TED Talk      To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life Speaker: Ben Saunders     第二课

This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He led the last team to attempt this expedition.  罗伯特斯考特

Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton, over the space of a decade, both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole, to chart and map the interior of Antarctica, a place we knew less about, 

at the time, than the surface of the moon, because we could see the moon through telescopes. 

Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted.

【选择】-What is different about the South Pole today compared to a century ago?   -People can now live there year round.

Some of you may know the story. Scott's last expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition in 1910, started as a giant siege-style approach. 

He had a big team using ponies, using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors, dropping multiple, 

pre-positioned depots of food and fuel through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole, 

where they would turn around and ski back to the coast again on foot.  【跟读】depot    n. 仓库；停车场；航空站   vt. 把…存放在储藏处   adj. 药性持久的

Scott and his final team of five arrived at the South Pole in January 1912 to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, who rode on dogsled. 

Scott's team ended up on foot.

And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished. 【跟读】

Scott's team of five died on the return journey. 

And for the last decade, I've been asking myself why that is. 

How come this has remained the high-water mark? Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot. 

【词汇】The high-water mask of sth. is... the time when it is the most successful.

No one's come close to that ever since. 

【跟读】No one had ever accomplished the journey Saunders and his partener were attempting.

So this is the high-water mark of human endurance, human endeavor, human athletic achievement in arguably the harshest climate on Earth. 

It was as if the marathon record has remained unbroken since 1912. 

And of course some strange and predictable combination of curiosity, stubbornness, 

and probably hubris led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job.

【选择】-Why did Saunders want to break Scott's record?    -He was curious, stubborn and proud. -为什么桑德斯想打破斯科特的纪录?-他好奇，固执，骄傲。(because of his personality)

Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us, and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year, 

dragging everything ourselves, a process Scott called "man-hauling." 

【选择】-How was their expedition different from Scott's?   -They had less men but better technology than Scott did.

【词义】man-hauling=using your own body to pull sth.

When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back, 

I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more than the heaviest ever NFL player. 

Our sledges weighed 200 kilos, or 440 pounds each at the start, the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled. 

Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour. 

Perhaps the reason no one had attempted this journey until now, in more than a century, was that no one had been quite stupid enough to try. 

And while I can't claim we were exploring in the genuine Edwardian sense of the word — we weren't naming any mountains or mapping any uncharted valleys — 

I think we were stepping into uncharted territory in a human sense.

【选择】-In what sense did Saunder see himself and his partner as explorers?   -They were exploring uncharted parts of themselves and humanity.-他们在探索自己和人类未知的部分。

【跟读】An area that hasn't been mapped yet is called uncharted territory.

Certainly, if in the future we learn there is an area of the human brain that lights up when one curses oneself, I won't be at all surprised.

You've heard that the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. 

We didn't go indoors for nearly four months. 

We didn't see a sunset either. 

It was 24-hour daylight. 

Living conditions were quite spartan. 

I changed my underwear three times in 105 days and Tarka and I shared 30 square feet on the canvas. 

Though we did have some technology that Scott could never have imagined. 

And we blogged live every evening from the tent via a laptop and a custom-made satellite transmitter, all of which were solar-powered: we had a flexible photovoltaic panel over the tent. 

And the writing was important to me. 

As a kid, I was inspired by the literature of adventure and exploration, 

and I think we've all seen here this week the importance and the power of storytelling.  【填空】

So we had some 21st-century gear, but the reality is that the challenges that Scott faced were the same that we faced: 

those of the weather and of what Scott called glide, the amount of friction between the sledges and the snow. 

The lowest wind chill we experienced was in the -70s, and we had zero visibility, what's called white-out, for much of our journey. 

We traveled up and down one of the largest and most dangerous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore glacier. 

It's 110 miles long; most of its surface is what's called blue ice. 

You can see it's a beautiful, shimmering steel-hard blue surface covered with thousands and thousands of crevasses, 

these deep cracks in the glacial ice up to 200 feet deep. 

Planes can't land here, so we were at the most risk, technically, when we had the slimmest chance of being rescued.  【填空】

【跟读】No planes could land on the gracier, so they were at the most risk while on the gracier.

【跟读】It is nearly impossible to see during a white-out.

【词义】During a white-out... it is nearly impossible to see.

We got to the South Pole after 61 days on foot, with one day off for bad weather, and I'm sad to say, it was something of an anticlimax. 

There's a permanent American base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the South Pole. 

【选择】-What made their arrival to the South Pole and Antarctica? -The South Pole has a permanent American base.是什么使他们到达南极和南极洲?-南极有一个永久的美国基地。

They have an airstrip, they have a canteen, they have hot showers, they have a post office, a tourist shop, a basketball court that doubles as a movie theater. 

So it's a bit different these days, and there are also acres of junk. 

I think it's a marvelous thing that humans can exist 365 days of the year with hamburgers and hot showers and movie theaters, but it does seem to produce a lot of empty cardboard boxes. 

You can see on the left of this photograph, several square acres of junk waiting to be flown out from the South Pole. 

But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history. 

And if we'd stopped there and flown home, which would have been the eminently sensible thing to do, then my talk would end here and it would end something like this.

If you have the right team around you, the right tools, the right technology, and if you have enough self-belief and enough determination, then anything is possible.