泛读课文段落翻译

泛读课文段落翻译

Unit Eight  Environment

2. A Convenient Truth, Sadly Ignored

  If all goes well, in 2011, a year before the Kyoto protocol expires, a new opera will open at La Scala in Milan. It will be based on “An Inconvenient Truth”, the book and film about global warming by Al Gore, the former vice-president. It is easy to see the drama in the story of the failed American presidential candidate turned green crusader (although not in the thickets of statistics into which be sometimes strays). But whether the opera in Milan will end happily or tragically, the composer has not yet revealed.

    如果一切顺利的话，到2011年，即《京都议定书》到期的前一年，一个新的歌剧会在米兰的拉斯卡拉上演。它改编自美国前副总统艾尔·格尔所著的关于全球变暖问题的《难以忽视的真相》和根据此书所拍摄并由其主演的电影。在故事中不难看出一位在美国总统竞选中失败的候选人变成一名环保主义者的情节（尽管有时候不会迷失在统计数据的丛林中）。但是制作者并没有透露这部歌剧会是以喜剧结尾还是会以悲剧结尾。

Unit Nine  Sports

1. A Place of Legend

  The lowest of these categories is partisanship: us lot beating them lot, our bloke beating their bloke –and it’s the most wonderful fun, especially when you win. Partisanship is the bread and butter of the sports industry: loyalty, identification, cheering for your team, your man, feeling absurdly glad when you win and suffering the most ridiculous pain when you lose. One world, one dream, and that dream is to beat the crap out of everybody else.     Partisanship is Tim Henman at Wimbledon: agonizing desperation for a mere result, glorious and painful to experience because of the extreme identification of audience and athlete.

    这些分类中最低层次的是派别对立：我们一伙打败了他们一伙，我们支持的小伙子打败了他们的小伙子——这是最妙的乐趣，尤其是当你们获胜的时候。派别意识是体育界的面包和黄油：忠诚，认同，为你的队伍、你的人欢呼，当你们获胜的时候感到不同寻常的喜悦，当你们失败的时候遭受最异乎寻常的痛苦。同一个世界，同一个梦想，而这个梦想就是把其他所有人都打败。    派别对立就是蒂姆·亨曼在温布尔顿说的话：仅仅为了一个结果而苦恼绝望，由于观众和运动员偏激的认同而使他们共同经历着光荣与痛苦。

2. China loves its soccer. its team? don’t ask.

Big money is part of the problem, he said, with most Chinese male soccer players making annual salaries of more than one million yuan, or $146,000, in a country where the average citizen’s income is less than $3,000. It goes to their heads, he said.

巨款是问题的一个方面，他说，因为大部分中国男足球员的年薪高达100多万，具体说是146万，而整个国家公民的平均年收入却少于3000美金（2万多人民币）。这对他们来说是一种冲击，他说。

The Chinese news media often report on the flashy lives that many soccer players lead. Players have been caught with drugs and prostitutes. Such behavior is not that unusual for international soccer stars, but is out of the norm for Chinese athletes.

　　中国新闻媒体多次报道了许多足球运动员的奢华生活。还有球员被拍到吸毒、嫖妓。这对于国际足球运动员或许并不稀奇，但对于中国运动员来说却十分反常。

Unit Ten  People

1. The Birth of the Beatles

  Like Shakespeare, another provincial Englishman who produced greatness from nowhere, the Beatles surpassed their modest beginnings. They wrote in imitation of the American icons they loved, but they were more than slavish mimics. They drew on the rhythms of their childhoods, the nursery rhymes, sea shanties, working-class ballads and music-hall routines that made up the fabric of everyday English musical life.

  Like all great artists, they transcended their immediate historical circumstances. Perhaps nobody has come closer to capturing the vigor, optimism and sheer possibility of being young.

