英语博客-北美风情 246 The numbers are skyrocketing

 　　What goes up must come down! Things are always changing in today’s world, and that’s why we decided¹ to make an episode about things going up and going down. Especially in the news, we often hear about increases and decreases, and they use lots of different expressions to talk about this. This time, we’re talking about numbers, such as prices, statistics, and other amounts. Listen to this episode and we’ll see if our numbers start to soar!

　　Maura:These expressions are often used in business, especially talking about money or amounts of things. To be honest, when I got the idea for this episode, Harp², I was listening to the news. I heard a bunch of these expressions used on the news, and that’s what inspired this episode.

　　Harp:Oh, I like it. Yeah, you’re right. They use these expression a lot in the news to talk about things like the price of stocks going up or going down.

　　Maura:Right. They might use these expression to talk about statistics, too, like “35% of people believe this.” So that’s the kind of stuff that you hear on the news.

　　Harp:Yeah. These expressions are always about an amount.

　　Maura:All right. Let’s get to the first expression. The first expression is to skyrocket.

1 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

2 harp   

n.竖琴；天琴座

参考例句：

• She swept her fingers over the strings of the harp.她用手指划过竖琴的琴弦。
• He played an Irish melody on the harp.他用竖琴演奏了一首爱尔兰曲调。