高中英语美文摘抄带翻译欣赏

英语美文诵读有利于培养学生的英语语感,提高学生表达的准确性,丰富学生的英语口头表达内容,发展学生的英语听、说、写能力。本文是高中英语美文摘抄带翻译，希望对大家有帮助!

高中英语美文摘抄带翻译：Evolution of Sleep

Sleep is very ancient. In the electroencephalographic sense we share it with all the primates and almost all the other mammals and birds: it may extend back as far as the reptiles.

There is some evidence that the two types of sleep, dreaming and dreamless, depend on the life-style of the animal, and that predators are statistically much more likely to dream than prey, which are in turn much more likely to experience dreamless sleep. In dream sleep, the animal is powerfully immobilized and remarkably unresponsive to external stimuli. Dreamless sleep is much shallower, and we have all witnessed cats or dogs cocking their ears to a sound when apparently fast asleep. The fact that deep dream sleep is rare among prey today seems clearly to be a product of natural selection, and it makes sense that today, when sleep is highly evolved, the stupid animals are less frequently immobilized by deep sleep than the smart ones. But why should they sleep deeply at all? Why should a state of such deep immobilization ever have evolved? Perhaps one useful hint about the original function of sleep is to be found in the fact that dolphins and whales and aquatic mammals in general seem to sleep very little. There is, by and large, no place to hide in the ocean. Could it be that, rather than increasing an animal's vulnerability, the function of sleep is to decrease it? Wilse Webb of the University of Florida and Ray Meddis of London University have suggested this to be the case. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep. The point seems particularly clear for the young of predatory animals. This is an interesting notion and probably at least partly true.

睡眠的进化

睡眠是古老的。 从脑电图上看，我们人类和所有灵长目动物以及几乎所有的哺乳动物和鸟类都一样需要睡眠;甚至爬行类动物也有睡眠。 有证据显示，有梦睡眠和无梦睡眠这两种类型的睡眠取决于该动物的生活方式。 从统计上看，食肉动物比被捕食动物有更多的有梦睡眠，而被捕食动物更多地无梦睡眠。 动物在有梦睡眠时，被有效地解除动作能力，并且对外界刺激缺乏反应。 无梦睡眠则要浅得多。 我们都看到过猫和狗在显然的酣睡中，有一点响动耳朵就会竖起来。 被捕食动物很少有深度的有梦睡眠，这看来显然是自然选择的结果。 而且这一点是有道理的：当睡眠高度进化以后，愚笨的动物比聪明的动物更少在深度睡眠状态下丧失动作能力。但是动物为什么要进入深度睡眠呢?为什么这样的无动作状态也会进化出来呢?海豚、鲸鱼以及水生哺乳动物睡眠都极少，这一事实可以给睡眠的根本功能提供有用的线索。 海洋中是没有藏身之处的。 会不会是这样，睡眠不但不增加动物受伤害的可能性，反而是减少了这种可能性呢?佛罗里达大学的Wilse Webb 和伦敦大学的Ray Meddis 认为情况就是如此。 可以想像得出，在危险的时刻，那些由于太愚笨而不能自动保持安静的动物，会不由自主地变得动弹不得。 这一点在食肉动物的幼兽身上表现得特别明显。 这是一个很有意思的看法，它至少部分是正确的。

高中英语美文摘抄带翻译：Evolution and Wheels

In the past, evolutionary biologists contemplating the absence of wheels in nature agreed thatthe explanation was not undesirability: wheels would be good for animals, just as they are forus. Animals were prevented from evolving wheels, the biologists reasoned, by the followingdilemma: living cells in an animal's body are connected to the heart by blood vessels, and tothe brain by nerves. Because a rotating joint is essential to a wheel, a wheel made of livingcells would twist its artery vein and nerve connections at the first revolution, making livingimpracticable.

However, there is a flaw in the argument that the evolution of wheeled animals was thwartedby the insoluble joint problem. The theory fails to explain why animals have not evolvedwheels of dead tissue with no need for arteries and nerves. Countless animals, including us,bear external structures without blood supply or nerves - for example, our hair andfingernails, or the scales, claws, and ho rns of other animals. Why have rats not evolved bonywheels, similar to roller skates?Paws might be more useful than wheels in some situations, butcats' claws are retractable: why not retractable wheels?We thus arrive at the serious biologicalparadox flippantly termed the RRR dilemma: nature's failure to produce rats with retractableroller skates.

