The Butterfly Effect 蝴蝶效應(yīng) 英語作文漢語對照.doc

The Butterfly Effect 蝴蝶效應(yīng)First listen and then answer the following question.Why do small errors make it impossible to predict the weather system with a high degree of accuracy?Beyond two or three days, the worlds best weather forecasts are speculative, and beyond six or seven they are worthless.The Butterfly Effect is the reason. For small pieces of weather - and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards - any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.The modern weather models work with a grid of points of the order of sixty miles apart, and even so, some starting data has to guessed, since ground stations and satellites cannot see everywhere. But suppose the earth could be covered with sensors spaced one foot apart, rising at one-foot intervals all the way to the top of the atmosphere. Suppose every sensor gives perfectly accurate readings of temperature, pressure, humidity, and any other quantity a meteorologist would want. Precisely at noon an infinitely powerful computer takes all the data and calculates what will happen at each point at 12.01, then 1202, then 12.03.The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12.01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.JAMES GLEICK, ChaosNew words and expressions 生詞和短語forecastn. 預(yù)報speculativeadj. 推測的blizzardn. 暴風(fēng)雪deterioratev. 變壞multiplyv. 增加cascadev. 瀑布似地落下turbulentadj. 狂暴的dust devil小塵暴，塵旋風(fēng)squalln. 暴風(fēng)eddyn. 旋渦gridn. 坐標(biāo)方格sensorn. 傳感器humidityn. 溫度 meteorologistn. 氣象學(xué)家Princetonn. 普林斯頓（美國城市名）New Jerseyn. 新澤西（美國州名）fluctuationn. 起伏，波動deviationn. 偏差參考譯文世界上最好的兩三天以上的天氣預(yù)報具有很強的猜測性，如果超過六七天，天氣預(yù)報就沒有了任何價值。原因是蝴蝶效應(yīng)。對于小片的惡劣天氣 - 對一個全球性的氣象預(yù)報員來說，“小”可以意味著雷暴雨和暴風(fēng)雪 - 任何預(yù)測的質(zhì)量會很快下降。錯誤和不可靠性上升，接踵而來的是一系列湍流的徵狀，從小塵暴和暴風(fēng)發(fā)展到只有衛(wèi)星上可以看到的席卷整塊大陸的旋渦?，F(xiàn)代氣象模型以一個坐標(biāo)圖來顯示，圖中每個點大約是間隔60英里。既使是這樣，有些開始時的資料也不得不依靠推測，因為地面工作站和衛(wèi)星不可能看到地球上的每一個地方。假設(shè)地球上可以布滿傳感器，每個相隔1英尺，并按1英尺的間隔從地面一直排列到大氣層的頂端。再假定每個傳感器都極極端準(zhǔn)確地讀出了溫度、氣壓、溫度和氣象學(xué)家需要的任何其他數(shù)據(jù)。在正午時分，一個功能巨大的計算機搜集了所有的資料，并算出在每一個點上12：01、12：02、12：03時可能出現(xiàn)的情況。計算機無法