五个愚人节经典英文笑话

Five Best Hoaxes of April Fool’s Day That Happened

 

A tree that grows spaghetti?

 

 

The greatest pitcher that never played baseball? 

 

The value of “Pi” is changing?

 

An animal that digs through ice by making its body burning hot? 

 

Planetary alignment causes people to levitate? 

 

Sounds unbelievable?  Many people actually believed these stories when they were made public.  Read the hoaxes in Chinese and English below.  I also would like to share with you 10 popular phrases that you can useon April Fool’s Day in Chinese.

 

10 Popular April Fool’s Day Phrases

English	Chinese	Pinyin
April Fool’s Day	愚人节	yú rén jié
Happy April Fool’s Day	愚人节快乐	yú rén jié kuài lè
April Fool’s Day is on April 1	愚人节是四月一号	yú rén jié shì sì yuè yī hào
Just kidding	开玩笑啦	kāi wán xiào la
Fool	傻子	shǎ zi
Person who has been fooled on April Fool’s Day	愚人节被愚弄的人	yú rén jié bèi yú nòng de rén
Have you ever been fooled on April Fool’s Day?	你在愚人节被愚弄过吗？	nǐ zài yú rén jié bèi yú nòng guò ma?
Do you know about April Fool’s Day?	你知道愚人节是怎么回事吗？	nǐ zhī dào yú rén jié shì zěn me huí shì ma?
When did April Fool’s Day custom start?	愚人节的风俗源于何时呢？	yú rén jié de fēng sú yuán yú hé shí ne ?
Most April Fool’s jokes are in good fun and not harmful	愚人节的玩笑大都好玩而无害	yú rén jié de wán xiào dà dū hǎo wán ér wú hài

Below are five of the best April Fool’s Day hoaxes in English and Chinese that actually fooled people.  Practice your Chinese reading skills with annotated text.  Simply click on any word you don’t know to see the pinyin and English definition.  Then read the English version to check your understanding of the Chinese text.

瑞士面条树

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest 瑞士面条树

1957年愚人节BBC新闻中说，瑞士的面条树大丰收，农民都在树上收割面条。大量观众上当受骗，打电话来咨询面条树的种植方法。BBC对此的回复是：把一根面条插在番茄酱里，然后就等着吧。

 

Spaghetti harvest 1957: The respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

虚拟棒球天才

Sidd Finch

1985年愚人节，运动画刊杂志发布一条假消息，称一个名为Sidd Finch的新人棒球投球手，能投出168mph时速的球，比当时记录高出65mph；而且这位新人之前都没有玩过棒球！他在一个西藏的寺庙里学会了投球的艺术。大批棒球粉丝因此被骗。其实这个只是文章作者瞎编的。

 

Sidd Finch 1985: Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the “art of the pitch” in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the “great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa.” Mets fans celebrated their teams’ amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. In reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.

圆周率值的修改

Alabama Changes the Value of Pi

 

1998年愚人节：New Mexicans科学技术杂志宣称阿拉巴马州要立法改变圆周率pi的值，很快这事被传上网，通过电子邮件传遍全世界。阿拉巴马立法机构因此接到无数抗议电话。

 

1998: The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the ‘Biblical value’ of 3.0. Soon the article made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly spread around the world, forwarded by email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by physicist Mark Boslough.

 

热性裸体凿冰虫

Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers

 

1995年愚人节。探索杂志著名野生动物学家Aprile Pazzo博士在南极洲发现了一种新生物：热性裸体凿冰虫。这种生物的头上有盘状骨头，血液丰富，温度很高，因此能够穿透冰层。他们以此来捕食企鹅。 Pazzo博士同时声称，经过详细调查，这种动物与1837年南极探险家Philippe Poisson的失踪有关：“对这种虫来说，他可能长得像企鹅。”探索杂志上还从来没有哪篇文章得到如此多的读者反馈。

 

Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer 1995: Discover Magazine reported that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had found a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. “To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin,” the article quoted her as saying. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.

万有引力消失

Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity

1976年愚人节，英国天文学家Patrick Moore说，早上9：47时，一个千载难逢的天文现象就要发生：冥王星会从木星后面经过，导致暂时的重力失调，抵消并消减地球上的万有引力，因此人们能体会到一种奇妙的漂浮感觉。9：47，BBC电台接到无数电话，人们声称感到自己漂浮起来了。一个女人甚至说，她和她的朋友从椅子上飘起来，在房间里荡来荡去。

 

1976: The British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.