3 3通用考博翻译冲刺讲义2

1、在线考博翻译讲义考博翻译讲义主讲人：唐静欢迎使用在线电子讲义讲义并非老师授课的逐字稿，难免有错漏，如有不符，请以课程讲解为主，有任何疑问可以到知识堂进行提问在线考博翻译讲义英译汉Passage 11. Contemporarytechnologicalreportingisfullofnotionsofelectroniccommunities in which people interact across regions or entire continents. Couldsuch “virtual communities” eventually replace geographicall

2、y localized socialrelations? There are reasons to suspect that, as the foundation for a democratic2. For example, electronic communication filters out and alters mush of the subtlety,warmth, contextuality, and so no that seem important to fully human, morallyengaged interaction. That is one reason m

3、any Japanese and European executivespersist in considering face-to-face encounter essential to their business dealingsand why many engineers, too, prefer face-to-face encounter essential to theirbusiness dealings and why many engineers, too, prefer face-to-face interaction3. Even hypothetical new me

4、dia (e. g. advanced “virtual realities”), conveying adimensionally richer sensory display, are unlikely to prove fully satisfactorysubstitutes for face-to-face interaction. Electronic media decompose holisticexperience into analytically distinct sensory dimensions and then transmit thelatter. At the

5、 receiving end, people can resynthesize the resulting parts into acoherent experience, but the new whole is invariably different and, is someSecond, there is evidence that screen-based technologies (such as TV and在线考博翻译讲义computermonitors)arepronetoinducedemocraticallyunpromisingpsychopathologies, ra

6、nging from escapism to passivity, obsession, confusingwatching with doing, withdrawal from other forms of social engagement, orThird, a strengthbut also a drawbackto a virtual community is that anymember can exit instantly. Indeed, an entire virtual community can decline or4. To the extent that memb

7、ership in virtual communities proves less stable than thatobtaining inother forms of democratic community, or that social relationsprove less thick (i, e. less embedded in a context filled with shared meaning andhistory), there could be adverse consequences for individual psychological andmoral deve

8、lopment.5. no matter with whom we communicate nor how far our imaginations fly, ourbodiesand hencemanymaterialinterdependencieswithotherpeoplealways remain locally situated. Thus it seems morally hazardous tocommune with far-flung tele-mates, if that means growing indifferent to physicalneighbors. I

9、t is not encouraging to observe just such indifference in CaliforniasSilicon Valley, one of the world most “highly wired” regions.Passage 21. The onrush of cheap communications, powerful computers and the Internetall explain why many people feel that, nowadays, change is happening ever more在线考博翻译讲义r

10、apidly as technological progress accelerates.Moores law, that the power ofmicrochips doubles every 18 months, has been tested and found correct. This is2.Yet the implication that rapid change is a new phenomenon is againmisleading. If you measure the time it takes for a technology to become widelydi

11、ffused, todays experience does not seem unusual.Take the car. The basicpatent for an internal-combustion engine capable of powering a car was filed in1877. By the late 1920s50 years laterover half of all American households3.The comparable dates for the computer are harder to tie down, but the first

12、big computer, based on vacuum valves, was built in 1946.The transistorthefirst semiconductor devicewas invented at Bell Laboratories in 1948. The firstpatent for an integrated circuit was filed in 1959. Now, in 1999-50 years after thefirst one was builtaround half of American households own a comput

13、er. The pace4.You have to cheat, choosing only the date for the personal computer, say(mid-1970s), or the internet (ditto) to make it seem much more rapid. Comparing its diffusion among private users is, you might say, unfair to thecomputer, for that machines main use is in businesses. On that measu

14、re, the besthistorical analogy is with electrification, and the spread of the electric dynamo into5.According to Paul David, a historian at Stanford University in California, the在线考博翻译讲义first electricity-generating stations had been installed in New York and London in1881, but it was well into the 1

15、920s before the dynamo became widely used andstarted to raise productivity.The adoption of the computer in business has alsobeen slow, and failed to have any measurable impact on productivity until veryPassage 371. The main impression growing out of twelve years on the faculty of amedical shcool is

16、that the No. 1 health problem in the U. S. today, even more thanAIDS or cancer, is that Americans dont know how tit hind about health and illness.72. We fear the worst, expect the worst, thus invite the worst and the result isthat we are becoming a nation of weaklings and hypochondriacs, a self-medi

17、catingsociety incapable of distinguishing between casual, everyday symptoms and thosethat require professional attention.Somewhere in our early education we become addicted to the notion that painmeans sickness. We fail to learn that pain is the bodys way of informing the mindthat we are doing somet

