策马优课（南京）丨为什么我的鞋带总是会松？

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策马优课（南京）丨为什么我的鞋带总是会松？

Original 2017-04-25 小马驹 南京策马翻译

策马优课，带你玩转高大上英文外刊，指点超地道规范表达，四两拨千斤，晦涩难懂秒变口语日常~

大家好，这里是最新出炉的策马优课（南京）第10期栏目！Ryan老师又来和大家见面了！

本期为大家讲解的这篇文章来自《Economist 经济学人》关于日常生活谜题之一—鞋带为什么常常会松？的话题。

下面就让我们来听一听老师的深入讲解吧~

此处奉上策马优课（南京）第10期的音频，让老师带着我们将音频解析、英文文本、词汇整理一网打尽！

The science of shoelaces：A knotty problem

Three Californian engineers have found out how laces come undone

ENGINEERING brings great benefit to humanity,from aircraft to bicycles and from bridges to computer chips. It has, though, had difficulty creating a shoelace that does not accidentally come loose. At least in part, this is because no one has truly understood why shoelaces come un-done in the first place.

But that crucial gap in human knowledge has just been plugged. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Christopher Daily-Diamond, Christine Gregg and Oliver O’Reilly, a group of engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have now worked out the mechanics of shoelace-bow disintegration.

A shoelace bow is a type of slip knot that has, at its core, a reef knot. Like conventional reef knots, bows can be mis-tied as “granny” knots, which come undone more easily than a true reef does. But even a shoelace bow with a true reef at its core will fail eventually, and have to be retied.

平结 reefknot

老奶奶结 grannyknot

Walking involves two mechanical processes, both of which might be expected to exert forces on a shoelace bow. One is the forward and back movement of the leg. The other is the impact of the shoe itself hitting the ground. Preliminary experiments carried out by Mr Daily-Diamond, Ms Gregg and Dr O’Reilly showed that neither of these alone is enough to persuade a bow to unravel. Both are needed. So they had to devise experiments which could measure and record what was going on while someone was actually walking.

词汇整理:

Shoelaces 鞋带

If you undo something that is closed, tied, or held together, you loosen or remove thething holding it. 打开; 解开; 松开

A knotty problem is complicated and difficult to solve. 复杂的; 难以解决的

come loose (结等)松开；松掉

Proceedings of the Royal Society《英国皇家学会学报》

The mechanics of 运作方式

Slipknot 滑结；活结

Reef knot 平结

Preliminary 初步的

Unravel 解开; 拆散

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