英语精读翻译整理
5篇英语精读文章+翻译
1.Can We Know the Universe? - Reflections on a Grain of SaltCarl SaganScience is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things - from sub-nuclear particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole. Our intuition is by no means an infallible guide. Our perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or merely because of the limitations of our sense organs, which, of course, perceive directly but a small fraction of the phenomena of the world.Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of friction a pound of lead falls faster than a grain of fluff was answered incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the time of Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage-at the very least, the courage to question the conventional wisdom.But to what extent can we really know the universe around us? Sometimes this question is posed by people who hope the answer will be in the negative, who are fearful of a universe in which everything might one day be known. And sometimes we hear pronouncements from scientists who confidently state that everything worth knowing will soon be known - or even is already known.Let us approach a much more modest question: not whether we can know the universe or the Milky Way Galaxy or a star or a world. Can we know ultimately and in detail, a grain of salt? Consider one microgram of table salt, a speck just barely large enough for someone with keen eyesight to make out without a microscope. In that grain of salt there are about 1016 sodium and chlorine atoms. This is a 1 followed by 16 zeros, 10 million billion atoms. If we wish to know a grain of salt, we must know at least the three-dimensional positions of each of these atoms. (In fact, there is much more to be known - for example, the nature of the forces between the atoms - but we are making only a modest calculation.) Now, is this number more or less than the number of things which the brain can know?How much can the brain know? There are perhaps 1011 neurons in the brain, the circuit elements and switches that are responsible in their electrical and chemical activity for the functioning of our minds. A typical brain neuron has perhaps a thousand little wires, called dendrites, which connect it with its fellows. If, as seems likely, every bit of information in the brain corresponds to one of these connections, the total number of things knowable by the brain is no more than 1014, one hundred trillion. But this number is only one percent of the number of atoms in our speck of salt.So in this sense the universe is intractable, astonishingly immune to any human attempt at full knowledge. We cannot on this level understand a grain of salt, much less the universe.But let us look more deeply at our microgram of salt. Salt happens to be a crystal in which, except for defects in the structure of the crystal lattice, the position of every sodium and chlorine atom is predetermined. If we could shrink ourselves into this crystalline world, we could see rank upon rank of atoms in an ordered array, a regularly alternating structure - sodium, chlorine, sodium, chlorine, specifying the sheet of atoms we are standing on and all the sheets above us and below us. An absolutely pure crystal of salt could have the position of every atom specified by something like 10 bits of information. This would not strain the information-carrying capacity of the brain.If the universe had natural laws that governed its behavior to the same degree of regularity that determines a crystal of salt, then, of course, the universe would be knowable.Even if there were many such laws, each of considerable complexity, human beings might have the capacity to understand them all.Even if such knowledge exceeded the information-carrying capacity of the brain, we might store the additional information outside our bodies - in books, for example, or in computer memories - and still, in some sense, know the universe.Human beings are, understandably, highly motivated to find regularities, natural laws. The search for rules, the only possible way to understand such a vast and complex universe, is called science. The universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.It is an astonishing fact that there are laws of nature, rules that summarize conveniently - not just qualitatively but quantitatively - how the world works. We might imagine a universe in which there are no such laws, in which the 1080 elementary particles that make up a universe like our own behave with utter and uncompromising abandon. To understand such a universe we would need a brain at least as massive as the universe. It seems unlikely that such a universe could have life and intelligence, because beings and brains require some degree of internal stability and order. But even if in a much more random universe there were such beings with an intelligence much greater than our own, there could not be much knowledge, passion or joy.Fortunately for us, we live in a universe that has at least important parts that are knowable. Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something of the workaday world.When we go into other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly unreliable guides.For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.2.Extraterrestrial LifeA. Bowdoin Van RiperWhether life exists anywhere in the universe besides Earth is an open question, one that Western scholars have debated for over 200 years without coming significantly closer to a solution.Proving that extraterrestrial life does not exist is, by definition, impossible.Our galaxy is too large for us to investigate every corner of it where life might have arisen since we last looked, and it is only one galaxy among many.Proving that extraterrestrial life does exist is easy in principle but difficult in practice.The discovery of an alien organism would provide proof, but searching for one would require interstellar travel-something well beyond humans' technological reach.NONINTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUR GALAXYMost of the planets and moons in our solar system appear inhospitable to life as we know it. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune lack solid surfaces and receive only limited sunlight. Mercury is baked and irradiated by the sun, while Pluto is perpetually dark and frozen. Venus's dense atmosphere creates crushing pressures, intense heat, and corrosive rain at its surface. Few of the solar system's moons, and none of its asteroids, are large enough to hold even a thin atmosphere. The most likely places to search for life in our solar system appear to be Mars and the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Robot spacecraft have photographed Mars, Europa, and Titan from space. Robot landers have explored small portions of the Martian surface. Finding intelligent life on any of the three worlds now seems unlikely. Finding simpler forms of life, if they exist at all, is likely to require systematic observation at close range.The probability that life exists somewhere else in our galaxy is high, simply because the number of stars in our galaxy is so high. Even if only a tiny fraction of stars have planets, even if only a tiny fraction of those planets are suitable for life, even if life only develops on a fraction of those planets, and even if intelligence only evolves on a fraction of the planets with life, there are still likely to be thousands of life-bearing planets in our galaxy. Finding such life will, however, mean finding the planets. Even ifinterstellar travel was routine, the job would be daunting. It would mean finding one world among thousands, with no evidence of its special status visible at interstellar distances.INTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUR GALAXYIntelligent life, if it exists elsewhere, is likely to be much rarer than nonintelligent life. It may, however, prove easier actually to find. Our own species beams a steady stream of radio and television signals into space and attaches information-laden metal plates to spacecraft headed out of the solar system. The signals are an accidental by-product of broadcasting; the plates are a conscious attempt at communication. Both announce our existence, our level of technological sophistication, and a tiny bit about our culture.It is also possible that a sufficiently intelligent and technologically adept species might find us before we develop the ability to go looking for it. Believers in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs argue that such encounters have already happened, either in the past or in the present. Most mainstream scientists are skeptical of such beliefs, explaining purported encounters with aliens in more prosaic terms.EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE IN POPULAR CULTUREPopular culture depicts thousands of human encounters with extraterrestrial life. Entire subgenres of science fiction are devoted to such encounters: "first contact" stories, "alien invasion" stories, "aliens among us" stories, and so on. A detailed discussion of popular culture's treatment of aliens could easily fill a book. Nearly all stories about extraterrestrial life, however, follow three well-established conventions.First, most stories featuring imagined extraterrestrial life tend to focus on one or, at most, two species from any given world. Gatherings of intelligent aliens from many worlds are common, but fully imagined alien ecosystems are not. The reason for this is both obvious and understandable. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex. Describing one on Earth, the building blocks of which are familiar, is a significant challenge; creating a plausible alien ecosystem from scratch, using very different building blocks, is an even greater challenge.Second, the physical form of extraterrestrial species reflects human attitudes toward species on Earth. The sweet-natured title character of Stephen Spielberg's film E.T. has a head that is large in proportion to its body and eyes that are large in proportion to its head. It has, in other words, the basic morphology of a human infant. Alien species that invade or attack the earth often resemble creatures that Western culture deems unpleasant. Powerful and benevolent aliens, on the other hand, recall angels in their lack of permanent physical bodies. Their evolution "beyond the need for physical form" is also suggestive of ideas about the afterlife.Third, the personalities and thought patterns of intelligent aliens closely resemble those of humans. Alien invaders of Earth want what human invaders want: territory, resources, slaves, or mates. Alien benefactors of Earth act out of altruism or paternalism or to secure allies in a hostile universe. Humans and aliens routinely discover that despite their physical differences, they share many of the same hopes and fears.We know nothing of how extraterrestrial life - if it exists - appears, behaves, or (if intelligent) thinks. Stories about it thus allow for limitless imagination. We tend, nevertheless, to imagine aliens whose appearance reflects our attitudes toward species here on Earth and whose thought and behavior patterns mirror our own. The reason for this is less a failure of imagination than an acknowledgement of dramatic necessity.Stories about human encounters with alien species are, ultimately, stories about us rather than the aliens. The innocent, stranded aliens of films like Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Starman are litmus tests for human society. Good-hearted individuals shelter and aid them, but those in power persecute them; the stories simultaneously reveal the best and worst of human behavior. Stories like these require aliens that are more human than any real alien species is likely to be-aliens that are human enough for human characters to interact with and for human audiences to care about.3.We Are All ScientistsThomas H. HuxleyThe method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about.There is no more difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person, than there is between the operations and methods of a baker weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights.It is not that the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.You have all heard it repeated, that men of science work by means of induction and deduction: and that by the help of these operations, they wring from Nature certain other things, which are called natural laws and causes, and that out of these, they build up hypotheses and theories. And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can by nomeans be compared with these processes, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the craft. