2006-08三级笔译英译汉真题

三级笔译2006.11英译汉真题

For all the natural and man-made disasters of the past year, travelers seem more determined than ever to leave home.

Never mind the tsunami devastation in Asia last December, the recent earthquake in Kashmir or the suicide bombings this year in London and Bali, among other places on or off the tourist trail. The number of leisure travelers visiting tourist destination s hit by trouble has in some cases bounced back to a level higher than before disaster struck.

"This new fast recovery of tourism we are observing is kind of strange," said John Koldowski, director for the Strategic Intelligence Center of the Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association. "It makes you think about the adage that any publicity is good publicity."

It is still too soon to compile year-on-year statistics for the disasters of the past 12 months, but travel industry experts say that the broad trends are already clear. Leisure travel is expected to increase by nearly 5 percent this year, according to the World Tourism and Travel Council.

"Tourism and travel now seem to bounce back faster and higher each time there is an event of this sort," said Ufi Ibrahim, vice president of the London-based World Tourism and Travel Council. For London, where suicide bombers killed 56 and wounded 700 on July 8, she said, "It was almost as if people who stayed away after the bomb attack then decided to come back twice."

Early indicators show that the same holds true for other disaster-struck destinations. Statistics compiled by the Pacific Asia Travel Association, for example, show that monthly visitor arrivals in Sri Lanka, where the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami left more than 30,000 people dead or missing, were higher than one year earlier for every month from March through August of this year.

A case commonly cited by travel professionals as an early example of the trend is Bali, where 202 people were killed in bombings targeting Western tourists in October 2002. Visitor arrivals plunged to 993,000 for the year after the bombing, but bounced back to 1.46 million in 2004, a level higher than the two years before the bomb, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association.

Even among Australians, who suffered the worst casualties in the Bali bombings, the number of Bali-bound visitors bounced back within two years to the highest level since 1998, according the Pacific Asia Travel

Association. Bali was hit again this year by suicide bombers who killed 19 people in explosions at three restaurants.

Visits are also on the upswing to post-tsunami Thailand, where the giant waves killed 5,400 and left more than 5,000 missing.

Although the tsunami killed more than 500 Swedes on the Thai resort island of Phuket, the largest number of any foreign nationality to die, Swedes are returning to the island in larger numbers than last year, according to My Travel Sweden, a Stockholm-based group that sends 600,000 tourists overseas annually and claim s a 28 percent market share for Sweden.

"We were confident that Thailand would eventually bounce back as a destination, but we didn"t think that this year it would come back even stronger than last year," said Joakim Eriksson, director of communication for My Travel Sweden. "We were very surprised because we really expected a significant decline." Eriksson said My Travel now expects a 5 percent increase in visitors to both Thailand and Sri Lanka this season compared with the same season last year. This behavior is a sharp change from the patterns of the 1990s, Eriksson said. "During the first Gulf war we saw a sharp drop in travel as a whole, and the same after Sept. 11," Eriksson said. "Now the main impact of terrorism or disasters is a change in destination."

三级笔译2007.11英译汉真题

One of the biggest decisions Andy Blevins has ever made, and one of the few he now regrets, never seemed like much of a decision at all. It just felt like the natural thing to do.

In the summer of 1995, he was moving boxes of soup cans, paper towels and dog food across the floor of a supermarket warehouse, one of the biggest buildings here in southwest Virginia. The heat was brutal. The job had sounded impossible when he arrived fresh off his first year of college, looking to make some summer money, still a skinny teenager with sandy blond hair and a narrow, freckled face.

But hard work done well was something he understood, even if he was the first college boy in his family. Soon he was making bonuses on top of his $6.75 an hour, more money than either of his parents made. His girlfriend was around, and so were his hometown buddies. Andy acted more outgoing with them, more relaxed. People in Chilhowie noticed that.

It was just about the perfect summer. So the thought crossed his mind: maybe it did not have to end. Maybe he would take a break from college and keep working. He had been getting C's and D's, and college never felt like home, anyway.

