英汉段落翻译试题Passage 1Kunitz, whose own work has a simple elegance, sees great value in the innovations of slam and hip-hop poets. “The various and diverse populations of the earth contribute to mainstream poetry,” he says, “and this contribution needs to occ ur generation after generation in order to invigorate the tradition itself.” Otherwise, “certain styles, techniques, even meanings tend to consolidate and perpetuate.” The poet’s life, he explains, is a process of transformation. “One must build a new imag e of self, out of which comes new styles, new leaps in one’s work.”Passage 2So, should we be concerned about the current spasm of extinction, which has been accelerated by the inexorable expansion of agriculture and industry? Is it necessary to try to slow down a process that has been going on forever? I believe it is. We know that the well-being of the human race is tied to the well-being of many other species, and we can’t be sure which species are most important to our own survival. But dealing with the extinction crisis is no simple matter, since much of the world’s biodiversity resides in its poorest nations, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America Can such countries justify setting aside national parks and nature reserves where human encroachment and even access is forbidden? Is it legitimate to spend large sums of money to save some species-be it an elephant or an orchid—in a nation in which a sizable percentage of the people are living below the poverty line?Passage 3American culture is not conservative; it is democratic. Given their strong suspicion of inherited authority and their almost infinite faith in an individual’s right to shape his own destiny, Americans have trouble accepting social customs whose provenance is unclear and whose authority they never consented to. This dose not mean that Americans are always comfortable with diversity, for as we know there have been periods of stifling conformity and moralism in American history. What it does mean is that Americans see cultural changes as matters of principle that need to be publicly debated, and those debates can be polarizing. Americans have a reputation abroad for being pragmatic, which in economic and technical matters might be true. But on large political issues, and almost all cultural ones, Americans tend to be dogmatic and uncompromising because they see democratic principles at stake in them.Passage 4But last August, she was fired—for refusing to wear makeup. Earlier this moth, Ms. Jespersen filed suit against her former employer in US district court, saying that being forced to wear mascara, lipstick, blush, and face powder to keep her job was not only humiliating but also gender discrimination. Her case is setting up the latest test of how far companies can go in mandating what employees should look like on the job. From men suing for the right to sport goatees, to airline stewardesses tired of company-mandated dieting, to TV news anchors being replaced because of encroaching wrinkles, the past quarter century has been filled with lawsuits by employees demanding their rights to look and be who they are.Passage 5By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, however, the image of the entrepreneur as an American ideal had lost much of its luster. The crucial change came w ith the rise of corporation. Few business barons remained. They were replaced by “technocrats” as the heads of corporations. These executives, expert in every phase of corporate activity, became the indispensable cogs in theindustrial machine. The high-salaried manager replaced the swaggering tycoon. The big business leaders today are often involved in many areas of public life. They not only direct the fate of corporations, they also serve on boards in their community and as university trustees. The new corporate leaders fly to Washington to confer with government officials on national policy. They are concerned about the state of the national economy and America’s relationship with other nations.Passage 6Rising prices prompted many labor unions to demand higher wages, and in 1946, when their demands were not met, more than 4,500,000 workers engaged in strikes. This demonstration of strength by labor alarmed a large segment of the public, and so the following year a republican-controlled Congress enacted the Taft-Hartley Act. This measure was strongly opposed by labor leaders—it required a 60-day notice before either a union or an employer could end a contract, permitting management to sue union officials for violation of contract and limiting certain union privileges contained in existing contracts. Although labor continued to win higher wages along with increased security through retirement pensions and health insurance financed by employers, they viewed the Taft-Hartley restrictions as a deliberated attempt to eliminate much of their ability to bargain with industry. During the election of 1948, President Truman and the Democratic Party pledged to repeal the act.Passage 7The new administration sought legislative remedies for these conditions. An Area development Act gave the federal government power to help depressed communities start new industries and build needed public facilities. Another law provided retraining, with pay, for workers either unemployed or in low-paying jobs through lack of needed skills. In addition, states were given emergency authority to extend unemployment－insurance payments for 13 weeks beyond the standard 26-week period. Following the examples of his two predecessors, President Kennedy requested Congress to liberalize some of the existing social legislation. As a result, the Social Security Act provided workers the option to retire at age 62 instead of 63; the minimum wage was increased to $1.25 an hour; and the federal housing program was stepped up to help elderly persons and families with low or moderate incomes find homes at a reasonable cost.Passage 8It reminds us of what we believe and what we do not believe, what we need and what we want as a group. By portraying the enemy as the other, the threat, the danger to our stability and to our sense of order and value, we willingly come together to resist and to reassert our oneness with the group we belong to. We cooperate in order to rid ourselves of the threat from the unfamiliar, the different—them. In the process, we share our ideas, feelings, resources and willingly face threats we would normally avoid. Our enemy has made us human and civilized by forcing us to suppress our narcissistic urges and desires for the good of all. We become involved in our community of hate and, like good soldiers, obey orders by persuading ourselves that unless we do so ,our way of life-our values and beliefs—will be destroyed and we will have to embrace the values, beliefs, practices of those we have just made unfamiliar, unlike ourselves—the enemy. This will require change and we all know how utterly disruptive that can be to a well-ordered, habitual way of life. No wonder we are so angry and so eager to remove this threat.Passage 9Adolescence and age are the two stages in lives when the need for friendship is crucial. In theformer stage, teens are plagued by uncertainty and mixed feelings. In the lat4ter stage, older people are upset by feelings of uselessness and insignificance. In both instances, friends can make a dramatic difference. With close friends in their lives, people develop courage and positive attitudes. Teenagers have the moral support to assert their individuality; the elderly approach their advanced years with optimism and