(单词翻译:单击)
中英文本
Ice is not a monolith. It encompasses everything from the giant iceberg that sank the Titanic – "the most famous piece of ice in the history of the world," as the writer Mariana Gosnell observed – to the millimetre-thin stuff you find at the edges of ponds and puddles, also known as "cat ice" – ice so thin that it could support the weight of a cat, but nothing heavier. Ice is at once a byword for permanence and something whose evanescence is essential to how we use it.
冰不是一块巨石
For something so apparently simple, it can be fiendishly complex. The science of ice is maddening, and features phenomena such as the Mpemba effect, in which hot water appears to freeze faster than cold. Ice is maddening, in fact; anyone selling it for a living fights a constant battle against the laws of thermodynamics and the basic tenets of common sense, filling their freezer in the winter and clearing it out just as the weather starts to get hot. Elizabeth David writes of early importers desperately pleading with port authorities about the amount of duty payable on a cargo that was visibly diminishing in size. Perhaps the most successful ice-man of the 20th century, James Stuart, abandoned his empire for unspecified personal reasons just months after Ian Parker had profiled him in the New Yorker. Even Frederic Tudor, the 19th century Boston Ice King, spent time in prison on several occasions, having been rendered bankrupt by his obsession. With ice, crisis is a constant, a looming threat and fatal flaw inherent to every cube.
一些看似简单的东西可能实则极为复杂
So now Brexit looms – bad news for a business that exports products to the continent in temperature-controlled lorries – and Covid-19 drags on. The usual, virtual attempts have been made to keep morale high at The Ice Co during the pandemic – Friday afternoons see the doors open to The Ice-Olation Station, an online pub – but the apocalyptic subtext of the EPIA's newsletter from March this year – which promised "the certainty of a significant decline in packaged ice sales for this coming peak ice sales season" – was unignorable. Now the packaged ice industry faces a Christmas period that will feature fewer parties and, one can safely assume, less Party Ice.
因此,现在英国脱欧迫在眉睫——对于一家用温控卡车向欧洲大陆出口产品的企业来说,这是个坏消息——2019冠状病毒病还在蔓延
But it is further in the future that ice's real reckoning awaits. The Ice Co's management team talked in rapturous tones about the long, hot summer of 2018: the year the ice almost ran out, when a full lorry was dispatched from the factory every 30 minutes, round the clock, for weeks on end. And yet selling ice in a world that's demonstrably heating up presents both an opportunity and an ethical dilemma. From the hack-it-off-a-glacier days up to the present, ice has always been about mankind's relationship with the environment. Even if the industry is no longer so obviously extractive, it still leaves a sizeable carbon footprint.
不过,冰块真正的清算还要等到更久远的未来
词语解释
1.round the clock 连续一整天,昼夜不停
Rescue services have been working round the clock to free stranded motorists.
救援工作一直在昼夜不停地进行着,来解救被困的开车的人们
2.duty 关税
To impose a heavy duty on the imports of steel is unreasonable.
对钢材进口征收高关税是无道理的
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