研究生学位英语考试 翻译

一、A Working Community

1. I have a friend who is a member of the medical community. It does not say that, of course, on the stationery that bears her home address.This membership comes f rom her hospital work.

我有一个朋友,她是医学界的一员。当然，这在有她家庭住址的信笺上是找不到的。她的这个成员身份来自她的医院工作。

2. I have another friend who is a member of the computer community. This is a fairl y new subdivision of our economy, and yet he finds his sense of place in it.

我有另一个朋友，他是电脑圈的一员。这是我们的经济的一个相当新的分支，但是他在这里找到了自己的归属感。

3. Other friends and acquaintances of mine are members of the academic communi ty, or the business community, or the journalistic community.

我的其他朋友和熟人是学术界，商界，或新闻社区的成员。

4. Though you cannot find these on any map, we know where we belong。

虽然在任何地图上找不到这些，我们却知道自己的归属。

5、None of us, mind you, was born into these communities. Nor did we move into them, U-Hauling our possessions along with us. None has papers to prove we are card-carrying members of one such group or another. Yet it seems that more and more of us are identified by work these days, rather than by street.值得一提的是，我们没有谁一出生就属于这些社区，也不是后来我们搬了进来。这些身份是我们随身携带的，没有人可以拿出文件证明我们是这个或那个群体的会员卡持有者。然而，不知不觉中人们的身份更倾向于各自所从事的工作，而不是像以往一样由家庭住址来界定。

6、In the past, most Americans live in neighborhoods. We were members of precincts or parishes or school districts. My dictionary still defines community, first of all in geographic terms, as “a body of people who live in one place.”过去大多数彼邻而居的美国人彼此是同一个街区、教区、校区的成员。今天的词典依然首先从地理的角度来定义社区，称之为“一个由居住在同一地方的人组成的群体”。

7、But today fewer of us do our living in that one place; more of us just use it for sleeping. Now we call our towns “bedroom suburbs,” and many of us, without small children as icebreakers, would have trouble naming all the people on our street.然而，如今的情况是居住和工作都在同一个地方的人极少，对更多的人来说家成了一个仅仅用来睡觉的地方。我们的居住地被叫做“近郊居住区”，由于没有了孩子像过去那样起到沟通邻里关系的作用，许多人感到要叫出跟我们同住一条街的所有人的名字是件极不容易的事。

10、We may be strangers at the supermarket that replaced the corner grocer, but we are known at the coffee shop in the lobby. We share with each other a cast of characters from the boss in the corner office to the crazy lady in Shipping, to the lovers in Marketing. It’s not surprising that when researchers ask Americans what they like best about work,they say it is “the shmoose factor.” When they ask young mothers at home what they miss most about work, it is the people.人们曾经在杂货店的超市里可能是陌生人，但是却极可能在公司大厅的咖啡间里相识。我们谈论一些人物，从街头办文室的老板，到运输部中的疯女人，到营销部的情人

们。难怪当研究者问及美国人关于工作他们最喜欢什么的时候，他们的回答是“和同事悠闲自在地闲扯”，当询问在家里做全职母亲的年轻妇女对工作最怀念什么时，她们说是工作中所接触过的人。

11、Not all the neighborhoods are empty, nor is every workplace a friendly playground. Most of us have had mixed experiences in these environments. Yet as one woman told me recently, she knows more about the people she passes on the way to her desk than on her way around the block. Our new sense of community hasn’t just moved from house to office building. The labels that we wear connect us with members from distant companies, cities, and states. We assume that we have something “in common” with other teachers, nurses, city planners.不是所有的住宅区都是空的，也不是所有的工作单位都是友好的。多数人在这些环境里都曾有过复杂的经历。然而，最近一位女性朋友告诉我她对工作单位里的人的了解程度要胜于对同一街区人的了解程度。我们不仅把社区的概念从住宅区搬进了办公楼，上班时身上所佩戴的标志也把我们和异国他乡的人们和公司员工联系在一起。我们假设自己和其他的教师、护士、城市规划者有着某些共同点。

12、It’s not unlike the experience of our immigrant grandparents. Many who came to this country still identified themselves as members of the Italian community, the Irish community, the Polish community. They sought out and assumes connection with people from the old country, Many of us have updated that experience. We have replaced ethnic identity with professional identity, the way we replaced neighborhood with the workplace. This whole realignment of community is surely most obvious among the mobile professions. People who move from city to city seem to put roots into their professions. In an age of specialists, they may have to search harder to find people who speak the same language.这有点像最初移民来到美国的我们的祖辈们的经历，许多人来到这里后把自己原来的国籍当成一个社区，所以有意大利人社区、爱尔兰人社区、波兰社区等。他们不断寻找并设想自己与来自同一个国家的人们有着亲密的联系。我们把这种体验提升了一步。像用工作单位取代居住地一样，我们用专业身份取代了种族身份。这种社区的完全重组在流动作业的行业中表现得最为明显，那些在不同城市变换工作的人似乎把自己的身份植根于他们的行业中。在这个充满专业人士的时代，他们不得不费尽周折去寻找有共同语言的人。

