By Paddy Clark, BBC News

媒體英語(yǔ)會(huì)帶大家一起學(xué)習(xí) BBC 撰稿人在報(bào)道世界大事時(shí)常用到的單詞和短語(yǔ)。

Background: 科學(xué)家們研究出一項(xiàng)新的方式來(lái)估計(jì)在地球上生物的總數(shù)，據(jù)統(tǒng)計(jì)一共有8百70萬(wàn)種不同類型的生物。這同過(guò)去使用的評(píng)估方式得到的結(jié)果差距很大。科學(xué)家們的發(fā)現(xiàn)將在網(wǎng)絡(luò)科研期刊《生物科學(xué)公共圖書(shū)館》上發(fā)表。

It's generally accepted that very many species have yet to be discovered, but until now nobody has devised a reliable way to find out just how many. Suggestions for total numbers have ranged from 3 million to a hundred million, but most of these have been no more than intelligent guesses.

Scientists from the Census of Marine Life devised a counting method by identifying numerical patterns linking data on known species. They reckon that there should be about 8.7 million types of living organisms, three-quarters of them animals and the rest plants.

However, since the introduction of the current classification system by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, only a million and a quarter have been catalogued.

The scientists warn that human activity is hastening extinctions, and they note a touch wistfully, that many of the hitherto unknown species may vanish before we even know of their existence.