18、hing wrong, not necessarily that something is wrong. Wedont understand that pain may be telling us that we are eating too much or thewrong things; or that we are smoking too much or drinking too much or that thereis too much emotional congestion in our lives that we are being worn down byhaving to c

19、ope daily with overcrowded streets and highways, the pounding nose of在线考博翻译讲义garbage grinders, or the cosmic distance between the entrance to the airport andthe departure gate. We get the message of pain all wrong. Instead of addressingourselves to the cause, we become pushovers for pills, driving t

20、he pain73. Early in life, too, we become seized with the bizarre idea that we are constantlyassaulted by invisible monsters called germs, and that we have to be on constantalert to protect ourselves against their fury, but equal emphasis is not given to thepresiding fact that our bodies are superbly

21、 equipped to deal with the little demonsand the best way of forestalling an attack is to maintain a sensible lifestyle.Passage 4The worlds long romance with speed may finally be ending. Even ifConcorde(协和式飞机) flies again, its antique nature was revealed as soon as theParis accident made people scrat

22、ch their heads and ask quite why these oddaircraft were still flying. Much of the technology that surrounded us has, when welook at it afresh, a Jules Verne qualitysolving problems that once seemedThe reorientation of science reward the biological and computer frontiers isnow truism, but the 19th ce

23、ntury fascination with motive power has retained apowerful hold on our imaginations and our economies. 71. Advances in motivepower were for a long while the main way in which progress and nationalcompetition in technology were measured. First at sea, then on the railways, then在线考博翻译讲义on the roads, i

24、n the air and finally in space, more and more rapid movement wasseen as an carefree good and also, in some vague way, as a key to a fullerunderstanding of the world.So intoxicating was this ultimate way in which the growing speed and reach ofman-made vehicles could be used that when an unknown rocke

25、t enthusiast calledHermann Oberth published his By Rocket To Interplanetary Space in the 1920s, itrepresented such an escape from the difficulties of the present to the anxiouscitizens of Weimar Germany (德国魏玛) that it became a bestseller overnight.72. For individual sportsmen, pilots and drivers, sp

26、eed had the status of aprivileged substance to which, in those early days, only a minority had full access.Mechanized speed made men, and a few women, into heroes, and it remains acommodity to which males, in particular, are attracted. The front of the Boys Ownannual of half a century ago would typi

27、cally feature a speeding train in the middleDisentangling the genuine advantages of speed from its cult aspects hasalways been a problem, and this was certainly the case in the era in which Concordewas conceived. Land, air and sea speed records had mattered since the 20s in a wayinconceivable today,

28、 This manic race was run on three tracksof celebrity sport, ofcompetition between civil industries, and of military development. All three werelittered with casualties, whether spectators at Le Mans, Donald Campbell on在线考博翻译讲义Britain was slowing down on all three courese when Concorde came along,Ind

29、eed the concorde project survived in part because, as Harold Wilson explainedin his memoirs, the agreement with the French was embodied in an internationaltreaty, and they refused even to consider abandoning or postponing the work.“We had little choice but to go on,” the then prime ministeHis lack o

30、f enthusiasm suggests that, long before Concorde flew, some thoseresponsible for it knew that it was not going to be a practical aircraft, and also thatthe technical spin-off would be less than advertised. The reason was that speed wassuch as dominant consideration that everything else had to take s

31、econd place. Theresult was an aircraft that was both ahead of its tie and behind the times, since theera of small-A preoccupation with speed has always gone hand in hand with apreoccupation with safety, the two standards between them providing a way inwhich advanced states calibrate the state of civ

32、ilization. Increasing speeds haveworld lives inconstant fear of regression, of losing the scientific and organizationaledge that enables it to be both fast and safe. That is one reason why air and seaaccidents can attain such mythic status. The disparate treatment of first and thirdworld accidents i

33、n the Western press is probably due ore to the feeling thataccidents are indicators of technical health than to any devaluation of African orSpeed still has its kingdom, but is it shrinking. Its limits have long ago beenreached on the roads, and its value in the air, even for manned military aircraf

34、t, is在线考博翻译讲义diminishedagility and protection are as or more important. 73. It is still marginallyattractive to make trains go faster. The pursuit of physical speed has been replacedby the pursuit of near instantaneity on the Net, an aim which we may in time cometo regard just as skeptically.It is h

35、ard to imagine the mood in which David Leans The Sound Barrier wasmade in 1952. breaking that barrier seemed to hold the key to a mystery. But therePassage 5Computers are permeating almost every aspect of our lives, including manyareas previously untouched by technology. 1. But unlike such other per