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by the terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong. Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing of course in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you go into a fruiter's shop, wanting an apple--you take up one, and, on biting it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and green. You take up another one, and that too is hard, green, and sour. The shop man offers you a third; but, before biting it, you find it is hard and green, and you immediately say that you will not have it, as it must be sour.Nothing can be simpler than that, but if you take the trouble to analyze and trace out into its logical elements what has been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. You found that, in the two experiences, hardness and greenness in apples went together with sourness. When you are offered another apple which is hard and green, you say: "All hard and green apples are sour; this apple is hard and green, therefore it is sour." You see, you have, in the first place, established a law by induction, and upon that you have founded a deduction, and reasoned out the special conclusion of the particular case. Now, suppose, someday, you are questioned by a friend: "But how do you know that all hard and green apples are sour?" You at once reply, "Oh, because I have tried them over and over again, and have always found them to be so." Well, if we were talking science instead of common sense, we should call that an experimental verification. The more extensive verifications are, the more frequently experiments have been made, and results of the same kind arrived at, and the more varied the conditions under which the same results are attained, the more certain is the ultimate conclusion. And in science, as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact proportion to the absence of variation in the result of our experimental verifications. We believe gravitation in such an extensive, thorough, and unhesitating manner because the universal experience of mankind verifies it, and we can verify it ourselves at any time; and that is the strongest possible foundation on which any natural law can rest.Let us now take another example.Suppose that on coming down to the parlor of your house, you find that a teapot and some spoons which had been left in the room are gone--the window is open, and you observe the mark of a dirty hand on the window frame, and you notice the impress of a hobnailed shoe on the gravel outside. All these phenomena have struck your attention instantly, and before twoseconds have passed you say, "Oh, somebody has broken open the window, entered the room, and run off with the spoons and the teapot!" You mean to say exactly what you know; but in reality you are giving a hypothesis. You do not know it at all; it is nothing but a hypothesis rapidly framed in your own mind. By a train of reasoning involving many inductions and deductions, you have probably arrived at the general law that the windows do not open by themselves. Something has opened the window. A second general law you have arrived at is that teapots and spoons do not go out of a window spontaneously. They have been removed. In the third place, you look at the marks on the windowsill and the shoe-marks outside, and you conclude that they are made by a man. You assume from all these premises that the man who made the marks outside and on the window sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole your teapot and spoons.Now, in this supposition case, I have taken phenomena of a very common kind, in order that you might see what are the different steps in an ordinary process of reasoning. I say that you are led to your conclusion by exactly the same train of reasoning as that which a man of science pursues when he is endeavoring to discover the origin and laws of the most occult phenomena. The only difference is that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in his hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is always of importance, and is sure to be in the long run constantly productive of mischievous, if not fatal results.puter AddictsDina IngberIt is 3 A.M. Everything on the university campus seems ghostlike in the quiet, misty darkness--everything except the computer center. Here, twenty students sit transfixed at their consoles, tapping away on the terminal keys. For the rest of the world, it might be the middle of the night, but here time does not exist. As in the gambling casinos of Las Vegas, there are no windows or clocks. This is a world unto itself. Like gamblers, these young computer "hackers" are pursuing a kind of compulsion, a drive so consuming it overshadows nearly every other part of their lives and forms the focal point of their existence. They are compulsive computer programmers.What do they do at the computer at all hours of the day or night? They design and play complex games; they delve into the computer's memory bank for obscure tidbits of information; like ham radio operators, they communicate with hackers in other areas who are plugged into the same system. They even do their everyday chores by computer, typing termpapers and getting neat printouts. By breaking the code, they can cut into other programs, discovering secrets in computerized systems or making mischievous (and often costly) changes to other people's programs.Computer-science teachers are now more aware of the implications of this hacker phenomenon and are on the lookout for potential hackers and cases of computer addiction that are already severe. They know that the case of the hackers is not just the story of one person's relationship with a machine. It is the story of a society's relationship to the so-called thinking machines, which are becoming almost ubiquitous.Many feel we are now on the verge of a computer revolution that will change our lives as drastically as the invention of the printing press and the Industrial Revolution changed society in the past. By the most conservative estimates, one out of three American homes will have computers or terminals within the next five to ten years. Electronic toys and games, which came on the market in 1976, already comprise a more than half-billion-dollar business. And though 300,000 Americans now work full time programming computers, at least another 1.2 million will be needed by 1990. Many of them are likely to come from today's young hackers.There is a strong camaraderie and sense of belonging among hackers. They have their own subculture, with the usual in jokes and even a whole vocabulary based on computer terminology (there is even a hacker's dictionary). But to outsiders, they are a strange breed. In high schools, the hackers are called nerds or the brain trust. They spend most of their free time in the computer room and don't socialize much. And many have trouble with interpersonal relationships.Joel Bion, a sophomore at Stanford, explains how he got hooked: "I've been working with computers since I was eight. I grew up in Minnesota and I didn't have many friends. I wasn't into sports and couldn't participate in gym class because I had asthma. Then I found a computer terminal at school. I bought some books and taught myself. Pretty soon I was spending a few hours on it every day. Then I was there during vacations. Sure, I lost some friends, but when I first started I was so fascinated. Here was a field I could really feel superior in. I had a giant program, and I kept adding and adding to it. And I could use the computer to talk to people all over the state, I thought that was a great social interaction. But, of course, it wasn't, because I never came into face-to-face contact."Interesting and malleable are the two key words if you want to understand the hacker's addiction and the increasing allure of the computer for all segments of our society.The computer can be almost as interesting as a human being. Like people, it is interactive. When you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. And because it stores great quantities of information, it can often answermore questions, more accurately, than human friends. This interaction has led some to attribute human characteristics to the machine.Hackers are not the only ones interacting with the computer on a personal level. The amazing powers of the machine have enticed even the most sophisticated scientists into wondering just how human it can become. The newly developing science of artificial intelligence aims at programming the computer to think, reason and react in much the same way that people do. Computers can diagnose a patient's ailments and recommend treatments. They can mimic the dialogue of a psychotherapist or the reasoning of a lawyer.If computers can replace our most admired humans, the professionals, then why shouldn't the hackers feel close to them and invest emotional energy in them? After all, the computer seems to have unlimited potential. Already, with today's technology, tens of thousands of words can be stored on a tiny silicon chip measuring less than a centimeter square and millimeter thick. And any item of information on the chip can be called up and displayed on a TV screen in a fraction of a second. So the computer user has access to worlds of information within reach, literally, of his fingertips. And the computer can rearrange that information and interrelate facts or draw conclusions at the programmer's command. It is extremely malleable.Computer-science teachers say they can usually pick out the prospective hackers in their courses because these students make their homework assignments more complex than they need to be. Rather than using the simplest and most direct method, they take joy in adding extra steps just to prove their ingenuity.But perhaps those hackers know something that we don't about the shape of things to come. "That hacker who had to be literally dragged off his chair at MIT is now a multimillionaire of the