研究生 英语阅读教程 第三版 课文 Lesson 6

Lesson 1 Spillonomics: Underestimating Risk[1] In retrospect, the pattern seems clear. Years before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money. An explosion at a Texas refinery killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A. BakerⅢ, the former secretary of state, said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year, a corroded pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay. None other than Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas and a global-warming skeptic, upbraided BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues”.[2] Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may. But there also appears to have been another factor, one more universally human, at work. The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely—but that would bring enormous costs.[3] Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to consider what BP executives must be thinking today. Surely, given the expense of the clean-up and the hit to BP’s reputation, the executives wish they could go back and spend the extra money to make Deepwater Horizon safer. That they did not suggests that they figured the rig would be fine an itwas.[4]For all the criticism BP executives may deserve, they are far from the only people to struggle with such low-probability, high-cost events. Nearly everyone does. “These are precisely the kinds of events that are hard for us as humans to get our hands around and react to rationally, ”Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard, says. We make two basic—and opposite—types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to imagine, we tend to underestimate its likelihood. This is the proverbial black swan. Most of the people running Deepwater Horizon probably never had a rig explode on them. So they assumed it would not happen , at least not to them.[5] Similarly, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble because it had never been in one before. Wall Street traders took the same view and built mathematical models that did not allow for the possibility that house prices would decline. And may home buyers signed up for unaffordable mortgages, believing they could refinance or sell the house once its price rose. That’s what house prices did, it seemed.[6]On the other hand, when an unlikely event is all too easy to imagine, we often go in the opposite direction and overestimate the odds. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans canceled plane trips and took to the road. There were no terrorist attacks in this country in 2002, yet theadditional driving apparently led to an increase in traffic fatalities.[7]When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so. Yet in the case of Deepwater Horizon, government policy actually went the other way. It encouraged BP to underestimate the odds of a catastrophe.[8] In a little-noticed provision in a 1990 law passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress capped a spiller’s liability over and above cleanup costs at $7500 million for a rig spill. Even if the party is on the hook for only $7500 million. (In this instance, BP has agreed to waive the cap for claims it deems legitimate. ) Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economist who runs the Hamilton Project in Washington, says the law fundamentally distorts a company’s decision making. Without the cap, executives would have to weigh the possible revenue from a well against the cost of drilling there and the risk of damage. With the cap, they can largely ignore the potential damage beyond cleanup costs. So they end up drilling wells even in places where the damage can be horrific, like close to a shoreline. To put it another way, human frailty helped BP’s executives underestimate the chance of a low-probability, high-cost event. Federal law helped them underestimate the costs.[9] In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Congress and Obama administration will no doubt be tempted to pass laws meant to reducethe risks of another deep-water disaster. Certainly there are some sensible steps they can take, like lifting the liability cap and freeing regulators from the sway of industry. But it would be foolish to think that the only risks we are still underestimating are the ones that have suddenly become salient.[10]The big financial risk is no longer a housing bubble. Instead, it may be the huge deficits that the growth of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will cause in coming years—and the possibility that lender will eventually become nervous about extending credit to Washington. True, some economists and policy makers insist the country should not get worked up about this possibility, because lenders have never soured on the Unite States government before and show no signs of doing so now. but isn’t that reminiscent of the old Bernanke-Greenspan tune about the housing market?[11]Then, of course, there are the greenhouse gases that oil wells ( among other things) send into the atmosphere even when the wells function properly. Scientists say the buildup of these gases is already likely to warm the planet by at least three degrees over the next century and cause droughts, storms and more ice-cap melting. The researcher’s estimates have risen recently, too, and it is also possible the planet could get around 12 degree hotter. That kind of could flood major cities and cause parts of Antarctica to collapse.[12]Nothing like that has ever happened before. Even imagining it is difficult. It is much easier to hope that the odds of such an outcome are vanishingly small. In fact, it’s only natural to have this hope. But that doesn’t make it wise.。

TEXT AUnder the bombs: 19451945：在炮火攻击下1 Today, when I look back, I'm surprised that I recall the beginning so vividly; it's still clearly fixed in my mind with all its coloring and emotional intensity. It begins with my suddenly noticing 12 distant silver points in the clear brilliant sky filled with an unfamiliar abnormal hum. I'm seven years old, standing in a meadow, and staring at the points barely moving across the sky.如今，当我回首往事，我很惊讶我居然能如此生动地回忆起轰炸开始的情况，那天的色彩和紧张的情绪仍然清晰地印在我的脑海中。