36、vasivetechnologies as electricity, television and the motor car, computers are on thewhole less reliable and less predictable in their behavior. This is because they arediscrete state digital electronic devices that are prone to total and catastrophicfailure. Computer systems, when they are “down,”

37、are completely down, unlikeelectromechanical devices, which may be only partially down and are thus partiallyusable.Computers enable enormous quantities of information to be stored, retrieved,and transmitted at great speed on a scale not possible before. 2. This is all very well,but it has serious i

38、mplications for data security and personal privacy becausecomputers are inherently insecure. The recent activities of hackers and data thievesin the United States, Germany, and Britain have shown how all-too-easy it still is to在线考博翻译讲义break into even the most-sophisticated financial and military sys

39、tems. The list ofscares perpetrated by the new breed of hi-tech criminals, ranging from fraud inairline-ticket reservations to the reprogramming of the chips inside mobile phones,is growing daily.Computer systems are often incredibly complex-so complex, in fact, that theyare not always understood ev

40、en by their creators (although few are willing to admitit). This often makes them completely unmanageable. Unmanageable complexity,can result in massive foul-ups or spectacular budget “runaways.” For example,Jeffrey Rothfeder in Business Week reports that Bank of America in 1988 had toabandon a $ 20

41、-million computer system after spending five years and a further$ 60 million trying to make it work. Allstate Insurance saw the cost of its newsystem rise from $ 8 million to a staggering $ 100 million and estimated completionwas delayed from 1987 to 1903. Moreover, the problem seems to be getting w

42、orse:in 1988 the American Arbitration. Association took on 190 computer disputes, mostof which involved defective systems. The claims totaled 200 million up from3. Complexity can also result in disaster: no computer is 100 percentguaranteed because it is virtually impossible to anticipate all sorts

43、of criticalapplications, such as saving lives, flying air craft, running nuclear power stations,transferring vast sums of money, and controlling missile systemssometimes withtragic consequences. For example, between 1982 and 1987, some twenty-twoservicemen died in five separate crashes of the United

44、 States Air Forces在线考博翻译讲义sophisticated Blackhawk helicopter before the problem was traced to itscomputer-based “fly-by-wire” system. At least two people died after receivingoverdoses of radiation emitted by the computerized. There are 25 X-ray machines,and there are many other examples of fatal com

45、puter-based foul-Popular areas for less life-threatening computer malfunctions includetelephone billing and telephone switching software, bank statements andbank-teller machines, electronic funds-transfer systems, and motor-vehicle licensedata bases. Although computers have often taken the “blame” o

46、n theseoccasions, the ultimate cause of failure in most cases is, in fact, human error.Every new technology creates new problemsas well as new benefits-forsociety, and computers are no exception. 4. But digital computers have renderedsociety especially vulnerable to hardware and software malfunction

47、s. Sometimesindustrial robots go crazy, while heart pacemakers and automatic garage dooropeners are rendered useless by electromagnetic radiation or “electronic smog”emitted from point-of-sale terminals, personal computers, and video games.Automated teller machines (ATMs) and pumps at gas stations a

48、re closed downbecause of unforeseen software snafus.The cost of all this downtime is huge. 5. For example, it has been reported thatBritish businesses suffer around thirty major mishaps a year. revolving lossesrunning into millions of pounds. These are caused by machine or human error anddo not incl

49、ude human misuse in the form of fraud and sabotage. The cost offailures in domestically produced software in the United Kingdom alone is在线考博翻译讲义conservatively estimated at $ 900 million per year. In 1989, a British ComputerSociety committee, reported that much software was now so complex that curren

50、tskills in safety assessment were inadequate and that therefore the safety of peoplePassage 6Without doubt, the international relations appear at times bewildering.Students may at time feel that their efforts to understand the complexities of theThe task is a difficult one, but it is not futile. It

51、requires patience and persistenceas71. As the examples just given often illustrate, contemporary internationalevents are regularly interrelated; our task of achieving understanding is thereforefurther complicated because seemingly unrelated events in different areas of thewould may over a period of

52、time combine to affect still other regions of the globe.Events are demonstrably interdependent, and as we improve our ability tounderstand the causesof and reasons behind this interdependence, we willHow can our taskbest be approached? Throughout history, analysts ofinternationalrelationshavediffere

53、dintheirapproachestoimprovingunderstanding in their field. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, forexample, the study of international relations centered around diplomatic history.在线考博翻译讲义Who did what to whom at a particular time and place were the main features of themethod of diplomatic history. This methodology concentrated on nation-states asthe main actors in international relations and in