托福听力练习：A Mission to Mars 火星新探索
国家航空航天局的两位宇航员将成为首次搭乘外国的航天飞船在外国着陆的美国宇航员。另外，美国国家航空航天局官员们正为两辆火星车的为期七个月的火星之旅做最后准备,据CNN记者约翰.泽瑞拉报道，要到火星绝非易事。
1.proposition n. 主张, 建议, 陈述，事情，命题
2.pushover n. <俚>容易打败的对手, 容易做的事情
3.slam dunk n. 灌篮
4.martian n. 火星人adj.火星的
5.mitigate v. 减轻
6.deploy v. 展开, 配置
7.geologist n. 地质学者
8.ingredient n. 成分, 因素
A Mission to Mars
And the two NASA astronauts would be the first to land in a foreign space craft and in a foreign country. NASA officials are also making final preparations to send twin rovers on a 7-month journey to Mars but as John Zarrella reports, getting there isn’t an easy proposition1.
JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT
Mars is no pushover2. This is actually not a slam dunk3 and nobody should think that it is. Thirty-four times humans have sent spacecraft to our planetary neighbor. Only 11 times have the vehicles not crashed or burnt up in the Martian4 atmosphere, or missed their mark entirely and skipped out into deep space.
DAVE LAVERY, SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION MGR
Mars may come and bite us and that’s one of the reasons that we’re flying two, just in case Mars bites us, and we lose one, we have a second basically to mitigate5 that risk and that potential.
JOHN
At the Kennedy Space Center, twin rovers are going through the final check-out. In June, two Delta rockets launched 3 weeks apart will start the rovers on a 7-month journey to Mars. After air-breaking through the atmospheres giant air bags will deploy6 surrounding the spacecraft, which, like an over-inflated soccer ball, will land and bounce on the Martian surface. In 1997, the Pathfinder Mission used air bags to successfully land on Mars. Two years later, the Polar Lander was lost during landing. That mission did not use air bags. So NASA engineers went back to a method they knew would work. At landing sites thousands of miles apart, t
these roving geologists7 will spend 90 days sampling Mars.
PETER THEISINGER, MARS EXPLORATION PROJECT MGR
They will wake up in the morning and they’ll get a message from Earth which says, this is what we want you to do today, and they’ll start doing that and then, kind of in the middle of the day, they’ll send back information on what they’ve accomplished, which we need to plan tomorrow.
JOHN
The rovers are not going to Mars looking for life but they will be looking for water, which is an essential ingredient8 for even the simplest forms of life to have existed or perhaps to still exist. John Zarrella CNN, Cape Canaveral, Florida
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