computer industry," says MIT professor Michael Dertouzos. "And two former hackers became the founders of the highly successful Apple home-computer company."When seen in this light, the hacker phenomenon may not be so strange after all. If, as many psychiatrists say, play is really the basis for all human activity, then the hacker games are really the preparation for future developments.Computers are not just becoming more and more a part of our world. To a great degree they are our world. It is therefore not unlikely that our relationship with them will become as subjective as that of the hackers. So perhaps hackers are, after all, harbingers of the world to come.5.Why Superstitions?Peter LorieEvery age pays attention to the ancient superstitions according to a certain subtle fashion, very often knowing nothing about the original sources from which they derived. It wasn't so long ago that bibles were fanned in front of sick men's faces and communion wine was prescribed for whooping cough while women bathed their sore eyes with baptismal water. Although modem Westerners would not admit to crossing themselves when faced with potential evil such as a passing magpie, they do cross fingers to prevent bad luck. Some superstitions merely transform from the original, and the original is frequently a relic of still more ancient cultures and long-vanished ways of life. Above all, superstitions remain as outward expressions of the tensions and anxieties that hold sway over humanity as it struggles down the corridor of life from birth to death, full of change and uncertainty.We can see the superstition, therefore, as a kind of reassurance against fluctuation as though we are part of an impenetrable mystery with incomprehensible rules.And yet - strangely perhaps in this age of reason - it very often turns out that we are more interested in the mysteries of superstitions than in previous centuries when they were taken for granted, and that in fact there is much more to many superstitions than is at first obvious. Mistletoe, for example, was the most holy of plants to the Druids, why so? To hang a sprig of this strange plant in a house at Christmas is to attract young men to kiss young women beneath it, each time plucking one of the berries from the sprig. Why should this be so? Who started it? Why did the hanging of mistletoe keep away the devil? The young woman to whom the man had given the plucked berry would retire to her room, lock the door and swallow the berry. She would then inscribe the initials of the man onto a mistletoe leaf and "stitch it into her corset close to her heart, binding him to her so long as it remain there."Superstitious nonsense! But how do we maintain the best love affairs, the best and most happy relationships? By mutual concern, by bringing the partner close to an open heart, by honesty and warmth, by acknowledging their presence in our lives. How better to represent this than with a mistletoe leaf inscribed and secreted in the most intimate place?All superstition has grown from something; there is no smoke without fire. Who was the first one to decide that opening an umbrella in a house is bad luck? Who was the first to walk under a ladder and suffer the consequences? Who smashed a mirror, and spilled salt to spend a life-sentence at the hands of the fates? Who first branded Friday the 13th as a day on which luck would run out? What was the world like that produced and maintained such extraordinary ideas?。
大学英语精读课后翻译汇总(1-7单元)
大学英语精读课后翻译汇总Unit 11)史密斯太太对我抱怨说，她经常发现与自己十六岁的女儿简直无法沟通。
Mrs. Smith complained to me that she often found it simply impossible to communicate with her 16-year-old daughter.2) 我坚信，阅读简写的(simplified) 英文小说是扩大我们词汇量的一种轻松愉快的方法。
I firmly believe that reading simplified English novels is an easy and enjoyable way of enlarg ing our vocabulary.3) 我认为我们在保护环境不受污染(pollution) 方面还做得不够。
I don’t think we’re doing enough to protect our environment from pollution.4) 除了每周写作文外，我们的英语老师还给我们布置了八本书在暑假里阅读。
In addition to/Apart from writing compositions on a weekly basis, our English teacher assign ed us eight books to read during the summer vacation.5) 我们从可靠的消息来源获悉下学期一位以英语为母语的人将要教我们英语口语。
We’ve learned from reliable sources that a native English speaker is going to teach us spok e n English next term/semester.6) 经常看英语电影不仅会提高你的听力，而且还会帮助你培养说的技能。
5篇英语精读文章+翻译
1.Can We Know the Universe? - Reflections on a Grain of SaltCarl SaganScience is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things - from sub-nuclear particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole. Our intuition is by no means an infallible guide. Our perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or merely because of the limitations of our sense organs, which, of course, perceive directly but a small fraction of the phenomena of the world.Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of friction a pound of lead falls faster than a grain of fluff was answered incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the time of Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage-at the very least, the courage to question the conventional wisdom.But to what extent can we really know the universe around us? Sometimes this question is posed by people who hope the answer will be in the negative, who are fearful of a universe in which everything might one day be known. And sometimes we hear pronouncements from scientists who confidently state that everything worth knowing will soon be known - or even is already known.Let us approach a much more modest question: not whether we can know the universe or the Milky Way Galaxy or a star or a world. Can we know ultimately and in detail, a grain of salt? Consider one microgram of table salt, a speck just barely large enough for someone with keen eyesight to make out without a microscope. In that grain of salt there are about 1016 sodium and chlorine atoms. This is a 1 followed by 16 zeros, 10 million billion atoms. If we wish to know a grain of salt, we must know at least the three-dimensional positions of each of these atoms. (In fact, there is much more to be known - for example, the nature of the forces between the atoms - but we are making only a modest calculation.) Now, is this number more or less than the number of things which the brain can know?How much can the brain know? There are perhaps 1011 neurons in the brain, the circuit elements and switches that are responsible in their electrical and chemical activity for the functioning of our minds. A typical brain neuron has perhaps a thousand little wires, called dendrites, which connect it with its fellows. If, as seems likely, every bit of information in the brain corresponds to one of these connections, the total number of things knowable by the brain is no more than 1014, one hundred trillion. But this number is only one percent of the number of atoms in our speck of salt.So in this sense the universe is intractable, astonishingly immune to any human attempt at full knowledge. We cannot on this level understand a grain of salt, much less the universe.But let us look more deeply at our microgram of salt. Salt happens to be a crystal in which, except for defects in the structure of the crystal lattice, the position of every sodium and chlorine atom is predetermined. If we could shrink ourselves into this crystalline world, we could see rank upon rank of atoms in an ordered array, a regularly alternating structure - sodium, chlorine, sodium, chlorine, specifying the sheet of atoms we are standing on and all the sheets above us and below us. An absolutely pure crystal of salt could have the position of every atom specified by something like 10 bits of information. This would not strain the information-carrying capacity of the brain.If the universe had natural laws that governed its behavior to the same degree of regularity that determines a crystal of salt, then, of course, the universe would be knowable.Even if there were many such laws, each of considerable complexity, human beings might have the capacity to understand them all.Even if such knowledge exceeded the information-carrying capacity of the brain, we might store the additional information outside our bodies - in books, for example, or in computer memories - and still, in some sense, know the universe.Human beings are, understandably, highly motivated to find regularities, natural laws. The search for rules, the only possible way to understand such a vast and complex universe, is called science. The universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.It is an astonishing fact that there are laws of nature, rules that summarize conveniently - not just qualitatively but quantitatively - how the world works. We might imagine a universe in which there are no such laws, in which the 1080 elementary particles that make up a universe like our own behave with utter and uncompromising abandon. To understand such a universe we would need a brain at least as massive as the universe. It seems unlikely that such a universe could have life and intelligence, because beings and brains require some degree of internal stability and order. But even if in a much more random universe there were such beings with an intelligence much greater than our own, there could not be much knowledge, passion or joy.Fortunately for us, we live in a universe that has at least important parts that are knowable. Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something of the workaday world.When we go into other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly unreliable guides.For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.2.Extraterrestrial LifeA. Bowdoin Van RiperWhether life exists anywhere in the universe besides Earth is an open question, one that Western scholars have debated for over 200 years without coming significantly closer to a solution.Proving that extraterrestrial life does not exist is, by definition, impossible.Our galaxy is too large for us to investigate every corner of it where life might have arisen since we last looked, and it is only one galaxy among many.Proving that extraterrestrial life does exist is easy in principle but difficult in practice.The discovery of an alien organism would provide proof, but searching for one would require interstellar travel-something well beyond humans' technological reach.NONINTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUR GALAXYMost of the planets and moons in our solar system appear inhospitable to life as we know it. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune lack solid surfaces and receive only limited sunlight. Mercury is baked and irradiated by the sun, while Pluto is perpetually dark and frozen. Venus's dense atmosphere creates crushing pressures, intense heat, and corrosive rain at its surface. Few of the solar system's moons, and none of its asteroids, are large enough to hold even a thin atmosphere. The most likely places to search for life in our solar system appear to be Mars and the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Robot spacecraft have photographed Mars, Europa, and Titan from space. Robot landers have explored small portions of the Martian surface. Finding intelligent life on any of the three worlds now seems unlikely. Finding simpler forms of life, if they exist at all, is likely to require systematic observation at close range.The probability that life exists somewhere else in our galaxy is high, simply because the number of stars in our galaxy is so high. Even if only a tiny fraction of stars have planets, even if only a tiny fraction of those planets are suitable for life, even if life only develops on a fraction of those planets, and even if intelligence only evolves on a fraction of the planets with life, there are still likely to be thousands of life-bearing planets in our galaxy. Finding such life will, however, mean finding the planets. Even if interstellar travel was routine, the job would be daunting. It would mean finding one world among thousands, with no evidence of its special status visible at interstellar distances.INTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUR GALAXYIntelligent life, if it exists elsewhere, is likely to be much rarer than nonintelligent life. It may, however, prove easier actually to find. Our own species beams a steady stream of radio and television signals into space and attaches information-laden metal plates to spacecraft headed out of the solar system. The signals are an accidental by-product of broadcasting; the plates are a conscious attempt at communication. Both announce our existence, our level of technological sophistication, and a tiny bit about our culture.It is also possible that a sufficiently intelligent and technologically adept species might find us before we develop the ability to go looking for it. Believers in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs argue that such encounters have already happened, either in the past or in the present. Most mainstream scientists are skeptical of such beliefs, explaining purported encounters with aliens in more prosaic terms.EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE IN POPULAR CULTUREPopular culture depicts thousands of human encounters with extraterrestrial life. Entire subgenres of science fiction are devoted to such encounters: "first contact" stories, "alien invasion" stories, "aliens among us" stories, and so on. A detailed discussion of popular culture's treatment of aliens could easily fill a book. Nearly all stories about extraterrestrial life, however, follow three well-established conventions.First, most stories featuring imagined extraterrestrial life tend to focus on one or, at most, two species from any given world. Gatherings of intelligent aliens from many worlds are common, but fully imagined alien ecosystems are not. The reason for this is both obvious and understandable. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex. Describing one on Earth, the building blocks of which are familiar, is a significant challenge; creating a plausible alien ecosystem from scratch, using very different building blocks, is an even greater challenge.Second, the physical form of extraterrestrial species reflects human attitudes toward species on Earth. The sweet-natured title character of Stephen Spielberg's film E.T. has a head that is large in proportion to its body and eyes that are large in proportion to its head. It has, in other words, the basic morphology of a human infant. Alien species that invade or attack the earth often resemble creatures that Western culture deems unpleasant. Powerful and benevolent aliens, on the other hand, recall angels in their lack of permanent physical bodies. Their evolution "beyond the need for physical form" is also suggestive of ideas about the afterlife.Third, the personalities and thought patterns of intelligent aliens closely resemble those of humans. Alien invaders of Earth want what human invaders want: territory, resources, slaves, or mates. Alien benefactors of Earth act out of altruism or paternalism or to secure allies in a hostileuniverse. Humans and aliens routinely discover that despite their physical differences, they share many of the same hopes and fears.We know nothing of how extraterrestrial life - if it exists - appears, behaves, or (if intelligent) thinks. Stories about it thus allow for limitless imagination. We tend, nevertheless, to imagine aliens whose appearance reflects our attitudes toward species here on Earth and whose thought and behavior patterns mirror our own. The reason for this is less a failure of imagination than an acknowledgement of dramatic necessity.Stories about human encounters with alien species are, ultimately, stories about us rather than the aliens. The innocent, stranded aliens of films like Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Starman are litmus tests for human society. Good-hearted individuals shelter and aid them, but those in power persecute them; the stories simultaneously reveal the best and worst of human behavior. Stories like these require aliens that are more human than any real alien species is likely to be-aliens that are human enough for human characters to interact with and for human audiences to care about.3.We Are All ScientistsThomas H. HuxleyThe method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about.There is no more difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person, than there is between the operations and methods of a baker weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights.It is not that the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.You have all heard it repeated, that men of science work by means of induction and deduction: and that by the help of these operations, they wring from Nature certain other things, which are called natural laws and causes, and that out of these, they build up hypotheses and theories. And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can by no means be compared with these processes, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the craft. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by the terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong. Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, thoughdiffering of course in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you go into a fruiter's shop, wanting an apple--you take up one, and, on biting it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and green. You take up another one, and that too is hard, green, and sour. The shop man offers you a third; but, before biting it, you find it is hard and green, and you immediately say that you will not have it, as it must be sour.Nothing can be simpler than that, but if you take the trouble to analyze and trace out into its logical elements what has been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. You found that, in the two experiences, hardness and greenness in apples went together with sourness. When you are offered another apple which is hard and green, you say: "All hard and green apples are sour; this apple is hard and green, therefore it is sour." You see, you have, in the first place, established a law by induction, and upon that you have founded a deduction, and reasoned out the special conclusion of the particular case. Now, suppose, someday, you are questioned by a friend: "But how do you know that all hard and green apples are sour?" You at once reply, "Oh, because I have tried them over and over again, and have always found them to be so." Well, if we were talking science instead of common sense, we should call that an experimental verification. The more extensive verifications are, the more frequently experiments have been made, and results of the same kind arrived at, and the more varied the conditions under which the same results are attained, the more certain is the ultimate conclusion. And in science, as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact proportion to the absence of variation in the result of our experimental verifications. We believe gravitation in such an extensive, thorough, and unhesitating manner because the universal experience of mankind verifies it, and we can verify it ourselves at any time; and that is the strongest possible foundation on which any natural law can rest.Let us now take another example.Suppose that on coming down to the parlor of your house, you find that a teapot and some spoons which had been left in the room are gone--the window is open, and you observe the mark of a dirty hand on the window frame, and you notice the impress of a hobnailed shoe on the gravel outside. All these phenomena have struck your attention instantly, and before two seconds have passed you say, "Oh, somebody has broken open the window, entered the room, and run off with the spoons and the teapot!" You mean to say exactly what you know; but in reality you are giving a hypothesis. You do not know it at all; it is nothing but a hypothesis rapidly framed in your own mind. By a train of reasoning involving many inductions and deductions, you have probably arrived at the general law that the windows do not open by themselves. Something has opened the window. Asecond general law you have arrived at is that teapots and spoons do not go out of a window spontaneously. They have been removed. In the third place, you look at the marks on the windowsill and the shoe-marks outside, and you conclude that they are made by a man. You assume from all these premises that the man who made the marks outside and on the window sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole your teapot and spoons.Now, in this supposition case, I have taken phenomena of a very common kind, in order that you might see what are the different steps in an ordinary process of reasoning. I say that you are led to your conclusion by exactly the same train of reasoning as that which a man of science pursues when he is endeavoring to discover the origin and laws of the most occult phenomena. The only difference is that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in his hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is always of importance, and is sure to be in the long run constantly productive of mischievous, if not fatal results.puter AddictsDina IngberIt is 3 A.M. Everything on the university campus seems ghostlike in the quiet, misty darkness--everything except the computer center. Here, twenty students sit transfixed at their consoles, tapping away on the terminal keys. For the rest of the world, it might be the middle of the night, but here time does not exist. As in the gambling casinos of Las Vegas, there are no windows or clocks. This is a world unto itself. Like gamblers, these young computer "hackers" are pursuing a kind of compulsion, a drive so consuming it overshadows nearly every other part of their lives and forms the focal point of their existence. They are compulsive computer programmers.What do they do at the computer at all hours of the day or night? They design and play complex games; they delve into the computer's memory bank for obscure tidbits of information; like ham radio operators, they communicate with hackers in other areas who are plugged into the same system. They even do their everyday chores by computer, typing term papers and getting neat printouts. By breaking the code, they can cut into other programs, discovering secrets in computerized systems or making mischievous (and often costly) changes to other people's programs.Computer-science teachers are now more aware of the implications of this hacker phenomenon and are on the lookout for potential hackers and cases of computer addiction that are already severe. They know that the case of the hackers is not just the story of one person's