那天，我突然发现在晴朗的天空中出现了12个银色的小点儿，离我很远，发出不正常的嗡嗡声，这种声音我以前从来没听过。

那年我七岁，就这样站在一片草地上，盯着天空中几乎不怎么移动的小点儿。

2 Suddenly, nearby, at the edge of the forest, there's the tremendous roar of bombs exploding. From my standpoint, I see gigantic fountains of earth spraying upward. I want to run toward this extraordinary spectacle; it terrorizes and fascinates me. I have not yet grown accustomed to war and can't relate into a single chain of causes and effects these airplanes, the roar of the bombs, the earth radiating out from the forest, and my seemingly inevitable death. Unable to conceive of the danger, I start running toward the forest, in the direction of the falling bombs. But a hand claws at me and tugs me to the ground. "Stay down," I hear my mother's trembling voice, "Don't move!" And I remember that my mother, pressing me to her, is saying something that I don't yet know exists, whose meaning I don't understand: That way is death.突然，就在附近，森林的边缘，我听到有巨大的炸弹爆炸的声音。

研究生英语阅读教程（基础级）第三次修订版课文参考译文第一课A世界英语：是福是祸？汤姆•麦克阿瑟（1）2000 年，语言学家、威尔士人格兰维尔•普莱斯，在他编辑的《英国与爱尔兰的语言》中发表了如下的观点：因为英语是个杀手。

正是英语，导致坎伯兰语、康沃尔语、诺恩语和马恩语灭亡。

在那些岛屿的部分地区，还有较大规模的群体讲比英语更古老的当地语言。

但是，现在日常生活中，英语无处不在，人人—或者说—几乎人人都懂英语。

英语威胁到那三种遗留的凯尔特语：爱尔兰语、苏格兰盖尔语和威尔士语，……所以必须意识到，从长远来看，这三种语言的未来……十分危险。

（第141 页）在此几年前，1992 年，英国学者罗伯特．菲利普森（他如今在丹麦工作）在牛津大学出版了一本书，名为《语言领域的帝国主义》。

在书中，他指出，主要的英语国家、世界范围内英语教学产业，尤其是英国文化委员会，实施的是语言扩张政策。

他还把这种政策和他所称的“语言歧视”（这个情况类似于“种族歧视”、“性别歧视”）联系在一起。

在菲利普森看来，以“白人”为主的英语世界中，起主导作用的机构和个人，或故意或无意，鼓励或者至少容忍英语大肆扩张，他们当然不反对英语的扩张。

英语的扩张开始于大约三个世纪以前，最初表现形式是经济与殖民扩张。

（2）菲利普森本人为英国文化委员会工作过几年。

和他一样，还有一些母语为英语的学者，也试图强调英语作为世界语言的危险。

在过去几十年里，人们从三个群体的角度，就英语的国际化进行了广泛的讨论。

第一个群体是ENL 国家，英语是母语（这个群体也叫“内部圈”）；第二个群体是ESL 国家，英语是第二语言（“外部圈”）；第三个群体是EFL 国家，英语是外语（“扩展圈”）。