进化与轮子

从前，研究自然界没有轮子的进化论生物学家都同意不能用无此需要来解释这种现象：轮子对于动物会像对于我们人类一样有好处。 生物学家们推论，动物没有进化出轮子是由下述困难所致：动物身上的活细胞通过血管与心脏相连，通过神经与大脑相连。 因为一个旋转的接头对轮子来说是至关重要的，由活的细胞构成的轮子在第一次转动时便会扭伤其上的动脉和神经的连结，因而不现实。

不过，动物未能进化出轮子是受阻于无法解决接头问题的说法有一个缺陷。 这种理论无法解释为何动物没有进化出由死组织构成的而无需动脉和神经的轮子。 包括人在内的无数动物都有一些没有血液供应和神经的体外构造，例如，我们的头发和指甲，或者鳞片、爪子和其它一些动物的角。为什么老鼠没有进化出类似于滑轮溜冰鞋的骨质的轮子呢?在某些情况下，爪子可能比轮子更有用，但猫的爪子是可以伸缩的： 为什么不能有可以伸缩的轮子呢?这样，我们便得出了一个被戏称为RRR 的严肃的生物学悖论：大自然未能产生出有可伸缩的滑轮溜冰鞋的老鼠。

高中英语美文摘抄带翻译：Electricity

The modern age is an age of electricity. People are so used to electric lights, radio, televisions,and telephones that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them. When there is apower failure, people grope about in flickering candlelight, cars hesitate in the streets becausethere are no traffic lights to guide them, and food spoils in silent refrigerators.

Yet, people began to understand how electricity works only a little more than two centuriesago. Nature has apparently been experimenting in this field for millions of years. Scientists arediscovering more and more that the living world may hold many interesting secrets of electricitythat could benefit humanity.

All living cells send out tiny pulses of electricity. As the heart beats, it sends out pulses ofrecord; they form an electrocardiogram, which a doctor can study to determine how well theheart is working. The brain, too, sends out brain waves of electricity, which can be recorded inan electroencephalogram. The electric currents generated by most living cells are extremelysmall -- often so small that sensitive instruments are needed to record them. But in someanimals, certain muscle cells have become so specialized as electrical generators that they donot work as muscle cells at all. When large numbers of these cells are linked together, theeffects can be astonishing.

The electric eel is an amazing storage battery. It can send a jolt of as much as eight hundredvolts of electricity through the water in which it lives. (An electric house current is only onehundred twenty volts.) As many as four-fifths of all the cells in the electric eel's body arespecialized for generating electricity, and the strength of the shock it can deliver correspondsroughly to the length of its body.

电

当今时代是电气时代。 人们对电灯、收音机、电视和电话早已司空见惯以致很难想象没有它们生活会变成什么样。 当停电时，人们在摇曳不定的烛光下暗中摸索; 因没有红绿灯的指示，汽车在道路上迟疑不前;冰箱也停止工作，导致食物变质。人们只是在两个世纪前一点才开始了解电的使用原理，自然界却显然在这方面经历过了数百万年。 科学家不断发现许多生物世界里可能有益于人类的关于电的有趣秘密。所有生物细胞都会发出微小的电脉冲。 当心脏跳动时，把它发出的脉冲记录下来就成了心电图，这可让医生了解心脏的工作状况。大脑也发出脑电波，这可在脑电图上记录下来。 许多生物细胞发出的电流都是极微小的，小到要用灵敏仪器才能记录和测量。 但一些动物的某些肌肉细胞能转化成一个个发电机，以致完全失去肌肉细胞的功能。 这种细胞大量地连接在一起时产生的效果将是非常令人吃惊的。电鳗就是一种令人惊异的蓄电池。 它可以在水中发出相当于 800 伏特电压电流(家庭用户的电压只有 120 伏特)。 在电鳗的身体里，多至五分之四的细胞都专门用来发电，而且发出的电流的强度大约和它身体的长度成正比。