教你讀懂理工英語：完整剖析生物、化學、物理英語

The Preface

When I became a freshman student of the Department of Electrical Engineering, I was deeply troubled by having to read English textbooks. The calculus textbook was not too troublesome because every page was filled with formulas. I tried to ignore the proofs and was successful in passing the examinations. There was a Chinese translation version of the physics textbook and the University Library had a large number of these Chinese version books. We all stormed to the library to borrow them. Yet chemistry was a great headache to me. There were so many English words which I had never seen before. I clearly remember that, to me, there were totally around twenty new English words in the first page. After I spent a lot of time searching through the dictionary, I had no energy to understand what this page was talking about.

I was supposed to be very good in English in high school. Yet I had trouble in reading college English textbooks. If we read our high school English textbooks, we will notice these books do not involve science. No wonder, for those students who want to major in science and technology, it is hard to read college science textbooks.

This book offers sixty short English articles on biology, chemistry and physics. Each article is coupled with a Chinese translation. This book is by no means a science textbook. High school students may casually read this book. By the time to get into college, they will find out that they are not totally unfamiliar with scientific terms. We deliberately chose the subjects in science which are of high school level. You cannot find subjects related to quantum physics, for instance, in this book.

作者序

當我成為電機工程學系的大一新生時，我對於讀原文教科書這件事極其困擾。微積分的教科書不是很難，因為每頁都充滿了演算公式。我試著忽略證明的部分，並成功地通過考試。物理學的教科書有中文譯本，而大學的圖書館也有這些中文譯本的大量藏書。我們都衝到圖書館借閱這些中譯本。然而，化學對我來說才是最頭痛的，其中有好多我不曾看過的英語詞彙。我清晰地記得，光是第一頁，就有約20個我不懂的英語生字。在我花費大量時間查字典之後，我根本沒剩餘的精力去搞懂這頁在講什麼。

我在高中時期英語算是不錯的，但閱讀大學的英語教科書對我來說卻困難重重。如果我們閱讀高中的英語教科書，會發現這些書基本上是不談科學的。怪不得對於想要主修理工相關科系的學生，閱讀大學的科學教科書是如此困難。

本書精編了60篇有關生物、化學與物理的英語篇章。每篇文章都附有中文翻譯。這本書絕不是一本科學教科書。高中生可以隨興地閱讀本書。在上大學之前，他們會發現自己熟悉了一些科學術語。我們刻意選用高中程度的科學詞彙，所以舉例來說，本書不會提到像是量子物理學的詞彙。