"I enjoyed working hard, getting the job done, getting a paycheck," Mr. Blevins recalled. "I just knew I didn't want to quit."

So he quit college instead, and with that, Andy Blevins joined one of the largest and fastest-growing groups of young adults in America. He became a college dropout, though nongraduate may be the more precise term.

Many people like him plan to return to get their degrees, even if few actually do. Almost one in three Americans in their mid-20's now fall into this group, up from one in five in the late 1960's, when the Census Bureau began keeping such data. Most come from poor and working-class families.

That gap had grown over recent years. "We need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor," Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said last year when announcing that Harvard would give full scholarships to all its lowest-income students. "And education is the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem."

Andy Blevins says that he too knows the importance of a degree. Ten years after trading college for the warehouse, Mr. Blevins, 29, spends his days at the same supermarket company. He has worked his way up to produce buyer, earning $35,000 a year with health benefits and a 401(k) plan. He is on a path typical for someone who attended college without getting a

four-year degree. Men in their early 40's in this category made an average of $42,000 in 2000. Those with a four-year degree made $65,000.

Mr. Blevins says he has many reasons to be happy. He lives with his wife, Karla, and their year-old son, Lucas, in a small blue-and-yellow house in the middle of a stunningly picturesque Appalachian valley.

"Looking back, I wish I had gotten that degree," Mr. Blevins said in his soft-spoken lilt. "Four years seemed like a thousand years then. But I wish I would have just put in my four years."

Why so many low-income students fall from the college ranks is a question without a simple answer. Many high schools do a poor job of preparing teenager s for college. Tuition bills scare some students from even applying and leave others with years of debt. To Mr. Blevins, like many

other students of limited means, every week of going to classes seemed like another week of losing money .

"The system makes a false promise to students," said John T. Casteen III, the president of the University of Virginia, himself the son of a Virginia shipyard worker.

三级笔译2008.5 英译汉真题

Europe Pushes to Get Fuel From Fields

ARDEA, Italy —The previous growing season, this lush coastal field near Rome was filled with rows of delicate durum wheat, used to make

high-quality pasta. Today it overflows with rapeseed, a tall, gnarled weedlike plant bursting with coarse yellow flowers that has become a new manna for European farmers: rapeseed can be turned into biofuel.

Motivated by generous subsidies to develop alternative energy sources —and a measure of concern about the future of the planet — Europe’s farmers are beginning to grow crops that can be turned into fuels meant to produce fewer emission s than gas or oil. They are chasing their counterparts in the Americas who have been raising crops for biofuel for more than five years.

“This is a much-needed boost to our economy, our farms,” said Marcello Pini, 50, a farmer, standing in front of the rapeseed he planted for the first time. “Of course, we hope it helps the environment, too.”

In March, the European Commission, disappointed by the slow growth of the biofuels industry, approved a directive that included a “binding target” requiring member countries to use 10 percent biofuel for transport by 2020 — the most ambitious and specific goal in the world.

Most European countries are far from achieving the target, and are introducing incentives and subsidies to bolster production.

As a result, bioenergy crops have replaced food as the most profitable crop in several European countries. In this part of Italy, for example, the government guarantees the purchase of biofuel crops at 22 euros for 100 kilograms, or $13.42 for 100 pounds —nearly twice the 11 to 12 euros for 100 kilograms of wheat on the open market in 2006. Better still, farmers can plant biofuel crops on “set aside” fields, land that Europe’s agriculture policy would otherwise require be left fallow.

But an expert panel convened by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization pointed out that the biofuels boom produces benefits as well as trade-offs and risks — including higher and wildly fluctuating food prices. In some markets, grain prices have nearly doubled.

“At a time when agricultural prices are low, in comes biofuel and improves the lot of farmers and injects life into rural areas,”said Gustavo Best, an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. “But as the scale grows and the demand for biofuel crops seems to be infinite, we’re seeing some negative effects and we need to hold up a yellow light.”

