(单词翻译:单击)
Hello again, and welcome back to lulu's happy hour. 欢迎你回到璐璐的小酒馆。
I don't know how many of you have listened to yesterday's show where I did a horror episode on urban legends purely out of personal interest and to those of you who got really scared, I would like to apologize and I promise not to scare you again any time soon.(我昨天吓到大家不好意思)As it can probably tell, we are back to relaxed setting again today(今天小酒馆里又回到了原来的这种轻松的气氛) Today it is going to be the last episode of the number series.
In the first two episodes of these series, we have covered half, one, two, three, four and five and some of the related expressions and idioms.
So today we are going to wrap up with bigger numbers.So the keyword of today is again—— numbers. 今天我们是数字的最后一集。Last time we stopped at the five, so today let's start from six. The only thing I would like to mention about six is recently there seems to be a new Chinese slang goes 'six sixsix'666. In Chinese culture,we seem to associate the number six with good fortune,with a lot of nice and positive things. However,when you are speaking English,the number 666 is related to the devil, definitely nothing positive about it. 在英语国家,666是和魔鬼相关的一个数字。I always remember there were few international hotels in china that had the room 666. And as you could imagine someone from the west or from the English speaking culture would never ever want to stay in a room with the number 666 on the door. This is the cultural reminder. 所以中文说666是没问题的,但是直译到英文就会出大问题了。From six to the number seven,there is a saying that we also use in Chinese called the seven-year itch."the seven-year itch". "itch"是痒的意思,so seven-year itch 七年之痒,after seven-year's marriage or being together, you start to get a little bit tired and you start to lose your passions and interest in your partner."the seven-year itch". Another expression which seems to be more and more popular in the recent years is twenty four/seven."twenty four/seven" and this is exactly how you read it. "24/7".
Think about it ,a day has twenty four hours and a week has seven days. So if you do something twenty four/seven, this means you are doing the thing all the time. For instance,you can say they are together twenty four/seven. 如胶似漆,24小时都在一起。They are together twenty four/seven.
Going on to a number we all love in Chinese culture, the number eight.The prefix for the number eight is Oct or Oct. Can you think of some words that are related to the number eight that starts with Oct? Perhaps you can think of the word, octopus. 章鱼,八爪鱼Because it has eight tentacles, so it's called octopus.Some people would say October,hang on, October that's the tenth months of the year,right? It's not the eighth. October 不是十月的意思么?Actually, in the old Roman calendar, October was the eighth month of the year. That's why in Latin, they called it October. From eight to nine, one of the very common expression is talking about working hours. Many of you probably work a nine-to –five job, a nine-to-five job where you keep regular hours. You go to work at nine and come back at five or something similar. 朝九晚五的工作,a nine-to-five job, and an expression that links to number nine and ten, we have something similar in Chinese, nine times out of the ten. 十次里有九次都……So most of the time. this is the case, for example, we can say 'nine times out of the ten people would choose coffee rather than tea' Nine times out of ten. So most people in most situation would choose coffee rather than tea. Add one more number, we move on to eleven. In English, there is an expression 'at the eleventh hour', 'at the eleventh hour' think about it, in the twelve hours schedule, the eleventh hour is approaching the very end. So doing something at the eleventh hour means doing something at the very last moment. We can say we handed in the report at the eleventh hour 到了最后关头才交报告 or we finally made the decision at the eleventh hour.But so far we are only talking about only the smaller numbers, so let us look at two bigger numbers in the end. The first one is a hundred, thinking about a hundred, for instance,you think of one dollar, if you separate one dollar into a hundred parts and one part would be one cent. 一美分叫做 one cent. So cent/centi is the prefix for hundred or a hundredth. 是百&百分之一的前缀 cent/centi,perhaps ,what we are most familiar with is century. Century a hundred years or percent, ninety-nine per-cent, fifty per-cent, for every hundred. And when we measure the length, we say 'cm' which stands for centimeter. So this is one hundredth of a meter. 'centimeter'. One extra word here and you can probably guess the meaning of centipede. Centi-, again means a hundred, -pede is foot, so something with a hundred feet.You are right, that would be 蜈蚣,an insect with a hundred feet.Moving on to an even bigger number, a thousand, we call ten years a decade, a hundred years a century, what about a thousand years? If you still remember the year two thousand, you probably remember the word millennium. Millennium, 千禧年,一千年,and while in china we are talking about the post eighties and post nineties, 中国我们会说80后,90后,in English, especially in north America, there is the idea of the millennials, 千禧一代,this refers to people who were born between the year 1983-1999,the reason why they are called the millennials is because they are still under age in the 20th century and they became adults in the 21st century, so they are called the Millennials.It is essentially covered 80后and 90后,you see this in a lot news articles. And in the end, let me share with you something you can use when you are trying to get your partner or your kid to do something, you would say, if I have told you once, l have told you a thousand times, 好像都在我们妈妈那里或者我们伴侣那里听到过这句话。It essentially says I have told you many many times, please do something or please stop doing something. 都告诉你一千次了。For example we can say if I've told you once ,I told you a thousand times. Don't leave the lights on! All right, no that note, let's wrap up.In our last episode, all our number series we have looked at six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, a hundred and a thousand. Hopefully you have enjoyed these three episodes and learned something new about these common numbers. From tomorrow onwards, we are moving on to new topics. 最后我还想说,if you like my show, please don't forget to follow and subscribe and feel free to share my programs with your friends. I will see you next time. Bye.
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