英語時間｜Photo of scared marmot wins top prize【622期】

更新時間：00:00 2022-05-05
發佈時間：00:00 2022-05-05

A museum in London has held a photo contest about wildlife for the past few years. In 2019, the Natural History Museum announced that the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is Bao Yongqing（鮑永清）, a Chinese photographer from Tibet（西藏）.

There were 48,000 entries from 100 countries and regions. The winning photograph by Bao is titled 「The Moment」. Bao waited for hours at the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau（青藏高原）in China before he was able to shoot the moment in which a marmot, with its mouth agape, likely saw the fox that was chasing it.

「The Moment」 is both funny and tragic, since the sad reality is that the fox probably caught and ate the marmot in the end, but at the same time, the look on the marmot's face and its body language were hilarious.

The chair of the 2019 judging panel, Roz Kidman Cox, said, “The expressive intensity of the postures holds you transfixed, and the thread of energy between the raised paws seems to hold the protagonists in perfect balance.”

G tips

A ‘contest’ is an event in which everyone in it tries to outperform the others.
e.g A museum … has been holding a photo contest …

A similar word is ‘competition’, but that has many categories.
e.g The debate competition has two sections, Chinese and English.

Another similar word is ‘tournament’, which is a series of contests over one prize.
e.g The winner of the basketball tournament had to beat 16 teams.

A single game of football is called a ‘match’.
e.g The first football match is between Manchester United and Arsenal.

Vocabulary
marmot (n) 土撥鼠
agape (adj) 大張着嘴的
intensity (n) 強烈
posture (n) 姿勢
transfixed (adj) 呆若木雞的
protagonist (n) 主人公