英语PK台 第183期:让孩子爱上动手科学

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A French-Japanese inventor and TED¹ senior fellow, he is the creator of Protei, a revolutionary sailing technology -- featuring a front rudder, flexible hull² and open-source hardware -- that allows for efficient cleanup of both oil and plastics from the sea. Currently based in London, Harada recently traveled to Japan and is designing Protei to measure radioactivity along the country's coast. The general coordinator³ of the future International Ocean Station, Harada teaches at Goldsmiths University London. A former project leader at MIT, he graduated form the Royal College of Arts Design Interactions in London and worked at the Southampton University Hydrodynamics laboratory on wave energy.

Section 1：

When I was a kid, my parents would tell me, "You can make a mess, but you have to clean up after yourself." So freedom came with responsibility. But my imagination would take me to all these wonderful places, where everything was possible. So I grew up in a bubble of innocence⁴ -- or a bubble of ignorance, I should say, because adults would lie to us to protect us from the ugly truth. And growing up, I found out that adults make a mess, and they're not very good at cleaning up after themselves.

Fast forward, I am an adult now, and I teach citizen science and invention at the Hong Kong Harbor School. And it doesn't take too long before my students walk on a beach and stumble upon piles of trash. So as good citizens, we clean up the beaches. And so it's sad to say, but today more than 80 percent of the oceans have plastic in them. It's a horrifying⁵ fact.

And in past decades, we've been taking those big ships out and those big nets and we collect those plastic bits that we look at under a microscope, and we sort them, and then we put this data onto a map. But that takes forever, it's very expensive, and so it's quite risky⁶ to take those big boats out. So with my students, ages 6 to 15, we've been dreaming of inventing a better way. So we've transformed our tiny Hong Kong classroom into a workshop.

Vocabulary:

Innocence, ignorance, stumble upon

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