二十世纪八十年代，这些词语开始流行。

从那时起，这第三圈实际上已扩展到全球范围。

（3）从来没有像英语这样?语言，这既有利也有弊。

曾经有许多“世界语言”，例如：阿拉伯语、汉语、希腊语、拉丁语和梵语。

总的来说，我们现在认为这些语言比较好，经常以赞美、感激的语气谈论与它们相关的文化以及它们给世界带来的变化。

Lesson 11 Mind over machineCarl zimmerSome monkey business in a Duke University lab suggests we’ll soon be able to move artificial limbs, control robotic soldiers, and communicate across thousands of miles—using nothing but our thoughts.[1] Something incredible is happening in a lab at Duke University,s Center for Neuroengineering—though ,at first ,it is hard to see just what it is. A robot arm swings from side to side, eerily lifelike, as if it extends its mechanical hand. The hand clamp shuts and squeezes for a few seconds , then relaxes its grip and pulls back to shoot out again in a new direction. OK ,nothing particularly astonishing here—robot arms , after all , do everything from building our cars to sequencing our DNA . But those robot arms are operated by software ; the arm at Duke follows commands of s different sort. To see where those commands are coming from, you have to follow a tangled trail of the lab and down the hall to another, smaller room.[2] Inside this room sits a motionless macaque monkey.[3] The monkey is strapped in a chair ,staring at a computer screen . On the screen a black dot moves from side to side ; when it stops ,a circle widens around it. You would not know just from watching , but that dot represents the movement of the arm in the other room . The circle indicates the squeezing of its robotic grip ; as the force of the grip increase ,the circle widens . In other words , the dot an the circle are responding to the robot arm’s movements . And the arm ? It is being directed by monkey .[4] Did i mention the monkey is motionless?[5] Take another look at those cables : They snake into the back of the computer and then out again ,terminating in a cap on the monkey’s head ,where they receive signals from hundreds of electrodes buried in its brain. The monkey is directing the robot with its thoughts.[6] For decads scientist have pondered ,speculated on ，and pooh-poohed the possibility of a direct interface between a brain and a machine —only in the late 1990s did scientists start learning enough about the brain and signal-processing to offer glimmers of hope that this science-fiction vision could become reality . Since then ,insights into the working of the brain —how it encodes commands for the body , and how it learns to improve those commands over time —have piled up at an astonishing pace ,and the researchers at Duke studying the maceque and the robotic arm are at the leading edge of the technology .“This goes way beyond what’s been done before,”says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis , co-director of the Center for Neurogengineering. Indeed , the performance of the center’s monkeys suggests that a mind-machine merger could become a reality in humans very soon .[7] Nicolelis and his team are confident that in five years they will be able to build a robot arm that can be controlled by a person with electrode implanted in his or her brain . Ther chief focus is medical —they aim to give people with paralyzed limbs a new tool to make everyday life easier. But the success they and other groups of scientists are achieving has triggered broader excitement in both the public and private sectors . The defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already doled out $24 million to various brain-machine research efforts across the Unite d States , and Duke group among them . High on DARPA’a wish list : mind -controlled battle robots , and airplanes that can be flown with nothing more than thought . You were hoping for something a bit closer to home ? How about a mental telephone that you could use simply by thinking about talking .[8] The notion of decoding the brain’s commands can seem , on the face of it ,to be pure hubris. How could any computer eavesdrop on all the goings-on that take place in there every moment of ordinary life ?[9] Yet after a century of neurological breakthroughs ,scientists aren’t so intimidated by the brain ;they treat it as just another information processor , albeit the most complex one in the word .“We don’t see the brain as being a mysterious organ ,”says Gr aig Henriquez ,Nicolelis’s fellow co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering . “We see 1s and 0s popping out of the brain, and we’re decoding it .”[10] The source of all those 1s and 0s is ,of course ,the brain’s billons of neurons . When a neuron gets an incoming stimulus at one end —for example , photons strike the retina , which sends that visual information to a nearby neuron —an electric pulse travels the neuron’s length . Depending on the signals it receives ,a neuron can crackle with hundreds of these impulses every second . When each impulse reaches the far end of the neuron , it triggers the cell to dump neurotransmitters that can spark a new impulse in a neighboring neuron . In the way , the signal gets passed around the brain like a baton in a footrace . Ultimately , this rapid-fire code gives rise to electrical impulses that travel along nerves that lead out of the brain and spread through the body ,causing muscles to contract and relax in all sorts of different patterns ,letting us blink, speak ,walk ,or play the sousaphone .[11] in the 1930s ,neuroscientist began to record these impulses with implantable electrodes. Although each neuron is in an insulating sheath ,an impulse still creates a weak electric field outside the cell . Researchers studying rat and monkey brains found that by placing the sensitive tip of an electrode near a neuron they could pick up the sudden changes in the electric field that occurred through the cell .[12] The more scientists studied this neural code , the more they realized that it wasn’t all that different from the on-off digital code of computers . If scientist could decipher the code —to translate one signal as “lift hand ”and another as “lift hand ” and another as “look left ”,they could use the information to operate a machine . “this is not new ,” says John Chapin , a collaborator with the Duke researchers who works at the State University of New York Downstate Health Science Center in Brooklyn . “People have thought about it since the 1960s”[13] But most researchers assumed that each type of movement was governed by a specific handful of the brain’s billions of neurons —the need to monitor the whole brain in order to find those few would make the successful decoding a practical impossibility . “If you wanted to have a robot arm move left ,” Chapin explain , “you would have to find that small set of neurons that would carry the command to move to the left ”. But you don’t know where those cells are in advance .[14] Thus everything that was known at the time suggested that brain-machine interfaces were a fool’s errand .Everything , it turned out ,was wrong .(1,145 words)。