Josette Sheeran, the new head of the United Nations World Food program, which fed nearly 90 million people in 2006, said that biofuels created new problems. “An increase in grain prices impacts us because we are a major procurer of grain for food,” she said. “So biofuels are both a challenge and an opportunity.”

In Europe, the rapid conversion of fields that once grew wheat or barley to biofuel crops like rapeseed is already leading to shortages of the ingredients for making pasta and brewing beer, suppliers say. That could translate into higher prices in supermarkets.

“New and increasing demand for bioenergy production has put high pressure on the whole world grain market,” said Claudia Conti, a spokesman for Barilla, one of the largest Italian pasta makers. “Not only German beer producers, but Mexican tortilla makers have see the cost of their main raw material growing quickly to historical highs.”

Some experts are more worried about the potential impact to low-income consumers. In the developing world, the shift to more lucrative biofuel crops destined for richer countries could create serious hunger and damage the environment if wild land is converted to biofuel cultivation, the agriculture panel concluded.

But officials at the European Commission say they are pursuing a measured course that will prevent some of the price and supply problems seen in American markets.

In a recent speech, Mariann Fischer Boel, the European agriculture and rural development commissioner, said that the 10 percent target was “not a shot in the dark,” but was carefully chosen to encourage a level of growth for the biofuel industry that would not produce undue hardship for Europe’s poor.

She calculated that this approach would push up would raw material prices for cereal by 3 percent to 6 percent by 2020, while prices for oilseed might rise 5 percent to 18 percent. But food prices on the shelves would barely change, she said.

Yet even as the European program begins to harvest biofuels in greater volume, homegrown production is still far short of what is needed to reach the 10 percent goal: Europe’s farmers produced an estimated 2.9 billion liters, or 768 million gallons, of biofuel in 2004, far shy of the 3.4 billion gallons generated in the United States in the period. In 2005, biofuel accounted for around 1 percent of Europe’s fuel, according to European statistics, with almost all of that in Germany and Sweden. The biofuel share in Italy was 0.51 percent, and in Britain, 0.18 percent.

That could pose a threat to European markets as foreign producers like Brazil or developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia try to ship their biofuels to markets where demand, subsidies and tax breaks are the greatest.

Ms. Fischer Boel recently acknowledged that Europe would have to import at least a third of what it would need to reach its 10 percent biofuels target. Politicians fear that could hamper development of a local industry, while perversely generating tons of new emissions as “green” fuel is shipped thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic, instead of coming from the farm next door.

Such imports could make biofuel far less green in other ways as well —for example if Southeast Asian rainforest is destroyed for cropland.

Brazil, a country with a perfect climate for sugar cane and vast amounts of land, started with subsidies years ago to encourage the farming of sugarcane for biofuels, partly to take up “excess capacity” in its flagging agricultural sector.

The auto industry jumped in, too. In 2003, Brazilian automakers started producing flex-fuel cars that could run on biofuels, including locally produced ethanol. Today, 70 percent of new cars in the country are

flex-fuel models, and Brazil is one of the largest growers of cane for ethanol.

Analysts are unsure if the Brazilian achievement can be replicated in Europe — or anywhere else. Sugar takes far less energy to convert to biofuel than almost any product.

Yet after a series of alarming reports on climate change, the political urgency to move faster is clearly growing.

With an armload of incentives, the Italian government hopes that 70,000 hectares, or 173,000 acres, of land will be planted with biofuel crops in 2007, and 240,000 hectares in 2010, up from zero in 2006.

Mr. Pini, the farmer, has converted about 25 percent of his land, or 18 hectares, including his “set aside”land, to Europe’s fastest-growing biofuel crop, rapeseed. He still has 50 hectares in grain and 7 in olives.

He has discovered other advantages as well. In Italy’s finicky food culture, food crops have to look good and be high quality to sell— a drought or undue heat can mean an off year. Crops for fuel, in contrast, can be ugly or stunted.

“You need fewer seeds and it’s much easier to grow,” he said.