13、I don’t think that there is anything massively disruptive about this shifting sense of community. The continuing search for connection and shared enterprise is very human. But I do feel uncomfortable with our shifting identity. The balance has tipped, and we seem increasingly dependent on work for our sense of self.我并不认为这种社区概念的变迁会造成大面积的混乱，这种对联系和共同理想的不断追寻充满了人性。但我对我们不断变化的身份确实感到不安。身份意识的天平似乎已经日渐倾斜到工作决定身份这边。

14、If our office are our new neighborhoods, if our professional titles are our new ethnic tags, then how do we separate ourselves from our jobs? Self-worth isn’t just something to measure in the marketplace. But in these new, communities, it becomes harder to tell who we are without saying what we do.如果办公室真的彻底变成我们的社区，如果我们的所从事的行业真的彻底变成我们的种族印记，那我们怎样才能把自己和工作区分开来呢？自我价值并不是只有在市场环境中

得到体现的。但是在这些新的社区中，如果不先说明我们是从事哪行哪业的，就越来越难以说清楚我们究竟是谁。

二、The Roots Of My Ambition

2、My mother,dead now to this world but still roaring free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before day-break. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, Russell, it’s a quitter.”虽然她已离天人世，我母亲却依旧在我的脑子里大声嚷嚷，有时天还未破晓她就催我起床，罗素，假如有一件事情我不能容忍的话，那就是轻易放弃的人。

25、Onward and upward was the course she set. Small progress was no excuse for feeling satisfied with yourself. People who stopped to pat themselves on the back didn’t last long. Even if you got to the top, you ‘d better not take it easy. “The bigger they come, the harder they fall” was one of her favorite maxims.进取、进取、再进取，这是母亲给我设定的方向。小小的进步是不足以自我满足的。那些因成功而沾沾自喜停下来欣赏自己的人是不会持久的。即使你已经到达顶峰，你也最好不要放松。爬得越高，摔得越痛，是母亲的至理名言。

36、It wasn’t the gin that was shouting. It was my mother. The gin only gave me the courage to announce to them that yes, by God, I had always believed in success, had always believed that without hard work and self-discipline you could never amount to anything, and didn’t deserve to.其实不是杜松子酒在吼，是我的母亲在吼。酒只是借给了我勇气向他们宣布那个想法。是的，上帝可以作证，我一直相信成功，一直相信如果没有辛勤的劳动和严格的自律，一个人不可能有任何成就，也不配有成就。

三、Help Yourself through the Hard Times

3、With no idea what to do next, I resolved literally to “sail off into the sunset,” following the coastline from Connecticut to Florida. But somewhere off New Jersey I turned due east, straight out to sea. Hours later, I climbed up on the stern rail and watched the dark Atlantic slip beneath the hull. How easy it would be to let the water take me, I thought.无所适从的我决心真正驾船“向夕阳行驶”，沿着海岸线从康涅狄格州驶向佛罗里达州。但是在离新泽西巷的地方，我转向正东方，直接驶往大海。几小时后，我爬上船尾的栏杆，注视着从船体下面滑过的黑沉沉的大西洋海水。我想让海水淹死是多么容易的一件事。

5、Everyone, at some point, will suffer a loss-the loss of loved ones. Good health, a job. “It’s your desert experience-a time of feeling barren of options, even hope,” explains Patrick Del Zoppo, a psychologist and bereavement specialist with the Archdiocese of New York. “The important thing is not to allow yourself to be stranded in the desert.”每个人，在某个时刻，都将遭受损失—失去挚爱的人、健康或是工作。“这是你经历中的荒漠---一段感到毫无出路，甚至毫无希望的时期”，帕垂克·戴尔·左珀解释说。他是一名心理学家，纽约大主教管区的丧亲之痛专家，“重要的是不要让你自己陷入荒漠之中无法自拔”。

四、What Is Happiness?

14、Happiness is never more than partial. There are no pure states of mankind.

Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming. What the Founding Fathers declared for us as inherent right,we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the meaningful pursuit of what is life-engaging and life-revealing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming. A nation is not measured by what it possesses or wants to possess, but by what it wants to become.从来就没有过完美的幸福。人类社会不存在尽善尽美。无论人们怎样界定何谓幸福，它既不在于拥有也不在于实现，而在于追求的过程。我们应该牢记：开国元勋们为我们所宣布的与生俱来的权利，不是享受幸福而是追求幸福。假如他们当初预见到现在出现的幸福市场，他们就会强调指出这样一个基本事实：幸福在于为之奋斗的过程，在于我们终生为之努力并从中获得启迪的事业，也就是说在于追求。对于一个民族的评价不是看它拥有什么或是幸福拥有什么，而是看它想要追求什么。

15、By all means let the happiness-market sell us minor satisfactions and even minor follies so long as we keep them in scale and buy them out of spiritual change.

