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Shale is a kind of rock that started as fine mud on the floor of a sea or lake. Over a very long time the mud was pressed into stone. Because it was laid down in thin layers, it often breaks into smooth, flat pieces you can almost peel apart — like pages. It feels softer than granite; it can in your hand. People now talk a lot about shale gas: gas trapped inside this rock, which companies drill for. Though actually, shale is not slate. Slate is what shale can become if the earth cooks and squeezes it harder; slate is the one used for roofs and old school . Shale itself is the softer rock that splits. It is also not shell, even though its old English name sat next to words for husks and thin flakes.
From the word’s history
From Middle English schale 'shell, husk', from Old English sċealu 'shell, pod'; doublet of scale.
源自古英文 sċealu「殼、莢」，和 scale 同源。
組成From Middle English schale (“shell, husk; scale”), from Old English sċealu (“shell, husk, pod”), from a Germanic word, from an older root meaning “to split or cut.” That fits: the rock splits into thin pieces.
同家族的字
- scalethe thin flake on a fish or on skin — same old “husk / shell” word, not the machine for weighing
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
shalenoun/ʃeɪl/
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A shell, scale or husk; a cod or pod.
- the green shales of a bean
- Mr. Lyell next visited the red and green shales of Cabotville, north of Springfield in Massachusetts, where some of the best Ornithichnites have been procured, chiefly in the green shale.
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geographygeologynatural-sciencesA fine-grained sedimentary rock of a thin, laminated, and often friable, structure.
- As on all large green roofs, the soil is not dirt exactly but a gravel-like growing medium of granulated pumice, shales, clays and other minerals.
- Five years in, ARPA–E’s priorities have shifted, too, for the same reason. The cheap natural gas freed from shale by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) has helped kill off bleeding-edge programs like Electrofuels, a bid to use microbes to turn cheap electricity into liquid fuels, […]
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The shale oil and shale gas segment of the oil and gas industry.
- American shale’s placid responses to energy whirlwinds are becoming an enduring feature of the U.S. oil industry. In recent years, public drillers under investor pressure to be profitable have treated spiking oil prices as an opportunity to return more cash to shareholders—and lock in prices for futures sales. A wave of consolidation has swept out the privately held operators that were quick to add new barrels when prices screened higher. The upshot is that companies aren’t likely to add new rigs unless oil prices hit between $75 and $85 a barrel and stay there for several months, analysts and executives say. […] So far, U.S. shale’s temperance has been a boon to Trump. A steady increase in U.S. production has helped soften spikes in crude prices after his campaigns against Venezuela and now Iran—both major oil producers. The Energy Information Administration expects the national oil output to have hit about 13.7 million barrels a day in February, up nearly 600,000 barrels from when Trump took office. But these gains have been the fruit of technical prowess in the field, not the pursuit of growth. Shale companies have become proficient at drilling fewer but much longer horizontal wells, which allows them to trim costs and still extract more crude. They routinely frack multiple wells at the same time and do so virtually around the clock, which also saves on costs.
shaleverb/ʃeɪl/
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To take off the shell or coat of.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。