英语听力文摘 你相信有吸血鬼吗？
Who Believes in Vampires?
吸血鬼，傳說中永生不老的超自然不死生物。吸血鬼的典型形象和特征是：牙齒尖長，皮膚白皙，眼睛发红。吸血鬼害怕照射到陽光，在太陽下會烧起来变成灰。但是也认为高等级的吸血鬼可以维持在太陽下不死，只是能力有所下降，這些可在陽光下橫行無阻的吸血鬼被稱為「日行者(Daywalker)」，但仍然在「常規」的吸血鬼範圍內。由於吸血鬼的恢復能力極強，所以一般武器很難使吸血鬼致命，只有陽光能夠殺死吸血鬼。
The belief in vampires is one of the most wide-spread of superstitions; “real-life” instances of vampirism having been documented for hundreds of years.
How can all those eye-witnesses to these creatures of the night be wrong? One answer modern science gives us is that they weren’t all wrong: a lot of the written accounts of vampirism are accurate descriptions of events that actually took place. It’s just that the interpretation was flawed.
Some historians now suggest the real impetus driving belief in vampires was plague. Plague follows the same course originally ascribed to vampires: a single member of a community dies, after which the immediate family(直系亲属) withers away(1)one by one. The neighbors are the next to go, and so on. Victims of the original “vampire” exhibit a mounting fatigue, as if their very life were being drained from them.
Vampires may also have acted as a self-reinforcing myth. In the days before embalming, bodies were simply buried in porous wooden boxes. Under these conditions, natural decay causes a gradual bloating due to the release of gases. It may even cause blood to emerge from the corpse’s mouth as the lungs are squeezed — both sure signs of vampirism. To top things off, driving a stake through the chest of a body in this state will indeed cause it to emit an eerie cry — not because it is still alive, but by the sudden force exerted on the lungs.
So, people who tried to rid their towns of vampires could be said to have been acting rationally, given the limited medical knowledge of the time. The remedy never worked, of course –which is why vampires are still with us to this day.
Notes:
(1)wither away枯萎;幻灭
Doomed just like you and me two adjacent leaves, Ruojiruoli, and then wither away together.
妳我注定就像两片相邻的树叶，若即若离，然后壹起枯萎零落。
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