墨尔本PTE素材库——Cutting Carbon Pollution Could Save Health Care Money
2016/08/16墨尔本PTE素材库——Heat ID’d as Subtle Cause of Rockfalls
2016/08/16
墨尔本PTE素材库——Database Tries to Track Culture Quantitatively
中文批注
这段Podcast主要讲解了科学家们使用定量数据来追踪文化发展。数据来源于从1500年出版至今的520万本书籍，主要关注英语文化的发展。
澳大利亚语言学院整理的PTE素材库，旨在用最贴近PTE Official Question Criteria的材料，给大家提供一系列不同话题的PTE素材！让大家可以在平时练习听力、阅读、口语、写作，不至于陷入“题荒”的境地！比如这段音频，本身素材不算长，并且生词不多，但是信息量却很充足。大家可以用来练习Re-tell Lecture这个题型。在第一遍听完音频之后，可以尝试Re-tell一下这段录音的主要内容。如果有任何的疑问，可以参考文后的Transcript核对、学习。
这段音频主要的关注点有：
- 该研究采取了什么样的研究方法？
- 取得了怎样的研究结果？
- 这个结果有什么意义？
【Key Vocabulary】
quantity n. 量，数量
culturomics n. 文化经济学，文化组学
hampered adj. 受阻碍的
quantitative data 数据，数量资料
journal n. 期刊，杂志
dictionary n. 字典，词典
frequency n. 频率
Full Transcript
A database of millions of books tries to make it possible to track cultural trends through the quantities of individual words in print over the last few centuries. Cynthia Graber reports
They call it culturomics: the obvious play on the word “genomics” looks at trends in human thought and culture. But scientists say culturomics has been hampered by a lack of quantitative data. So researchers at Harvard, along with Google, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary, have come up with a new tool.
It’s a database of 5.2 million books, published since the year 1500. That’s four percent of all the books ever published, with a total of 500 billion words. The focus is on English language culture, so three quarters of the books are in English.
Among the first findings of the research, published in the journal Science [Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books”]: about, 8500 new words enter the English language annually. But many of them don’t end up in dictionaries. And about fame—actors become famous around age 30, writers around 40, and politicians around 50. But the fame of politicians can eventually exceed that of actors.
A Google tool called the Books Ngram Viewer is available based on this data—users can track the usage and frequency of a word or phrase over the past few centuries. Thus, we can watch the fall and rise of Melville. And soon the rise and fall of Snooki.
—Cynthia Graber
(Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/database-tries-to-track-culture-qua-10-12-17/)
