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The name Americans give to the warm southern part of their own country — a wide band running along the bottom of the United States, roughly from Virginia and the Carolinas in the east, down through Georgia and Florida, across Texas and the southwest, and out to southern California. 'Belt' here means a long strip of land across a map, the way a belt goes around a waist. But the word is doing more than pointing at a map, and this is the part worth understanding. It became common from the 1960s because something big was happening: people and companies were leaving the cold, older industrial cities of the north and moving south. They went for the warm winters, the cheaper houses, the lower taxes, and the new jobs. Cities like Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas and Miami grew . So when a writer says 'the Sunbelt', they usually mean this whole story of growth and movement, not just a region with nice weather. Its opposite is the Rust Belt — the older manufacturing states around the Great Lakes, named for the rusting factories left behind when that work went away or closed down. The two words are almost always understood against each other. You meet 'Sunbelt' most in news writing, business writing, and books about American and population — it is not a word people use to say where they live. Nobody answers 'Where are you from?' with 'the Sunbelt'. There are no fixed borders. Different writers include different states, and it is normal to see slightly different maps. Usually capitalised, and written both as 'Sunbelt' and 'Sun Belt'.
陽光帶（美國南部與西南部溫暖各州的統稱，與衰退的「鏽帶 Rust Belt」相對）
組成sun + belt. A belt on a map means a long strip of land sharing one feature, and English has several: the corn belt, the cotton belt, the Bible belt, the Rust Belt. Here the shared feature is sunshine — and, behind that, everything that came with it.
同家族的字
- Rust Beltthe same map-belt pattern, and the Sunbelt's opposite: the old northern factory states
- Bible Beltanother American belt — the southern states known for strong Christian faith
- beltthe plain word: a strip around a waist, stretched to mean a strip across a map
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，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。
sunbeltnoun
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An area or belt of land that receives a lot of sun; specifically, a zone comprising the southern and western states of the USA where the weather is typically sunny, characterised by an influx of population from the north and often typified as having conservative political views.
- Anglos to whom I talked in Miami […] persisted in the related illusions that the city was small, manageable, prosperous in a predictable broad-based way, southern in a progressive sunbelt way, American, and belonged to them.
- Lack of water, fertile land, productive mines, and heavy industry made it an unlikely candidate. But the same forces which forged the new west and lured millions of people to the sunbelt, also boosted Las Vegas.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。