relationship with a machine. It is the story of a society's relationship to the so-called thinking machines, which are becoming almost ubiquitous.Many feel we are now on the verge of a computer revolution that will change our lives as drastically as the invention of the printing press and the Industrial Revolution changed society in the past. By the most conservative estimates, one out of three American homes will have computers or terminals within the next five to ten years. Electronic toys and games, which came on the market in 1976, already comprise a more than half-billion-dollar business. And though 300,000 Americans now work full time programming computers, at least another 1.2 million will be needed by 1990. Many of them are likely to come from today's young hackers.There is a strong camaraderie and sense of belonging among hackers. They have their own subculture, with the usual in jokes and even a whole vocabulary based on computer terminology (there is even a hacker's dictionary). But to outsiders, they are a strange breed. In high schools, the hackers are called nerds or the brain trust. They spend most of their free time in the computer room and don't socialize much. And many have trouble with interpersonal relationships.Joel Bion, a sophomore at Stanford, explains how he got hooked: "I've been working with computers since I was eight. I grew up in Minnesota and I didn't have many friends. I wasn't into sports and couldn't participate in gym class because I had asthma. Then I found a computer terminal at school. I bought some books and taught myself. Pretty soon I was spending a few hours on it every day. Then I was there during vacations. Sure, I lost some friends, but when I first started I was so fascinated. Here was a field I could really feel superior in. I had a giant program, and I kept adding and adding to it. And I could use the computer to talk to people all over the state, I thought that was a great social interaction. But, of course, it wasn't, because I never came into face-to-face contact."Interesting and malleable are the two key words if you want to understand the hacker's addiction and the increasing allure of the computer for all segments of our society.The computer can be almost as interesting as a human being. Like people, it is interactive. When you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. And because it stores great quantities of information, it can often answer more questions, more accurately, than human friends. This interaction has led some to attribute human characteristics to the machine.Hackers are not the only ones interacting with the computer on a personal level. The amazing powers of the machine have enticed even the most sophisticated scientists into wondering just how human it can become. The newly developing science of artificial intelligence aims at programming the computer to think, reason and react in much the same way that people do. Computers can diagnose a patient's ailments and recommend treatments. They can mimic the dialogue of a psychotherapist or the reasoning of a lawyer.If computers can replace our most admired humans, the professionals, then why shouldn't the hackers feel close to them and invest emotional energy in them? After all, the computer seems to have unlimited potential. Already, with today's technology, tens of thousands of words can be stored on a tiny silicon chip measuring less than a centimeter square and millimeter thick. And any item of information on the chip can be called up and displayed on a TV screen in a fraction of a second. So the computer user has access to worlds of information within reach, literally, of his fingertips. And the computer can rearrange that information and interrelate facts or draw conclusions at the programmer's command. It is extremely malleable.Computer-science teachers say they can usually pick out the prospective hackers in their courses because these students make their homework assignments more complex than they need to be. Rather than using the simplest and most direct method, they take joy in adding extra steps just to prove their ingenuity.But perhaps those hackers know something that we don't about the shape of things to come. "That hacker who had to be literally dragged off his chair at MIT is now a multimillionaire of the computer industry," says MIT professor Michael Dertouzos. "And two former hackers became the founders of the highly successful Apple home-computer company."When seen in this light, the hacker phenomenon may not be so strange after all. If, as many psychiatrists say, play is really the basis for all human activity, then the hacker games are really the preparation for future developments.Computers are not just becoming more and more a part of our world. To a great degree they are our world. It is therefore not unlikely that our relationship with them will become as subjective as that of the hackers. So perhaps hackers are, after all, harbingers of the world to come.5.Why Superstitions?Peter LorieEvery age pays attention to the ancient superstitions according to a certain subtle fashion, very often knowing nothing about the original sources from which they derived. It wasn't so long ago that bibles were fanned in front of sick men's faces and communion wine was prescribed for whooping cough while women bathed their sore eyes with baptismal water. Although modem Westerners would not admit to crossing themselves when faced with potential evil such as a passing magpie, they do cross fingers to prevent bad luck. Some superstitions merely transform from the original, and the original is frequently a relic of still more ancient cultures and long-vanished ways of life. Above all, superstitions remain as outward expressions of the tensions and anxieties that hold sway over humanity as itstruggles down the corridor of life from birth to death, full of change and uncertainty.We can see the superstition, therefore, as a kind of reassurance against fluctuation as though we are part of an impenetrable mystery with incomprehensible rules.And yet - strangely perhaps in this age of reason - it very often turns out that we are more interested in the mysteries of superstitions than in previous centuries when they were taken for granted, and that in fact there is much more to many superstitions than is at first obvious. Mistletoe, for example, was the most holy of plants to the Druids, why so? To hang a sprig of this strange plant in a house at Christmas is to attract young men to kiss young women beneath it, each time plucking one of the berries from the sprig. Why should this be so? Who started it? Why did the hanging of mistletoe keep away the devil? The young woman to whom the man had given the plucked berry would retire to her room, lock the door and swallow the berry. She would then inscribe the initials of the man onto a mistletoe leaf and "stitch it into her corset close to her heart, binding him to her so long as it remain there."Superstitious nonsense! But how do we maintain the best love affairs, the best and most happy relationships? By mutual concern, by bringing the partner close to an open heart, by honesty and warmth, by acknowledging their presence in our lives. How better to represent this than with a mistletoe leaf inscribed and secreted in the most intimate place?All superstition has grown from something; there is no smoke without fire. Who was the first one to decide that opening an umbrella in a house is bad luck? Who was the first to walk under a ladder and suffer the consequences? Who smashed a mirror, and spilled salt to spend a life-sentence at the hands of the fates? Who first branded Friday the 13th as a day on which luck would run out? What was the world like that produced and maintained such extraordinary ideas?The bulk of the population, aside perhaps from the aristocratic classes, was concerned largely with the search for or production of food; therefore the changes of the seasons, the success or failure of the crops and all the influences that nature had upon life. The greater part of the populations of Europe lived in rural areas in small isolated communities. The difference between rich and poor was marked, and 99 percent of the people were very poor. Even as late as seventeenth century England, around two-thirds of the adult male population were unable to read and would sign their names with an "X."Life was extremely hazardous, and the central feature of day-to-day existence was a preoccupation with the explanation for and relief of human misfortune. In seventeenth-century Europe, for example, life-expectancy was influenced by the constant presence of sickness and premature death.。
精读1,3,6,8四个单元翻译
1翻译1) 发言人（spokesman）明确表示总统在任何情况下都不会取消（cancel）这次旅行。
The spokesman made it clear that the President would not cancel the trip under any circumstances.2) 杰克对书架上那些书一本也不了解，所以他的选择是很随意的。
Jack didn't know anything about any of the books on the bookshelf, so his choice was quite arbitrary.3) 随后发生的那些事件再次证明了我的猜疑（suspicions）是对的。
(confirm)The subsequent events confirmed my suspicions once again.4) 我认为我们应该鼓励中学生在暑假找临时工作。
I think we should encourage high school students to find temporary jobs employment during their summer holidays.5) 令我们吃惊的是，这位常被赞为十分正直的州长（governor）竟然是个贪官（corrupt official）。
To our surprise, the governor who had often been praised for his honesty turned out to be a corrupt official.6) 少数工人得到提升（be promoted），与此同时却有数百名工人被解雇。
A few workers were promoted, but meanwhile hundreds of workers were dismissed.7) 如果有机会，约翰也许已成为一位杰出的画家了。
大学英语精读课文翻译全
Unit 1 How to Improve Your Study Habits你也许是个智力一般的普通学生。
你在学校的学习成绩还不错，可你也许会觉得自己永远也成不了优等生。
然而实际情况未必如此。
你要是想取得更好的分数，也还是能做到的。
是的，即使中等智力水平的学生，在不增加学习负担的情况下，也能成为优等生。
其诀窍如下：1．仔细安排你的时间。
把你每周要完成的任务一一列出来，然后制定一张时间表或时间分配图。
先把用于吃饭、睡觉、开会、听课等这样一些非花不可的时间填上，然后再选定适宜的固定时间用于学习。
一定要留出足够的时间来完成正常的阅读和课外作业。
当然，学习不应把作息表上的空余时间全都占去，还得给休息、业余爱好和娱乐活动留出一定的时间，这一点很重要。
这张周作息表也许解决不了你所有的问题，但是它会使你比拟清楚地了解你是怎样使用你的时间的。
此外，它还能让你安排好各种活动，既有足够的时间工作，也有足够的时间娱乐。
2．寻找一个适宜的地方学习。
选定某个地方作为你的“学习区〞。
这可以是家里或者学校图书馆里的一张书桌或者一把椅子，但它应该是舒适的，而且不该有干扰。
在你开场学习时，你应能够全神贯注于你的功课。
3．阅读之前先略读。
这就是说，在你仔细阅读一篇文章之前，先把它从头至尾迅速浏览一遍。
在预习材料时，你就对它的内容及其构造有了大致的了解。
随后在你正式开场阅读时，你就能识别出不太重要的材料，并且可以略去某些章节不读。
略读不仅使你的阅读速度提高一倍，还有助于提高你的理解能力。
<4．充分利用课堂上的时间。
上课时注意听讲意味着课后少花力气。
要坐在能看得见、听得清的地方。
要作笔记来帮助自己记住教师讲课的内容。
5．学习要有规律。
课后要及早复习笔记。
重温课堂上提到的要点，复习你仍然混淆不清的地方。
阅读教科书上讲到这些内容的有关章节。
如果你知道第二天教师要讲述的内容，那你就把这局部材料浏览一下。
这有助于你听懂下一堂课。
如果你定期复习笔记和课本，你就能更深刻地领会这些材料的内容，你的记忆也会保持得更长久。
(完整)现代大学英语精读1 课后翻译
Unit11。
他们利用我们求助无门的困境把我们公司接管了。
They took advantage of our helpless situation and took over our company.2. 虽然我们面前仍有困难，但我肯定我们中国人有智慧靠自己实现国家的和平统一。
Although there are still difficulties ahead of us, I am sure that we Chinese people will have the wisdom to bring about the peaceful unification of our country on our own3. 只强调国内生产总值是错误的，它会引起很多严重问题。
It is wrong to put emphasis on nothing but GDP. It will give rise to many serious problems.4. 他喜欢炫耀他的财富，但是这完全是徒劳的，人们仍然像躲避毒药那样躲避他。
He loves to show off his wealth， but that is all in vain。
People still avoid him as though he were poison。
5. 他不久就爱上了这个村子。
他决心和村民一起把这个地方变成一个花园。
He soon fell in love with the village and was determined to make it a beautiful garden together with other villagers.6。
我们必须花更多的钱来和全球气温上升作斗争。
另外，我认为我们还必须采用严厉的法律措施.这不只是一个钱的问题。
We must spend more money fighting against global warming. In addition, we must resort to tough laws. It is not just a matter of money。
大学英语精读课后翻译
