English Recordings

toefl

Even the smallest and simplest of things hold the most precious and most beautiful Miracles.
We just need to Believe. Try and and focus on the Positive.
And open not only our eyes - but also our Hearts and Souls to see them. ♥

'even though'

I like her, even though she can be annoying at times.

We say 'even though' when we want to show two contrasting or opposite ideas. Notice the following:

1. Even though he's rich and successful, he's hot a happy person.

2. ABC Printing Company is very good. So even though they charge a lot, we use the company.

I think it would be good to go to a country that speaks English, but I would maybe wait till I've gotten down a variety of vocabulary.

I'd like to practice speaking English.
I once tried practicing it with native speakers on skype.
However, they spoke English so quickly that I couldn't understand what they were saying.
I can however understand English spoken by non-native speakers.
For example, I can understand English spoken by Asians.
I think that this is the greatest obstacle to studying English.
When can I understand native speakers?

Fatal attraction, National Geographic, part 2
Darwin expanded his studies from sundews to other species, eventually recording his observations and experiments in 1875 in a book, Insectivorous Plants. He marveled at the exquisite quickness and power of the Venus flytrap, a plant he called "one of the most wonderful in the world." He showed that when a leaf snapped shut, it formed itself into "a temporary cup or stomach," secreting enzymes that could dissolve the prey. He noted that a leaf took more than a week to reopen after closing and reasoned that the interlocking spines along the margin of the leaf allowed undersized insects to escape, saving the plant the expense of digesting an insufficient meal. Darwin likened the hair-trigger speed of the Venus trap's movement—it snaps shut in about a tenth of a second—to the muscle contraction of animals. But plants don't have muscles and nerves. So how could they react like animals?
Today biologists using 21st-century tools to study cells and DNA are beginning to understand how these plants hunt, eat, and digest—and how these bizarre adaptations arose in the first place. After years of study, Alexander Vol¬kov, a plant physiologist at Oakwood University in Alabama, believes he has figured out the Venus flytrap's secret. "This," Volkov declares, "is an electrical plant."
When an insect brushes against a hair on the leaf of a Venus flytrap, the bending triggers a tiny electric charge. The charge builds up inside the tissue of the leaf but is not enough to stimulate the snap, which keeps the Venus flytrap from reacting to false alarms like raindrops. A moving insect, however, is likely to brush a second hair, adding enough charge to trigger the leaf to close.
Volkov's experiments reveal that the charge travels down fluid-filled tunnels in a leaf, which opens up pores in cell membranes. Water surges from the cells on the inside of the leaf to those on the outside, causing the leaf to rapidly flip in shape from convex to concave, like a soft contact lens. As the leaves flip, they snap together, trapping an insect inside.

A hungry fly darts through the pines in North Carolina. Drawn by what seems like the scent of nectar from a flowerlike patch of scarlet on the ground, the fly lands on the fleshy pad of a ruddy leaf. It takes a sip of the sweet liquid oozing from the leaf, brushing a leg against one tiny hair on its surface, then another. Suddenly the fly's world has walls around it. The two sides of the leaf are closing against each other, spines along its edges interlocking like the teeth of a jaw trap. As the fly struggles to escape, the trap squeezes shut. Now, instead of offering sweet nectar, the leaf unleashes enzymes that eat away at the fly's innards, gradually turning them into goo. The fly has suffered the ultimate indignity for an animal: It has been killed by a plant.
The swampy pine savanna within a 90-mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina, is the one place on the planet where Venus flytraps are native. It is also home to a number of other species of carnivorous plants, less famous and more widespread but no less bizarre. You can find pitcher plants with leaves like champagne flutes, into which insects (and sometimes larger animals) lose themselves and die. Sundews envelop their victims in an embrace of sticky tentacles. In ponds and streams grow bladderworts, which slurp up their prey like underwater vacuum cleaners.
There is something wonderfully unsettling about a plant that feasts on animals. Perhaps it is the way it shatters all expectation. Carl Linnaeus, the great 18th-century Swedish naturalist who devised our system for ordering life, rebelled at the idea. For Venus flytraps to actually eat insects, he declared, would go "against the order of nature as willed by God." The plants only catch insects by accident, he reasoned, and once a hapless bug stopped struggling, the plant would surely open its leaves and let it go free.
Charles Darwin knew better, and the topsy-turvy ways of carnivorous plants enthralled him. In 1860, soon after he encountered his first carnivorous plant—the sundew Drosera—on an English heath, the author of Origin of Species wrote, "I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world." He spent months running experiments on the plants. He dropped flies on their leaves and watched them slowly fold their sticky tentacles over their prey. He excited them with bits of raw meat and egg yolk. He marveled how the weight of just a human hair was enough to initiate a response. "It appears to me that hardly any more remarkable fact than this has been observed in the vegetable kingdom," he wrote. Yet sundews ignored water drops, even those falling from a great height. To react to the false alarm of a rain shower, he reasoned, would obviously be a "great evil" to the plant. This was no accident. This was adaptation.

for the time being

Everything is in Ann's office for the time being.

The phrase 'for the time being' simply means at this time only or not forever. Notice the following:

1. We plan to buy a house, but for the time being we're living with my parents.
2. I'm working as a waiter for the time being. But I hope to become a doctor.

I started learning Chinese last week.
However, I don't have enough time to study Chinese because I'm already studying English.
My English is poor and I think learning English is more important than learning Chinese.
So, I spend a lot of time studying English.
But suddenly, I came up with an idea.
I could learn Chinese with material written in English!
However, I think this way of learning Chinese could be very difficult for me.
Moreover, I feel that my Chinese may suck....
What do you think about this?
Is it okay for me to learn Chinese with a book written in English?

It's my third Yoga class.
I started taking yoga this month.
I go to the class twice a week.
There are some difficult movements but I feel refreshed afterwards.
I regret signing up for classes just twice a week.
I should to enroll in the class for five times a week next month!