道地英文随手记，2015.06.18

坚持摄入原汁原味的英文的话，总是会听到、读到非常地道的英文表达方式，然而提笔忘字，到了自己要用的时候，又回到那套中文直译英文的习惯。记录这个系列，就是要聚沙成塔，改良自己的表达习惯。词都不难，关键怎么用，用在哪儿。

今天主要的材料来自University of London在Coursera上的课程Magna Carta 1215-2015。

It was predominantly rural population.

绝对性地、压倒性地，不一定要用most系列

Talking about Cathedrals reminds us of the centrality of religion to Medieval life. And that's something that obviously stretched across Europe rather than having a national boundary.

centrality是个很简单的词，但是表述“中心地位”时你是否会想到用它呢？而当表述一件事情不止于一国时，你会想到用national boundary来表述么？

On the strength of the profits of the wool trade……

凭借，依赖，你会这么使用strength吗？

Then a few more days of fine tuning and finally on the 15th of June the final terms were agreed.

微调，和中文一样，也可以用于文字、条款的微调。

King John had a bad write-up in history and he deserved it.

这个合成词可以理解为评论、报道，这里说的是约翰国王在历史上名声不好

So we can say Magna Carta, in its original form that we are marking the anniversary of, had a shelf life of just three months.

谈论某件事物的存活时间，可以用『保质期』来描述

That was partly because of the master stroke of Guala and the Marshal.

master stroke指『高招』，脑补一下吧，等同于：高，实在是高！

They saw it(Magna Carta) as a touchstone of good government.

试金石咋说？记住后面的介词是of不是for哦