英语听力：探索发现 2014-01-17 地平线：什么害死了我们的蜜蜂—25

 One of the first thing they look at is taking place in the grounds of University of Reading. They are hand-pollinating strawberry plants. It might seem strange, but hand-pollination¹ is something that's already been trying out in southwest China, where wild bees have been completely eradicated² due to loss of habitat. Perhaps, it could be an answer for us. -Take some pollen³ from there. 

-So here on the outside?

-Yes. These are an* that actually produce the pollen.

-OK. Where should I go?

-Let's try this flower here. So right on the center.

-Right on the center.That one?

-Yep. And you dust on there gently, and you'll rub some pollen onto the stigmas⁵ and that will help develop a fertilize⁶ and you'll start strawberry.

-I can see straightaway, though. That is not the exactly same intricate talents that bee would have.

-We are clumsy. We are clumsy.

What the bees do very perfectly⁷ is spread the pollen very precisely⁸ and evenly across the stigma⁴ of the flower, which is extremely important when it comes to the finished product.

-So as consumers, what would we like to have? Like nice, large, perfectly formed fruit. That's what we are after and you need good pollination to get that. And here's an example, a quite extreme example,  but this has been pollinated properly. Is that appetizing?

-No.

-Not really, so given the worldwide, we've got the colony pollinators. We wanted to ask the question how much would it cost to replace that service that the bees are giving. So we train up some students, and we give them paint brushes, and we time them to pollinate different crops, strawberries, apples, oil seeds, and so on. And then we calculated how many those flowers there are flowering in a year in the U.K., and putting that together, working out what would be the mininum wage we can pay them. We came out with a figure of 1.9 billion pounds a year to replace the service that bees do.

So it's pretty clear hand-pollination isn't practical and we really can't do without bees.

1 pollination   

n.授粉

参考例句：

• The flowers get pollination by insects.这些花通过昆虫授粉。
• Without sufficient pollination,the growth of the corn is stunted.没有得到充足的授粉，谷物的长势就会受阻。

2 eradicated   

画着根的

参考例句：

• Polio has been virtually eradicated in Brazil. 在巴西脊髓灰质炎实际上已经根除。
• The disease has been eradicated from the world. 这种疾病已在全世界得到根除。

3 pollen   

n.[植]花粉

参考例句：

• Hummingbirds have discovered that nectar and pollen are very nutritious.蜂鸟发现花蜜和花粉是很有营养的。
• He developed an allergy to pollen.他对花粉过敏。

4 stigma   

n.耻辱，污名；(花的)柱头

参考例句：

• Being an unmarried mother used to carry a social stigma.做未婚母亲在社会上曾是不光彩的事。
• The stigma of losing weighed heavily on the team.失败的耻辱让整个队伍压力沉重。

5 stigmas   

n.耻辱的标记，瑕疵( stigma的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Wind may affect the set of fruit by desiccating the stigmas. 风可影响座果，因为风吹干了柱头。 来自辞典例句
• Monterey's transpiration of pistils and stigmas are lowest. Monterey的柱头和雌蕊的失水速率均较低。 来自互联网

6 fertilize   

v.使受精，施肥于，使肥沃

参考例句：

• Fertilizer is a substance put on land to fertilize it.肥料是施在地里使之肥沃的物质。
• Reading will fertilize his vocabulary.阅读会丰富他的词汇。

7 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

8 precisely   

adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地

参考例句：

• It's precisely that sort of slick sales-talk that I mistrust.我不相信的正是那种油腔滑调的推销宣传。
• The man adjusted very precisely.那个人调得很准。