚同日本选举出来的最高层领导者们的权力一样大。 来自辞典例句

4 publicity   

n.众所周知，闻名；宣传，广告

参考例句：

• The singer star's marriage got a lot of publicity.这位歌星的婚事引起了公众的关注。
• He dismissed the event as just a publicity gimmick.他不理会这件事，只当它是一种宣传手法。

5 criticise   

v.批评，评论；非难

参考例句：

• Right and left have much cause to criticise government.左翼和右翼有很多理由批评政府。
• It is not your place to criticise or suggest improvements!提出批评或给予改进建议并不是你的责任！

6 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

7 diversion   

n.转移，转向，消遣，娱乐，临时绕行路

参考例句：

• Golf is my father's favourite diversion.高尔夫球是我父亲最喜欢的娱乐。
• The magician's talk created a diversion of attention.魔术师的讲话分散了人们的注意力。

8 spectacularly   

壮观地，令人吃惊地

参考例句：

• Was he even spectacularly sick, exceptionally blind, extraordinarily degraded? 难道他真的一身病态，格外愚昧，特别堕落吗？ 来自辞典例句
• Because this fact was no recognized, the early magnetic prospecting for iron deposits was spectacularly unsuccessful. 由于不了解这个事实，因此早期为寻找铁矿进行磁法勘深，遭到了惊人的失败。 来自辞典例句

9 idiots   

傻子，笨蛋( idiot的名词复数 )； 白痴

参考例句：

• "How I hate them-those idiots in charge of the town! “我恨极了，那班混账东西！ 来自子夜部分
• 'May the Devil carry away these idiots! “但愿魔鬼把这些白痴都抓了去！ 来自英汉文学 - 双城记