作为另一个英国人，披头士像莎士比亚一样于平凡中创造神奇，他们的作品家喻户晓，超越了他们卑微的开端。披头士在创作中模仿自己所喜爱的美国偶像，但不单是流于形式的盲目模仿。他们的歌曲吸收了儿时的韵律、童谣、海窝棚、工薪阶层民谣和音乐大厅的日常生活这些元素，这些元素组成了日常的英国式音乐生活。

像所有伟大的艺术家，他们超越了切身的历史环境。也许还没有人能够像他们那样：年轻富有活力，乐观和纯粹。

2. Gordon Brown

  Friends say he has been softened by marriage. He wed the public relations executive Sarah Macaulay in Fife in 2000 after a four-year courtship. In January 2002, their 10-day-old daughter, Jennifer, died after being born two months prematurely. At her funeral Mr. Brown declared that Jennifer had transformed his and Sarah’s lives twice. “Once by entering our lives, then by leaving.” He later told an interviewer that he could not listen to music for a year afterwards as he grieved.

    朋友们说婚姻使他变得柔和。经过四年的追求，他与公关经理莎拉·麦考利于2000年在苏格兰法夫郡结婚。他们是十天大的女儿珍妮弗，早产两个月，在2002年1月后夭亡。在她的葬礼上，布朗先生说珍妮弗两次改变了他和莎拉的生活。“一次是进入我们的生活，另外一次是离开。”后来他告诉一名记者，因为他的悲伤，此后长达一年的时间里他都无法听音乐。

Unit Eleven  Psychology

2. The Creative Personality

Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted. We’re usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelined and observing the passing show. In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

富有创造力的人既有外向型的性格又兼具内向的特点。一般情况下，我们不是这种人就是那种人，不是喜欢混入人群中就是喜欢坐在一边袖手旁观眼前的演出。事实上，在最近的心理学研究中，外向性和内向性被认为是把每个人相互区分开的最稳定的性格特点，并且它是可以可靠测量的。另外一方面，似乎富有创造力的人会同时展现两方面的特点。

Unit Twelve  Social Issues

1. Unhappy America

  And it’s not just the downturn that has caused this discontent.    Many Americans feel as if they missed the boom. Between 2002 and 2006 the incomes of 99% rose by an average of 1% a year in real terms, while those of the top 1% rose by 11% a year, three-quarters of the economic gains during Mr. Bush’s presidency went to that top 1%. Economic envy, once seen as a European vice, is now rife. The rich appear in Barack Obama’s speeches not as entrepreneurial role models but as modern versions of the “malefactors of great wealth” denounced by Teddy Roosevelt a century ago: this lot, rather than building trusts, avoid taxes and ship jobs to Mexico.

并且，导致这次不满情绪的不仅仅是经济的衰退。    许多美国人感觉好像它们错过了经济繁荣时期。在2002至2006年间，99%的人的工资平均每年实际只增长了1%，然而那处于顶端的1%的人的工资每年却增长了11%。在布什先生就任总统的期间，四分之三的经济增长都给了那顶端的1%。经济嫉妒，曾一度被看作是欧洲的缺点，现在（在美国也）非常普遍了。出现在巴拉克·奥巴马演说词中的富人们没有成为模范企业家，而是成了现代版的“为富不仁”。正如在一个世纪之前泰迪·罗斯福说的那样：这帮人，不是在建立信任，而是在逃税并向墨西哥输出劳务。 

Unit Fourteen  Art

1. In the Gloom, Seeing Rembrandt With New Eyes

I’m not saying hard times alone produced this painting. Rembrandt and art are so much more complicated than that. But when he was put to the test by circumstance, he somehow turned catastrophe into opportunity; turned his weakness into strength. From almost nothing — a little paint, a stretch of cloth, a freed-up mind and an unembarrassed heart — he made this.

我不是说困难时期是造就这样绘画的单一因素。伦勃朗和艺术是难于言表的。当他被环境左右的时候，他把灾难变成机遇，把弱点变成优势。几乎一无所有，仅用一点颜料，一块画布，一个摆脱束缚的精神，一颗不再矫饰的心，他创作了这些作品。

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