Lesson 1 Spillonomics: Underestimating Risk[1] In retrospect, the pattern seems clear. Years before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money. An explosion at a Texas refinery killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A. BakerⅢ, the former secretary of state, said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year, a corroded pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay. None other than Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas and a global-warming skeptic, upbraided BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues”.[2] Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may. But there also appears to have been another factor, one more universally human, at work. The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely—but that would bring enormous costs.[3] Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to consider what BP executives must be thinking today. Surely, given the expense of the clean-up and the hit to BP’s reputation, the executives wish they could go back and spend the extra money to make Deepwater Horizon safer. That they did not suggests that they figured the rig would be fine an itwas.[4]For all the criticism BP executives may deserve, they are far from the only people to struggle with such low-probability, high-cost events. Nearly everyone does. “These are precisely the kinds of events that are hard for us as humans to get our hands around and react to rationally, ”Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard, says. We make two basic—and opposite—types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to imagine, we tend to underestimate its likelihood. This is the proverbial black swan. Most of the people running Deepwater Horizon probably never had a rig explode on them. So they assumed it would not happen , at least not to them.[5] Similarly, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble because it had never been in one before. Wall Street traders took the same view and built mathematical models that did not allow for the possibility that house prices would decline. And may home buyers signed up for unaffordable mortgages, believing they could refinance or sell the house once its price rose. That’s what house prices did, it seemed.[6]On the other hand, when an unlikely event is all too easy to imagine, we often go in the opposite direction and overestimate the odds. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans canceled plane trips and took to the road. There were no terrorist attacks in this country in 2002, yet theadditional driving apparently led to an increase in traffic fatalities.[7]When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so. Yet in the case of Deepwater Horizon, government policy actually went the other way. It encouraged BP to underestimate the odds of a catastrophe.[8] In a little-noticed provision in a 1990 law passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress capped a spiller’s liability over and above cleanup costs at $7500 million for a rig spill. Even if the party is on the hook for only $7500 million. (In this instance, BP has agreed to waive the cap for claims it deems legitimate. ) Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economist who runs the Hamilton Project in Washington, says the law fundamentally distorts a company’s decision making. Without the cap, executives would have to weigh the possible revenue from a well against the cost of drilling there and the risk of damage. With the cap, they can largely ignore the potential damage beyond cleanup costs. So they end up drilling wells even in places where the damage can be horrific, like close to a shoreline. To put it another way, human frailty helped BP’s executives underestimate the chance of a low-probability, high-cost event. Federal law helped them underestimate the costs.[9] In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Congress and Obama administration will no doubt be tempted to pass laws meant to reducethe risks of another deep-water disaster. Certainly there are some sensible steps they can take, like lifting the liability cap and freeing regulators from the sway of industry. But it would be foolish to think that the only risks we are still underestimating are the ones that have suddenly become salient.[10]The big financial risk is no longer a housing bubble. Instead, it may be the huge deficits that the growth of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will cause in coming years—and the possibility that lender will eventually become nervous about extending credit to Washington. True, some economists and policy makers insist the country should not get worked up about this possibility, because lenders have never soured on the Unite States government before and show no signs of doing so now. but isn’t that reminiscent of the old Bernanke-Greenspan tune about the housing market?[11]Then, of course, there are the greenhouse gases that oil wells ( among other things) send into the atmosphere even when the wells function properly. Scientists say the buildup of these gases is already likely to warm the planet by at least three degrees over the next century and cause droughts, storms and more ice-cap melting. The researcher’s estimates have risen recently, too, and it is also possible the planet could get around 12 degree hotter. That kind of could flood major cities and cause parts of Antarctica to collapse.[12]Nothing like that has ever happened before. Even imagining it is difficult. It is much easier to hope that the odds of such an outcome are vanishingly small. In fact, it’s only natural to have this hope. But that doesn’t make it wise.。