I am no customer for either Puritanism or asceticism. But drop any real spiritual capital at those bazaars, and what you come to will be your own poorhouse.当然，只要我们掌握好一个度，或者只作为一种精神调节，不妨从幸福市场买点满足感甚至可以花钱买点愚蠢的东西。我既不信奉清教徒的生活准则也不赞面禁欲主义。但如果我们在这些市场上放弃任何真正意义上的精神财富，那么到头来我们只能是一无所有。

五、Remote Control

8、So when I want to watch TV, I’m confronted with a total of 120 buttons, identified by such helpful labels as PIP , MTS, DBS, FZ, JUMP and BLANK. There are three buttons labeled POWER, but there are times-especially if my son and his friends, who are not afraid of features, have changed the settings-when I honestly cannot figure out how to turn the TV on. I stand there, holding three remote controls, pressing buttons at random, until eventually I give up and go turn on the dishwasher. It has been, literally, years since I have successfully recorded a TV show. That is how “smart”my appliances have become.所以当我想看电视时，我面对的是120个功能键。通过诸多PIP、MTS、DBS、FZ、JUMP、BLANK等有用的标签来识别它们的功能。其中3个功能键的标签都是POWER。但有些时候尤其是如果我儿子和他的朋友们——他们都不害怕破坏原有的功能——改变了设置，我真不知道该如何打开电视机。我站在那儿，手中握着3个遥控器胡乱地按着，直到最终放弃转而去开洗碗机。毫不夸张地说，我花了几年的工夫才学会了录制电视节目。我的电器就“智能”到了这种程度。

9、Is this the kind of future you want, consumers? Do you want appliances that are smarter than you? Your appliances should be dumber than you, just like your furniture, your pets and your Representative in Congress. So Iam urging you to let the appliance industry know, by phone, letter, fax and e-mail, that when it comes to “smart”appliances, you vote NO.You need to act quickly. Because while you’re reading this, your microwave oven is voting YES.消费者们：这就是你们所期望的未来吗？你希望电器比你还聪明？当然不是。家用电器应该比你笨，就像你的家

具、宠物和国会众议员一样。所以我敦促你们通过电话、信件、传真或电子邮件的方式让电器制造厂商知道：当论及“智能电器”时你们会投反对票。必须尽快行动。因为在你读这篇文章时，你的微波炉正在投赞成票。

六、The Right to Fail

3.To hold this opinion, however is little short of treason in America. A boy or girl wh o leaves college is branded a failure-and the right to fail is one of the few freedoms that this country does not grant its citizens. The American dream is a dream of ―ge tting ahead,‖ painted in strokes of gold wherever we look. Our advertisements and TV commercials are a hymn to material success, our magazine articles a toast to pe ople who made it to the top. Smoke the right cigarette or drive the right car-so the ads imply-and the girls will be swooning into your deodorized arms or caressing yo ur expensive lapels Happiness goes to the man who has sweet smell of achievemen t. He is our national idol, and everybody else is our national fink.然而在美国，持有这种观点差不多就是背叛。中途退学的孩子们被指称为失败者—失败的权利是美国政府没有赋予国民的少数几个自由之一。美国之梦是―成功‖之梦，凡是我们放眼之处都是一片金光灿烂。宣传广告和电视广告歌颂物质方面的成功，杂志文章赞誉获得此类成功的人。广告暗示你：吸适合你身份的烟、开适合你身份的车，女孩们就会陶醉在你那没有异味的怀抱之中，抚摸你那昂贵的衣领。幸福只青睐那些散发出成功的甜蜜气味的人。他是全体国民的偶像，其他所有人则是国家的蛀虫。

6.What they should say is ―Don‘t be afraid to fail!‖ Failure isn’t fatal. Countless pe ople have had a bout with it and come out stronger as a result. Many have even co me out famous. History is strewn with eminent dropouts, ―loners‖who followed t heir own trail, not worrying about its odd twists and turns because they had faith i n their own sense of direction. To read their biographies is always exhilarating, not only because they beat the system, but because their system was better than the o ne that they beat.他们应该说不要害怕失败！失败并不致命。无数人曾失败过，也因此而变得更加强大。有些甚至成了名人。历史上充满了卓越的中途退出者以及沿着自己的道路前行的―孤独者‖。他们不惧怕偶尔的波折，因为他们坚信自己的方向感。阅读他们的传记总是令人振奋，这不仅因为他们打破了旧体制，更因为他们创立的体制要优于他们打破的。

14.Who is to say, then, if there is any right path to the top, or even to say what the top consists of? Obviously the colleges don‘t have more than a partial answer-othe rwise the young would not be so disaffected with an education that they consider v apid. Obviously business not have the answer- otherwise the young would not be s o scornful of its call to be an organization man.那么，谁能说清是否有通向巅峰的正确道路，或者甚至能说巅峰到底包含了什么呢？很明显大学只能提供部分的答案—要不然年青人也不会对教育不满，认为它如此枯燥乏味。很明显商业中也不曾有答案—要不上青人也不会地应聘成为公司总裁一员如此不屑一顾。