A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
法国的鳄鱼蛋第一次没用保温箱，自己孵出来了——因为沙子整个夏天都够热。
Nile Crocodiles Hatch Without Incubator in France
About this story
Nile Crocodiles Hatch Without Incubator in France. HSK 2 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 2 Chinese listening episode that runs about 3 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 6 key vocabulary words such as 白天、晚上、第一 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.
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原文Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
English transcript reference
There is a park in France, and it is full of reptiles.
This park is big — the biggest of its kind in Europe.
Inside it there are Nile crocodiles.
Nile crocodiles come from Africa, and Africa is hot.
After a crocodile lays its eggs, the eggs need heat.
How hot?
Thirty to thirty-two degrees.
Thirty degrees is hot.
And not hot for a day or two.
For three months, every day has to stay at that temperature.
Too low will not do, and too high will not do either.
It has to stay between thirty and thirty-two degrees the whole time.
A summer in France is usually not that hot.
So in the past, the staff had to help them.
The staff took the eggs out of the sand and put them into an incubator.
Inside the incubator the temperature stays at thirty-one degrees.
Three months later, the baby crocodiles came out of the eggs.
Every year, it was done this way.
Year after year, they needed people to help.
This year was different.
This year France was hot: three heatwaves in one summer.
Fifty-two days of extreme heat in all.
Fifty-two days is the most ever recorded.
Fifty-two days is a very great many.
By day, the sun heated the sand.
At night, the sand still held the heat of the day.
So the eggs in the sand were warm in the day, and warm at night as well.
Always above thirty degrees, on and on and on.
For three months, it never once dropped.
Three months, always above thirty degrees.
And so ten crocodile eggs hatched by themselves.
No incubator, and no one helping.
The sand itself was the incubator.
It was the first time this park had hatched crocodiles on sand alone.
The director of the park said two things.
The first: this is the first time incubation happened entirely under natural conditions.
The second: this is, above all, a marker of the climate.
The first one sounds like good news.
But the word he put first came out of that second sentence.
France is now hot enough for a subtropical African animal to hatch its own eggs here.
Sand cannot talk.
The sand only recorded three months of temperature.
Think about it:
Can something that sounds like good news be bad news at the same time?
Listen again
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇白天，太阳把沙晒热 — in the daytime the sun heats the sand.
The pair with 白天: the sand stayed warm 晚上 too.
这是这个动物园第一次 — it was this park’s first time.
France 已经热到…… — France is already hot enough that…
Nile 鳄鱼来自非洲 — Nile crocodiles come from Africa.
A "keep-warm box". The point of the story is that the sand became one.
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法把 + object + 从……拿出来
The 把 pattern with a source: take the object out of somewhere.
工作人员把蛋从沙里拿出来。 — The staff took the eggs out of the sand.
不是……，是……
Corrects an assumption: not this, but that. Here it corrects how long the heat had to last.
而且不是热一天两天，是三个月。 — And not hot for a day or two, but for three months.
……以上
"Above / over" a number. Comes AFTER the number, unlike English.
一直在三十度以上。 — Always above thirty degrees.
Proper nouns
专有名词Sources
来源Free account
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