A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
4:46
佛罗里达花钱请人抓蟒蛇：一个人十天抓了 96 条
Florida Pays People to Hunt Pythons. One Man Caught 96 in 10 Days.
This is an HSK 5-6 Chinese listening episode that runs about 5 minutes. The full Mandarin script is shown with tap-for-pinyin and a line-by-line English translation, so you can listen and read at once — comprehensible input in the sense of Stephen Krashen's i+1 theory. It teaches 14 key vocabulary words such as 其实、主要、流行 and walks through 3 grammar patterns, each explained in English with examples. The same news story is retold at 4 difficulty levels — use the level selector above to find the version that is challenging but still understandable for you.
Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
Ten days, ninety-six snakes, ten thousand dollars.
That is the scorecard of this year's winner of Florida's python-hunting contest.
It sounds like a novelty story, but it is actually a thirty-year war that will most likely never be won.
First, what these snakes are.
They are Burmese pythons, native to Southeast Asia, among the largest snakes in the world; a full-grown one can pass five metres.
They do not bite people. Their method is to coil around the prey and then swallow it whole.
The problem is that Florida did not originally have a single Burmese python.
So how did they get there?
Mostly the pet trade.
In the 1970s and 80s it became fashionable in America to keep big snakes as pets.
A small snake was cheap — a few tens of dollars — and did not look frightening.
But it grows, and far faster than its owner imagined; once it reaches three or four metres an ordinary household simply cannot keep it.
So some people quietly released them into the wild, telling themselves this was kinder than killing them.
There is also an account that a hurricane in 1992 tore apart a local breeding facility and a batch of snakes escaped in the chaos.
The real trouble began once they reached the Everglades.
The Everglades is a vast wetland in southern Florida, warm and humid year-round — for a snake from Southeast Asia, close to a purpose-built home.
More importantly, it has no natural predator here, and it can lay dozens of eggs at a time.
No predator plus a high breeding rate, and the result is a population out of control.
So how many Burmese pythons are in Florida now?
Honestly, nobody knows the exact number.
The usual estimate is a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand, and that range is itself the point: we cannot even pin down the order of magnitude.
What have they eaten?
Studies have found that some small and medium-sized animals in the Everglades, raccoons for instance, have declined by more than ninety percent.
That is not 'fewer'. In places it is close to gone.
Local animals have no experience of living alongside a large python; they do not know what to hide from, and cannot get away.
Florida has tried many things: bounties, professional hunters working the wetland year-round, training dogs to sniff out snakes.
The python contest is the one that broke through to the public.
The rules are simple: sign up and you can join, and whoever catches the most Burmese pythons takes the top prize.
This year's contest was open for just ten days.
More than nine hundred people took part, from thirty states, and some flew in specially from Canada and Vietnam.
Over the ten days, everyone together caught two hundred and eighty.
The winner is Tom Rahill, who caught ninety-six by himself — more than a third of the entire field.
He did not turn up on a whim: he has been catching pythons for well over a decade, at a professional level.
He also founded an organisation called Swamp Apes, which takes veterans and first responders into the wetland to hunt snakes.
It sounds a little odd, but the logic holds up.
Many veterans, back in ordinary life, develop trauma responses: they sleep badly, find it hard to be around people, feel they have lost their place.
Whereas hunting snakes in a wetland has a clear task, teammates, and a result you can actually see.
Rahill's own line is that they are not there to receive charity — they are there to work.
Right, now for the question you have probably already worked out.
Two hundred and eighty snakes in ten days, and Florida has at least a hundred thousand.
At that ratio, the contest's direct effect is close to zero.
Ecologists broadly agree: a once-a-year contest cannot clear the Burmese python out, and cannot even be said to control it.
So why hold it every year?
Researchers give three reasons.
First, data: every snake handed in is measured and recorded, an important source for understanding how this species actually lives there.
Second, people: the contest sends a thousand-odd ordinary people into the wetland each year, and some of them stay on as long-term volunteers or professional hunters — and it is that group, working year-round, that actually makes a difference.
Third, attention: the overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea what is happening in the Everglades, and a contest with prize money gets it into the news once a year.
In the end, the lesson of the Burmese python matters more than the python itself.
Once a species establishes itself in a new environment, it is essentially irreversible: you can suppress it, you can slow it, but you can rarely truly eliminate it.
What Florida spends on managing this today dwarfs those few-dollar snakes of decades ago.
Think about it: if something is already certain to be unfixable and can only be held down by spending forever, would you keep paying?
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
但它其实是一场打了三十年的仗 — corrects the impression the previous sentence gave.
主要是宠物贸易 = mostly it was the pet trade.
流行养大蛇当宠物 = keeping big snakes as pets became fashionable.
常见的估计 = the usual estimate.
没有共存的经验 = no experience of coexisting with it.
职业猎人 = professional hunter. 是职业级别的 = at a professional level.
结果就是数量失控 = the result is a population out of control.
生态学家基本都同意这一点 = ecologists broadly agree on this.
The invasive species at the centre of the story.
Having none is the single reason the population exploded.
高繁殖率 = a high breeding rate. 繁殖场 = a breeding facility.
The closing idea: once a species establishes itself, the change cannot be undone.
一个物种一旦在新环境里站稳 = once a species establishes itself in a new environment.
One of the methods Florida tried before the contest.
* beyond level超纲词
"once X happens, then Y" — states a rule about what inevitably follows.
一个物种一旦在新环境里站稳，基本上就是不可逆的。
与其说……不如说 / 不是……是……
Reframing: reject the first description, offer a sharper one.
这不是变少了，是在局部地区接近消失。
他们不是来做慈善的，是来干活的。
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