第一单元1． Their argument ended when she slammed the door and left without a word. 她砰地关上门，一声不吭地走了，他们间那场争执就此结束2． The guest at the dinner party were slightly surprised at the commanding tone of the American.出席晚宴的客人对那个美国人威严的语气感到有点以外3． Johnny has outgrown the fear of staying at home alone.约翰尼已长大成熟，不再害怕独自呆在家里了4． While all the other passengers made for the exit, he alone remained in his seat as if unwilling to leave the plane.当全部乘客都向出口处走去时，他却独自留在座位上，好象不愿意离开这架飞机似的5． The letter is to be handed to Dr. Wilson himself.这封信必须交给威尔逊博士本人6． While she felt like joining in the argument, Nancy was too shy to open her mouth.南希虽然很想参加辩论，但腼腆得不敢开口7． What do you think is the likeliest time to find him at home?你觉得什么时候最有可能在家里找到他8．The hunter’s face (was) lit up with excitement as soon as he saw a fox emerge from among the bushes and run in thedirection of/ make for the trap he had laid.猎人一看见有只狐狸从树丛中出现并向他设下的陷阱方向跑去，脸上顿时闪出了兴奋的表情。
精读课本翻译
P.13 (Unit 1)Translation:1)I’m tired. I shouldn’t have gone to bed so late last night.2)I don’t/didn’t know Bob very well, but we go/went out for an occasionaldrink together.3)We’re supposed to meet her at the train station.4)You could clearly see people drowning, but/and yet you took no action tosave them.5)Including weekends, there are only twelve more days to buy Christmaspresents.6)Without immediate action, many kinds of wild animals would die fromhunger.P.117Translation: (Unit4)1)It’s far too hot in the room; open the window, please.2)The noise woke up in the middle of the night.3)He shouldn’t have been angry at what I said. It was nothing more than a joke.4)We invited all our friends to the picnic but it rained and only five of themshowed up.5)She views marriages as a serious matter.6)To my disappointment, the movie didn’t live up to my expectations.P.221Translation: (Unit 7)1) We’re considering selling the home.2) I suggest he wait a while before he makes any decisions.3) John is very likely to come to the party tomorrow.4) We’d like to know the reason why she didn’t accept the job.5) You shouldn’t have gone back to the burning building---you might have been badly/seriously burnt.6) The thought had never crossed my mind that there might be a problem.P.291Translation: (Unit 9)1) The topic of the speech is announced a week in advance, but the name of the speaker is not.2）It seemed incredible that some students still played football before the exams.3) Mr. Auden is happy man who derives pleasure form helping others.4) Two Americans shared last year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine.5) First of all I’d like to welcome you to the meeting.6) I’m not accustomed to such luxury. It is a waste of money.7) The results of the exam will be put up on Friday afternoon.8) Some cruel experiments on animals are carried out in the name of science.。
大学英语精读4翻译
1.我知道，不管发生什么情况，我都可以依靠兄弟的支持。
I knew I could rely on my brother to stand by me whatever happened.2.一般说来，年轻一代和老一辈不同，他们对现在而不是对过去更感兴趣。
但这两代人如果不互相尊重对方的需要，就都会遭受损失。
As a general rule, unlike the older generation, the younger generation tends to be more interested in the present rather than the past, but both generations will stand to lose if they do not respect the other’s needs.3.中国的书面文字是国家完整统一的一个重要因素。
The Chinese written language has been a major factor for integrating the whole nation.4.在中国的传统艺术和文学中，竹子和松树往往象征着道德上的正直和刚正不阿。
In traditional Chinese art and literature, the bamboo and the pine tree usually symbolize moral integrity and uprightness.5.女皇伊丽莎白一世统治英国45年。
在她统治时期，国家十分繁荣昌盛。
Queen Elizabeth 1 ruled England for 45 years, and the nation prospered under her rule.6.民主意味着多数人来统治；但不仅如此，尊重少数人反对的权利也是民主不可分的一部分。
这两条规则同等重要。
精读1翻译及课文背诵
精读复习资料1. 他们利用我们求助无门的困境把我们公司接管了。
They took advantage of our helpless situation and took over our company.3. 只强调国内生产总值是错误的，它会引起很多严重问题。
It is wrong to put emphasis on nothing but GDP. It will giverise to Many serious problems6. 我们必须花更多的钱来和全球气温上升作斗争。
另外，我认为我们还必须采用严厉的法律措施。
这不只是一个钱的问题。
We must spend more money fighting against globalwarming. In addition, we must resort to tough laws. It is not just a matter of money.8这个腐败的官员还在死死抓住他的权力不放。
他拒绝靠边站。
This corrupt official was still clinging to his power. He refused to step aside.8. 以李教授为首的专家们很快就会来帮助农民解决问题。
A team of experts headed by Professor Li will soon come andhelp farmers solve their problems.6他们继续争吵了几个钟头，两人似乎谁也不愿听对方的话。
我突然想起有人说过：“讨论是知识的交流，而争吵是无知的交换。
”They went on arguing for hours. Neither was willing to listen to the other. I suddenly remembered someone saying: Discussion is an exchange ofknowledge while argument is an exchange ofignorance.7. 那里的形式似乎非常复杂，政府已答应进行认真调查。
精读翻译
Unit 11.他对他的研究如此专心致志，从来没有过很快就要退休的念头。
He is so devoted to his research that it never occurs to him that he will soon have to retire.2.很多人都曾说过，如果没有有效的制约，我们都有滥用权力的倾向。
Many people have observed that ,without effective checks , we all have the tendency to abuse our power .3.有些国家拒绝卷入这一争端，而且他们对外国的干涉感到非常反感。
Some countries refused to get involved in this dispute and they resent any foreign interference .4.控制沙尘暴需要大量的工作和资金。
The control of sand storms will involve a tremendous amount of work and money . 5.你们用这些技术的时候，必须考虑到当地的条件。
You have to take the local conditions into consideration when you apply these technologies .6.所有申请者都必须填好这些表格，然后邮寄50美元的报名费。
All applicants will have to fill out these forms and mail in an application fee of 50 dollars.7.他根据对孩子们行为的观察得出结论：学习是一种自然的乐趣。
、Based on his careful observation of children’s behavior , he came to the conclusion that learning is a natural pleasure.8.在一个多民族的国家里，各民族之间的和谐需要小心处理。
大学英语精读第三版第二册中英文课文翻译
1.The dinner partyI first heard this tale in Ind ia, where is to ld as if true -- tho ug h any naturalistwould know it couldn't be. Later som eone told m e that the story appeared in a magazine shortly before the First World War. That magazine story, and the person who wrote it, I have never been able to track down.The country is Ind ia. A colonial official and his wife are g iving a larg e d innerp arty. They are seated with their g uests -- o fficers and their wives, and a visitingAm e rican n atu ralist -- in the ir sp acio u s d in in g ro o m, which has a b are m arb le flo o r,open rafters and wide glass doors opening onto a veranda.A sp irited d iscussio n sp ring s up b etween a yo ung g irl who says that wo m enhave outgrown the jumping-on-a-chair-at-the-sight-of-a-mouse era and a major who says that they haven't."A wo m an's reactio n in any crisis," the m ajo r says, "is to scream. And while am an m ay fe e l like it, h e h as th at o u n ce m o re o f co n tro l th an a wo m an h as. An d th atlast ounce is what really counts."The American does not join in the argument but watches the other guests. As he looks, he sees a strang e exp ression com e over the face of the hostess. She isstaring straight ahead, her muscles contracting slightly. She motions to the native boy standing behind her chair and whispers something to him. The boy's e ye s widen: he quickly leaves the room.Of the g uests, no ne excep t the Am erican no tices this o r sees the b o y p lace abowl of milk on the veranda just outside the open doors.The Am erican com es to with a start. In Ind ia, m ilk in a b owl m eans only onething -- b ait fo r a snake. He realizes there m ust b e a co b ra in the ro o m. He lo o ksup at the rafters -- the likeliest place -- but they are bare. Three corners of thero o m are e m p ty, an d in th e fo u rth th e se rvan ts are waitin g to se rve th e n e xt co u rse.There is only one place left -- under the table.His first impulse is to jump b ack and warn the others, but he knows the commotion would frighten the cobra into striking. He speaks quickly, the tone of his voice so commanding that it silences everyone."I want to know just what control everyone at this table has. I will count three hund red -- that's five m inutes -- and not one of you is to m ove a m uscle. Thosewho move will forfeit 50 rupees. Ready?"The 20 people sit like stone images while he counts. He is saying "...two h u n d re d an d e ig h ty..." wh e n, o u t o f th e co rn e r o f h is e ye, h e se e s th e co b ra e m e rg eand make for the bowl of milk. Screams ring out as he jumps to slam the veranda doors safely shut."Yo u we re right, Major!" the host exclaims. "A man has just shown us an example of perfect self-control.""Just a minute," the American says, turning to his hostess. "Mrs. Wynnes, how did you know that cobra was in the room?"A faint smile lights up the wo m a n's face as she replies: "Because it was crawling across my foot."UNIT 2-1一场关于男人是否比女人勇敢的激烈的讨论以一个意外的方式。
5篇英语精读文章翻译
1.Can We Know the Universe? - Reflections on a Grain of SaltCarl SaganScience is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things - from sub-nuclear particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole. Our intuition is by no means an infallible guide. Our perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or merely because of the limitations of our sense organs, which, of course, perceive directly but a small fraction of the phenomena of the world.Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of friction a pound of lead falls faster than a grain of fluff was answered incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the time of Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage-at the very least, the courage to question the conventional wisdom.But to what extent can we really know the universe around us? Sometimes this question is posed by people who hope the answer will be in the negative, who are fearful of a universe in which everything might one day be known. And sometimes we hear pronouncements from scientists who confidently state that everything worth knowing will soon be known - or even is already known.Let us approach a much more modest question: not whether we can know the universe or the Milky Way Galaxy or a star or a world. Can we know ultimately and in detail, a grain of salt? Consider one microgram of table salt, a speck just barely large enough for someone with keen eyesight to make out without a microscope. In that grain of salt there are about 1016 sodium and chlorine atoms. This is a 1 followed by 16 zeros, 10 million billion atoms. If we wish to know a grain of salt, we must know at least the three-dimensional positions of each of these atoms. (In fact, there is much more to be known - for example, the nature of the forces between the atoms - but we are making only a modest calculation.) Now, is this number more or less than the number of things which the brain can know?How much can the brain know? There are perhaps 1011 neurons in the brain, the circuit elements and switches that are responsible in their electrical and chemical activity for the functioning of our minds. A typical brain neuron has perhaps a thousand little wires, called dendrites, which connect it with its fellows. If, as seems likely, every bit of information in the brain corresponds to one of these connections, the total number of things knowable by the brain is no more than 1014, one hundred trillion. But this number is only one percent of the number of atoms in our speck of salt.So in this sense the universe is intractable, astonishingly immune to any human attempt at full knowledge. We cannot on this level understand a grain of salt, much less the universe.But let us look more deeply at our microgram of salt. Salt happens to be a crystal in which, except for defects in the structure of the crystal lattice, the position of every sodium and chlorine