12月6日翻译

  

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 a power failure, people grope about in flickering candlelight, cars hesitate in the streets because there are no traffic lights to guide them, and food spoils in silent refrigerators.

当今时代是电气化的时代，人们平时用的电灯，收音机，电视机和电话，所以很难想象没有电的生活将会是怎么样的，当没有电的时候，人们只能在闪动的烛光中摸索，因为没有交通灯的引导，开汽车的人变得很犹豫，由于没有电冰箱而食物不能保存很久。

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

然而，人们在两百多年前才开始电力工作的简单原理，自然界很显然在几百万年前已经接触了这个领域。科学家在我们生活的地球上，发现了很多有趣且有益人类的电力秘密。

All living cell send out tiny pulses of electricity. As the heart beats, it sends out pulses of record; they form an electrocardiogram, which a doctor can study to determine how well the heart is working. The brain, too, sends out brain waves of electricity, which can be recorded in an electroencephalogram. The electric currents generated by most living cells are extremely small - often so small that sensitive instruments are needed to record them. But in some animals, certain muscle cells have become so specialized as electrical generators that they do not work as muscle cells at all. When large numbers of these cell are linked together, the effects can be astonishing.

所以生物细胞可以发出微小的脉冲电流。就像心脏跳动发出脉冲记录下来后，可以用于绘制出心电图，医生可以根据心电图判断心脏跳动是否正常。大脑也一样，发出脑电波，用于绘制脑电图。电流是靠很多极微小的生物细胞产生的——经常小到需要灵敏的工具才可以记录它们。但是一些动物的某些肌肉细胞像专门的电力发电机，这使得它们不可以像普通肌肉那样工作。当有足够多的这样的细胞聚集在一起产生的电流将是令人惊讶的。

The electric eel is an amazing storage battery. It can seed a jolt of as much as eight hundred volts of electricity through the water in which it live. ( An electric house current is only one hundred twenty volts.) As many as four-fifths of all the cells in the electric eel's body are specialized for generating electricity, and the strength of the shock it can deliver corresponds roughly to length of its body.

电鳗是一个令人惊奇的蓄电池。它可以在水中产生相当于800伏特的电流。（一般家庭用电只有120伏特。）电鳗身上差不多五分之四的细胞用于发电，而释放的电力强度大概相当于它身体的长度。