an interest in life. These positive outlooks are vital to cope successfully with the crises inherent in these two stages of life.Passage 10It’s going to be a nervous year. The nabob of nerves at the moment surely has to be Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. Microsoft closed out 1994 by announcing that the long－awaited Windows 95 would not now hit the streets until August-almost two years after the first projected release date. The expected bounty, as millions of users upgrade to the new system, may now not roll in until early 1996. The announcement saw Microsoft’s stock price drop $2.75 to $59.87 (it has already bounced back) and the shares of some software developers sagged, too. The problem for the developers is that Windows 95 catches up with improvements in hardware to become a 32-bit system (i.e., able to handl e any combination of 32 bits of data simultaneously). They can’t release 32-bit versions of their applications until the new system is available and, in the meantime, customers aren’t upgrading their old 16-bit applicationsPassage 11While our neighbors Venus and Mars would reflect a fairly even glow, Earth would put on a little show. Earth’s light would brighten and dim as it spins, because oceans, deserts, forests and clouds—which are all too small to be seen from such a distance—reflect varying amounts of sunlight. The variations, it turns out, are so strong and distinctive that a surprising amount of information could be taken from a simple ebb and flow of light. Scientists at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study conducted a detaile d study of Earth’s reflections not for insights into an alien’s view of our home planet, but as a way for human scientists to learn about distant planets that may be like our own. They are participating in the early planning for a NASA mission known as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, a space probe that will scan the skies for planets hospitable to life.Passage 12It was tempting to say that Sept.11 changed all that, just as it is tempting to say that every hero needs a villain, and good needs evil as its grinding stone. But try looking a widow in the eye and talking about all the good that has come of this. It may not be a coincidence, but neither is it a partnership: good doesnot end evil, we owe no debt to demons and the attack did not make us better. It was an occasion to discover what we already were. “Maybe the purpose of all this,” New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliami said at a funeral for a friend, “is to find out America today is as strong as when we fought for our independence or when we fought for ourselves as a union to end slavery of as strong as our fathers and grandfathers who fought to rid the world of Nazis m.” The terrorists, he argues, were counting on our cowardice. They’ve learned a lot about us since then. And so have we.Passage 13It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.Passage 14No English language central authority guards the purity of the language; therefore, many dialects have developed; American, British, Canadian, Indian, and Australian, to name a few. There is no standard pronunciation. Btu within this diversity is a unity of grammar and one set of core vocabulary, thus, each country that speaks the language can inject aspects of its own culture into the usage and vocabulary. There is no reason to believe that any one other language will appear within the next 50 years to replace English. However, it is possible that English will not keep its monopoly in the 21stcentury. Rather a small number of languages may form an oligopoly-each with a special area of the Latino population in the United States. This could create a bilingual English-Spanish region.Passage 15But A mericans are a restless people who are always ready to move. So, although they enjoy the life in the suburbs, they will by no means end their pursuit there. When his income rises as his career makes progress, he soon looks for a better house, in a better district, with more land, a better view, a bigger and finer swimming pool. He may be attached to the house which is home for the time being but this does not mean that he will put his roots there. Today’s job, today’s income, today’s friends and neighborhood: all these are part of an A merican’s (and his family’s) identity. Instant coffee, instant friends—but nothing is seen as permanent; an American hopes and expects to exchange them all for something better; and he finds no difficulty in identifying himself with the new.Passage16There has been nothing more without a definition, than excellence; although it is what we are more concerned with, than anything else whatsoever; yet, we are concerned with nothing else. But what is this excellence? Wherein is one thing excellent, and another evil; one beautiful, and another deformed? Some have said that all excellence is harmony, symmetry, or proportion; but they have not yet explained it. We would know, why proportion is more excellent than disproportion; that is, why proportion is pleasant to the mind, and disproportion unpleasant? Proportion is a thing that may be explained yet further. It is an equality or likeness of ratios; so that it is the equality, which makes the proportion. Excellency therefore seems to consist in equality.Passage 17Outside on the deck with my younger sister, Ann, and sister-in-law, Candace, I watch the distant night li ght s shimmer against the dark folds of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. I am fine, certainlyfar better than I was a year earlier, when I’d arrived for my family’s annual reunion reeling from a doctor’s shock bulletin that my husband, Joe, and I would not be able to conceive a child I’d spent most of that week holed up in my parents’ yellow guest room, hiding for everyone, particularly my five young nieces and nephews. Joe had spent most of that week worrying about my alarmingly fragile state of mind.Passage18Today we need a leadership that recognizes that the fundamental challenge in this nuclear hi-tech ear is one of psychology and education of the field of human relations. It is not the kind of problem that is likely to be resolved by expertise-even the sophisticated expertise of our most gifted military thinkers, who delight in exotic weapon systems and strategic doctrines. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures. As Abraham Lincoln put it in his second annual message to Congress, during the worst days of the Civil War, “As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”Passage 19When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself; that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in Pubic, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, bi it ever so little.Passage 20But his worries are also considerable. Though he may become neurotic abou t competition, the competition is real enough. He may round on his critics, or accuse his publishers of spending too little on advertisements. He may—with an engaging candor, in the case of Mailer—do his own advertising. But he is growing older; and the young are the arbiters whom he must please. He tends to become obsessed by youthfulness. Unless he has kept his head, or has exceptional talent, he tends to drop away, outmoded along with his brand of fiction, discarded like the partners and the pop singers who have also lost favor. It is a cruel process. The public is fickle, and treats yesterday’s idols with malice and animus, waiting to hear that they have hit bottom, taken to drink, or killed themselves.。
