文档介绍：Unit 1 The Sea Gypsies
It was Christmas night in the United States a year ago that a giant wave of Tsunami hit South Aisa. It swept away at least 200,000 Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Thais and tourists from around the world on their Christmas vacations. But there’s one group who live precisely where the tsunami hit hardest who suffered no casualties at all. They are the sea gypsies of the Andaman Sea, or as they call themselves, the Moken.
They’ve lived for hundreds of years on the islands off the coast of Thailand and Burma. As reported last March, they are, of all the peoples of the world, among the least touched by modern civilization. And miraculously they survived the tsunami because they knew it ing.
It's their intimacy with the sea that saved them. They’re born on the sea, live on the sea, die on the sea. They know its moods and motions better than any marine biologist. They're nomads, constantly moving from island to island, living more than six months a year on their boats.
At low tide, they collect sea cucumbers and catch eels. At high tide, they dive for shellfish. And they've been living this way for so many generations that they've e virtually amphibious. Kids learn to swim before they can walk. Underwater, they can see twice as clearly as the rest of us, and by lowering their heart rate, can stay underwater twice as long. They are truly sea urchins.
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