[自然探索] The Story of Longitude

 
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VOICE ONE:
This is Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And this is Bob Doughty with the VOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS.  Today, we tell about how people learned an important piece of information necessary for safely sailing on the oceans.  It is called longitude.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE: 
Far away from land, ships need to find their longitude so they can know where they are
On a foggy October night in seventeen-oh-seven, four English navy ships hit rocks in the Atlantic Ocean and sank.  Two thousand men drowned.  The ships had been sailing in the thick fog for twelve days.  There was no sure way to know where they were.  The commander of the ships had been worried that they could hit rocks if they were not careful.  He asked his navigators for their opinion on their location in the ocean.
The navigators did not really know.  They told the commander they thought they were west of a small island near the coast of northwestern France.
They were wrong.  Instead, they sailed onto rocks near a small group of islands southwest of England.