Door closer, are you?1 The next time you're deciding between rival options, one which is primary and the other which is secondary, ask yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?2 Xiang Yu was a Chinese imperial general in the third century BC who took his troops across the Zhang River on a raid into enemyterritory. To his troops' astonishment, he ordered their cooking pots crushed and their sailing ships burned.3 He explained that he was imposing on them a necessity for attaining victory over their opponents. What he said was surelymotivating, but it wasn't really appreciated by many of his loyal soldiers as they watched their vessels go up in flames. But the genius of General Xiang Yu's conviction would be validated both on the battlefield and in modern social science research. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a veteran leader who was highly respected for his many conquests and who achieved the summit of success.4 He is featured in Dan Ariely's enlightening new publication, Predictably Irrational, a fascinating investigation of seemingly irrational human behavior, such as the tendency for keeping multiple options open. Most people can't marshal the will for painful choices, not even students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Dr. Ariely teaches behavioral economics. In an experiment that investigated decision-making, hundreds of students couldn't bear to let their options vanish, even though it was clear they wouldprofit from doing so.5 The experiment revolved around a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always say, "It's good to preserve our options." Want a good example? A teenager is exhausted from soccer, ballet, piano, and Chinese lessons, but her parents won't stop any one of them because they might come in handy some day!6 In the experiment sessions, students played a computer game that provided cash behind three doors appearing on the screen. The rule was the more money you earned, the better player you were, given a total of 100 clicks. Every time the students opened a door by clicking on it, they would use up one click but wouldn't get any money. However, each subsequent click on that door would earn afluctuating sum of money, with one door always revealing more money than theothers. The important part of the rule was each door switch, though having no cash value, would also use up one of the 100 clicks. Therefore, the winning strategy was to quickly check all the doors and keep clicking on the one with the seemingly highest rewards.7 While playing the game, students noticed a modified visual element: Any door left un-clicked for a short while would shrink in size and vanish. Since they already understood the game, they should have ignored the vanishing doors. Nevertheless, they hurried to click on the lesser doors before they vanished, trying to keep them open. As a result, they wasted so many clicks rushing back to the vanishing doors that they lost money in the end. Why were the students so attached to the lesser doors? They would probably protestthat they were clinging to the doors to keep future options open, but, according to Dr. Ariely, that isn't the true factor.8 Instead of the excuse to maintain future options open, underneath it all the students' desire was to avoid the immediate, thoughtemporary, pain of watching options close. "Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a big price to avoid the emotion of loss," Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easily measured in lost cash. In life, the corresponding costs are often less obvious such as wasted time or missed opportunities.9 "Sometimes these doors are closing too slowly for us to see them vanishing," Dr. Ariely writes. "We may work more hours at our jobs without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away."10 So, what can be done to restore balance in our lives? One answer, Dr. Ariely says, is to implement more prohibitions on overbooking. We can work to reduce options on our own, delegating tasks to others and even giving away ideas for others to pursue.He points to marriage as an example, "In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we've closed doors."11 Since conducting the door experiment, Dr. Ariely says he has made a conscious effort to lessen his load. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.12 In other words, Dr. Ariely is encouraging us to discard those things that seem to have outward merit in favor of those things that actually enrich ourlives. We are naturally prejudiced to believe that more is better, but Dr. Ariely's research provides a dose of reality that strongly suggests otherwise.13 What price do we pay for trying to have more and more in life? What pleasure and satisfaction can be derived from focusing our energy and attention in a more concentrated fashion? Surely, we will have our respective answers.14 Consider these important questions: Will we have more by always increasing options or will we have more with fewer, carefully chosen options? What doors should we close in order to allow the right windows of opportunity and happiness to open?。

二、课文精解SECTION A1.It begins with my suddenly noticing12distant silver points in the clear brilliant sky filled with an unfamiliar abnormal hum.那天，我突然发现在晴朗的天空中出现了12个银色的小点儿，离我很近，发出不正常的嗡嗡声，这种声音我以前从来没听过。

one’s doing sth.中，one是doing的逻辑主语，存在主谓关系（某人的举动），该句相当于“It begins with that I suddenly notice...”例：I don’t like that he smokes here=I don’t like his smoking here.我不喜欢他在这里吸烟。

主语如果是无生命的东西，就不用所有格，直接用主语+动名词。

如:he was afraid of the tent falling down.他担心帐篷掉下来。

the tent(帐篷)没有生命。

2.Suddenly,nearby,at the edge of the forest,there’s the tremendous roar of bombs exploding.突然，就在附近，森林的边缘，我听到有巨大的炸弹爆炸的声音。

（1）at/on the edge of...在……的边缘。

而on the edge of还有“濒于；几乎；某事（尤指坏事）快要发生”的意思。

（2）roar作名词时有“咆哮；吼叫”等义，本句中表示“巨响”。

roar还可作动词，意为“吼叫；咆哮；大声地说；呼啸”。

例：A police car roared past.一辆警车呼啸而过。

3.I have not yet grown accustomed to war and can’t relate into a single chain of causes and effects these airplanes,the roar of the bombs,the earth radiating out from the forest,and my seemingly inevitable death.我还没有习惯战争，也不能把这些飞机、炸弹的轰鸣，森林那边飞溅开来的泥土以及我看似必然的死亡联系成单一的因果关系。