英语听力：自然百科 金星和水星旅行指南 Venus and Mercury-3

 Craters² here stretch as far as the eye can see. Although no human has ever set foot on Mercury, we have a pretty good idea of what you would see.

 

If you are walking around on the surface of Mercury, it will look outwardly a lot like the moon.

 

When you step onto Mercury, you step into a world with no real atmosphere where the sky is as black as night and ablaze³ in \ sunshine, and where a drive is an off-road track through at least a 3-billion-year-old battlefield.

 

Big craters, small craters, craters everywhere. So, that's your first impression looking at it.

 

Like the moon, Mercury took most of its battering⁴ early on. A silent witness to the dawn of time, it's been undisturbed by a single drop of rain or breath of wind ever since.

 

For the most part, the surface of Mercury has been frozen in time for periods of billions of years. And you may say that's boring, ah, but unnecessarily it's a good thing, because these planets such as Mercury and the Moon preserve a record of what was going on during this critical early period of the solar system's formation and so we can basically study it there because it's lying right \ on the surface.

 

Every stone and crater¹\ of this pockmark world has the potential to gaze back 4.5 billion years. But counting these craters is just the first challenge when it comes to revealing a planet like Mercury.

 

It's always low on the horizon so it's hard to point a telescope at it from earth. It's hard to get into an orbit around Mercury because it's so close to the sun.

 

For that reason, Mercury remains one of the most under-explored planets in our solar system

1 crater   

n.火山口，弹坑

参考例句：

• With a telescope you can see the huge crater of Ve-suvius.用望远镜你能看到巨大的维苏威火山口。
• They came to the lip of a dead crater.他们来到了一个死火山口。

2 craters   

n.火山口( crater的名词复数 )；弹坑等

参考例句：

• Small meteorites have left impact craters all over the planet's surface. 这个行星的表面布满了小块陨石留下的撞击坑。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The battlefield was full of craters made by exploding shells. 战场上布满弹坑。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

3 ablaze   

adj.着火的，燃烧的；闪耀的，灯火辉煌的

参考例句：

• The main street was ablaze with lights in the evening.晚上，那条主要街道灯火辉煌。
• Forests are sometimes set ablaze by lightning.森林有时因雷击而起火。

4 battering   

n.用坏，损坏v.连续猛击( batter的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• The film took a battering from critics in the US. 该影片在美国遭遇到批评家的猛烈抨击。
• He kept battering away at the door. 他接连不断地砸门。 来自《简明英汉词典》