atom is predetermined. If we could shrink ourselves into this crystalline world, we could see rank upon rank of atoms in an ordered array, a regularly alternating structure - sodium, chlorine, sodium, chlorine, specifying the sheet of atoms we are standing on and all the sheets above us and below us. An absolutely pure crystal of salt could have the position of every atom specified by something like 10 bits of information. This would not strain the information-carrying capacity of the brain.If the universe had natural laws that governed its behavior to the same degree of regularity that determines a crystal of salt, then, of course, the universe would be knowable.Even if there were many such laws, each of considerable complexity, human beings might have the capacity to understand them all.Even if such knowledge exceeded the information-carrying capacity of the brain, we might store the additional information outside our bodies - in books, for example, or in computer memories - and still, in some sense, know the universe.Human beings are, understandably, highly motivated to find regularities, natural laws. The search for rules, the only possible way to understand such a vast and complex universe, is called science. The universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.It is an astonishing fact that there are laws of nature, rules that summarize conveniently - not just qualitatively but quantitatively - how the world works. We might imagine a universe in which there are no such laws, in which the 1080 elementary particles that make up a universe like our own behave with utter and uncompromising abandon. To understand such a universe we would need a brain at least as massive as the universe. It seems unlikely that such a universe could have life and intelligence, because beings and brains require some degree of internal stability and order. But even if in a much more random universe there were such beings with an intelligence much greater than our own, there could not be much knowledge, passion or joy.Fortunately for us, we live in a universe that has at least important parts that are knowable. Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something of the workaday world.When we go into other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly unreliable guides.For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.2.Extraterrestrial LifeA. Bowdoin Van RiperWhether life exists anywhere in the universe besides Earth is an open question, one that Western scholars have debated for over 200 years without coming significantly closer to a solution.Proving that extraterrestrial life does not exist is, by definition, impossible.Our galaxy is too large for us to investigate every corner of it where life might have arisen since we last looked, and it is only one galaxy among many.Proving that extraterrestrial life does exist is easy in principle but difficult in practice.The discovery of an alien organism would provide proof, but searching for one would require interstellar travel-something well beyond humans' technological reach.NONINTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUR GALAXYMost of the planets and moons in our solar system appear inhospitable to life as we know it. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune lack solid surfaces and receive only limited sunlight. Mercury is baked and irradiated by the sun, while Pluto is perpetually dark and frozen. Venus's dense atmosphere creates crushing pressures, intense heat, and corrosive rain at its surface. Few of the solar system's moons, and none of its asteroids, are large enough to hold even a thin atmosphere. The most likely places to search for life in our solar system appear to be Mars and the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Robot spacecraft have photographed Mars, Europa, and Titan from space. Robot landers have explored small portions of the Martian surface. Finding intelligent life on any of the three worlds now seems unlikely. Finding simpler forms of life, if they exist at all, is likely to require systematic observation at close range.The probability that life exists somewhere else in our galaxy is high, simply because the number of stars in our galaxy is so high. Even if only a tiny fraction of stars have planets, even if only a tiny fraction of those planets are suitable for life, even if life only develops on a fraction of those planets, and even if intelligence only evolves on a fraction of the planets with life, there are still likely to be thousands of life-bearing planets in our galaxy. Finding such life will, however, mean finding the planets. Even ifinterstellar travel was routine, the job would be daunting. It would mean finding one world among thousands, with no evidence of its special status visible at interstellar distances.INTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUR GALAXYIntelligent life, if it exists elsewhere, is likely to be much rarer than nonintelligent life. It may, however, prove easier actually to find. Our own species beams a steady stream of radio and television signals into space and attaches information-laden metal plates to spacecraft headed out of the solar system. The signals are an accidental by-product of broadcasting; the plates are a conscious attempt at communication. Both announce our existence, our level of technological sophistication, and a tiny bit about our culture.It is also possible that a sufficiently intelligent and technologically adept species might find us before we develop the ability to go looking for it. Believers in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs argue that such encounters have already happened, either in the past or in the present. Most mainstream scientists are skeptical of such beliefs, explaining purported encounters with aliens in more prosaic terms.EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE IN POPULAR CULTUREPopular culture depicts thousands of human encounters with extraterrestrial life. Entire subgenres of science fiction are devoted to such encounters: "first contact" stories, "alien invasion" stories, "aliens among us" stories, and so on. A detailed discussion of popular culture's treatment of aliens could easily fill a book. Nearly all stories about extraterrestrial life, however, follow three well-established conventions.First, most stories featuring imagined extraterrestrial life tend to focus on one or, at most, two species from any given world. Gatherings of intelligent aliens from many worlds are common, but fully imagined alien ecosystems are not. The reason for this is both obvious and understandable. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex. Describing one on Earth, the building blocks of which are familiar, is a significant challenge; creating a plausible alien ecosystem from scratch, using very different building blocks, is an even greater challenge.Second, the physical form of extraterrestrial species reflects human attitudes toward species on Earth. The sweet-natured title character of Stephen Spielberg's film E.T. has a head that is large in proportion to its body and eyes that are large in proportion to its head. It has, in other words, the basic morphology of a human infant. Alien species that invade or attack the earth often resemble creatures that Western culture deems unpleasant. Powerful and benevolent aliens, on the other hand, recall angels in their lack of permanent physical bodies. Their evolution "beyond the need for physical form" is also suggestive of ideas about the afterlife.Third, the personalities and thought patterns of intelligent aliens closely resemble those of humans. Alien invaders of Earth want what human invaders want: territory, resources, slaves, or mates. Alien benefactors of Earth act out of altruism or paternalism or to secure allies in a hostile universe. Humans and aliens routinely discover that despite their physical differences, they share many of the same hopes and fears.We know nothing of how extraterrestrial life - if it exists - appears, behaves, or (if intelligent) thinks. Stories about it thus allow for limitless imagination. We tend, nevertheless, to imagine aliens whose appearance reflects our attitudes toward species here on Earth and whose thought and behavior patterns mirror our own. The reason for this is less a failure of imagination than an acknowledgement of dramatic necessity.Stories about human encounters with alien species are, ultimately, stories about us rather than the aliens. The innocent, stranded aliens of films like Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Starman are litmus tests for human society. Good-hearted individuals shelter and aid them, but those in power persecute them; the stories simultaneously reveal the best and worst of human behavior. Stories like these require aliens that are more human than any real alien species is likely to be-aliens that are human enough for human characters to interact with and for human audiences to care about.3.We Are All ScientistsThomas H. HuxleyThe method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about.There is no more difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person, than there is between the operations and methods of a baker weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights.It is not that the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.You have all heard it repeated, that men of science work by means of induction and deduction: and that by the help of these operations, they wring from Nature certain other things, which are called natural laws and causes, and that out of these, they build up hypotheses and theories. And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can by nomeans be compared with these processes, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the craft. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by the terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong. Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing of course in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you go into a fruiter's shop, wanting an apple--you take up one, and, on biting it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and green. You take up another one, and that too is hard, green, and sour. The shop man offers you a third; but, before biting it, you find it is hard and green, and you immediately say that you will not have it, as it must be sour.Nothing can be simpler than that, but if you take the trouble to analyze and trace out into its logical elements what has been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. You found that, in the two experiences, hardness and greenness in apples went together with sourness. When you are offered another apple which is hard and green, you say: "All hard and green apples are sour; this apple is hard and green, therefore it is sour." You see, you have, in the first place, established a law by induction, and upon that you have founded a deduction, and reasoned out the special conclusion of the particular case. Now, suppose, someday, you are questioned by a friend: "But how do you know that all hard and green apples are sour?" You at once reply, "Oh, because I have tried them over and over again, and have always found them to be so." Well, if we were talking science instead of common sense, we should call that an experimental verification. The more extensive verifications are, the more frequently experiments have been made, and results of the same kind arrived at, and the more varied the conditions under which the same results are attained, the more certain is the ultimate conclusion. And in science, as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact proportion to the absence of variation in the result of our experimental verifications. We believe gravitation in such an extensive, thorough, and unhesitating manner because the universal experience of mankind verifies it, and we can verify it ourselves at any time; and that is the strongest possible foundation on which any natural law can rest.Let us now take another example.Suppose that on coming down to the parlor of your house, you find that a teapot and some spoons which had been left in the room are gone--the window is open, and you observe the mark of a dirty hand on the window frame, and you notice the impress of a hobnailed shoe on the gravel outside. All these phenomena have struck your attention instantly, and before twoseconds have passed you say, "Oh, somebody has broken open the window, entered the room, and run off with the spoons and the teapot!" You mean to say exactly what you know; but in reality you are giving a hypothesis. You do not know it at all; it is nothing but a hypothesis rapidly framed in your own mind. By a train of reasoning involving many inductions and deductions, you have probably arrived at the general law that the windows do not open by themselves. Something has opened the window. A second general law you have arrived at is that teapots and spoons do not go out of a window spontaneously. They have been removed. In the third place, you look at the marks on the windowsill and the shoe-marks outside, and you conclude that they are made by a man. You assume from all these premises that the man who made the marks outside and on the window sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole your teapot and spoons.Now, in this supposition case, I have taken phenomena of a very common kind, in order that you might see what are the different steps in an ordinary process of reasoning. I say that you are led to your conclusion by exactly the same train of reasoning as that which a man of science pursues when he is endeavoring to discover the origin and laws of the most occult phenomena. The only difference is that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in his hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is always of importance, and is sure to be in the long run constantly productive of mischievous, if not fatal results.puter AddictsDina IngberIt is 3 A.M. Everything on the university campus seems ghostlike in the quiet, misty darkness--everything except the computer center. Here, twenty students sit transfixed at their consoles, tapping away on the terminal keys. For the rest of the world, it might be the middle of the night, but here time does not exist. As in the gambling casinos of Las Vegas, there are no windows or clocks. This is a world unto itself. Like gamblers, these young computer "hackers" are pursuing a kind of compulsion, a drive so consuming it overshadows nearly every other part of their lives and forms the focal point of their existence. They are compulsive computer programmers.What do they do at the computer at all hours of the day or night? They design and play complex games; they delve into the computer's memory bank for obscure tidbits of information; like ham radio operators, they communicate with hackers in other areas who are plugged into the same system. They even do their everyday chores by computer, typing termpapers and getting neat printouts. By breaking the code, they can cut into other programs, discovering secrets in computerized systems or making mischievous (and often costly) changes to other people's programs.Computer-science teachers are now more aware of the implications of this hacker phenomenon and are on the lookout for potential hackers and cases of computer addiction that are already severe. They know that the case of the hackers is not just the story of one person's relationship with a machine. It is the story of a society's relationship to the so-called thinking machines, which are becoming almost ubiquitous.Many feel we are now on the verge of a computer revolution that will change our lives as drastically as the invention of the printing press and the Industrial Revolution changed society in the past. By the most conservative estimates, one out of three American homes will have computers or terminals within the next five to ten years. Electronic toys and games, which came on the market in 1976, already comprise a more than half-billion-dollar business. And though 300,000 Americans now work full time programming computers, at least another 1.2 million will be needed by 1990. Many of them are likely to come from today's young hackers.There is a strong camaraderie and sense of belonging among hackers. They have their own subculture, with the usual in jokes and even a whole vocabulary based on computer terminology (there is even a hacker's dictionary). But to outsiders, they are a strange breed. In high schools, the hackers are called nerds or the brain trust. They spend most of their free time in the computer room and don't socialize much. And many have trouble with interpersonal relationships.Joel Bion, a sophomore at Stanford, explains how he got hooked: "I've been working with computers since I was eight. I grew up in Minnesota and I didn't have many friends. I wasn't into sports and couldn't participate in gym class because I had asthma. Then I found a computer terminal at school. I bought some books and taught myself. Pretty soon I was spending a few hours on it every day. Then I was there during vacations. Sure, I lost some friends, but when I first started I was so fascinated. Here was a field I could really feel superior in. I had a giant program, and I kept adding and adding to it. And I could use the computer to talk to people all over the state, I thought that was a great social interaction. But, of course, it wasn't, because I never came into face-to-face contact."Interesting and malleable are the two key words if you want to understand the hacker's addiction and the increasing allure of the computer for all segments of our society.The computer can be almost as interesting as a human being. Like people, it is interactive. When you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. And because it stores great quantities of information, it can often answermore questions, more accurately, than human friends. This interaction has led some to attribute human characteristics to the machine.Hackers are not the only ones interacting with the computer on a personal level. The amazing powers of the machine have enticed even the most sophisticated scientists into wondering just how human it can become. The newly developing science of artificial intelligence aims at programming the computer to think, reason and react in much the same way that people do. Computers can diagnose a patient's ailments and recommend treatments. They can mimic the dialogue of a psychotherapist or the reasoning of a lawyer.If computers can replace our most admired humans, the professionals, then why shouldn't the hackers feel close to them and invest emotional energy in them? After all, the computer seems to have unlimited potential. Already, with today's technology, tens of thousands of words can be stored on a tiny silicon chip measuring less than a centimeter square and millimeter thick. And any item of information on the chip can be called up and displayed on a TV screen in a fraction of a second. So the computer user has access to worlds of information within reach, literally, of his fingertips. And the computer can rearrange that information and interrelate facts or draw conclusions at the programmer's command. It is extremely malleable.Computer-science teachers say they can usually pick out the prospective hackers in their courses because these students make their homework assignments more complex than they need to be. Rather than using the simplest and most direct method, they take joy in adding extra steps just to prove their ingenuity.But perhaps those hackers know something that we don't about the shape of things to come. "That hacker who had to be literally dragged off his chair at MIT is now a multimillionaire of the computer industry," says MIT professor Michael Dertouzos. "And two former hackers became the founders of the highly successful Apple home-computer company."When seen in this light, the hacker phenomenon may not be so strange after all. If, as many psychiatrists say, play is really the basis for all human activity, then the hacker games are really the preparation for future developments.Computers are not just becoming more and more a part of our world. To a great degree they are our world. It is therefore not unlikely that our relationship with them will become as subjective as that of the hackers. So perhaps hackers are, after all, harbingers of the world to come.5.Why Superstitions?Peter LorieEvery age pays attention to the ancient superstitions according to a certain subtle fashion, very often knowing nothing about the original sources from which they derived. It wasn't so long ago that bibles were fanned in front of sick men's faces and communion wine was prescribed for whooping cough while women bathed their sore eyes with baptismal water. Although modem Westerners would not admit to crossing themselves when faced with potential evil such as a passing magpie, they do cross fingers to prevent bad luck. Some superstitions merely transform from the original, and the original is frequently a relic of still more ancient cultures and long-vanished ways of life. Above all, superstitions remain as outward expressions of the tensions and anxieties that hold sway over humanity as it struggles down the corridor of life from birth to death, full of change and uncertainty.We can see the superstition, therefore, as a kind of reassurance against fluctuation as though we are part of an impenetrable mystery with incomprehensible rules.And yet - strangely perhaps in this age of reason - it very often turns out that we are more interested in the mysteries of superstitions than in previous centuries when they were taken for granted, and that in fact there is much more to many superstitions than is at first obvious. Mistletoe, for example, was the most holy of plants to the Druids, why so? To hang a sprig of this strange plant in a house at Christmas is to attract young men to kiss young women beneath it, each time plucking one of the berries from the sprig. Why should this be so? Who started it? Why did the hanging of mistletoe keep away the devil? The young woman to whom the man had given the plucked berry would retire to her room, lock the door and swallow the berry. She would then inscribe the initials of the man onto a mistletoe leaf and "stitch it into her corset close to her heart, binding him to her so long as it remain there."Superstitious nonsense! But how do we maintain the best love affairs, the best and most happy relationships? By mutual concern, by bringing the partner close to an open heart, by honesty and warmth, by acknowledging their presence in our lives. How better to represent this than with a mistletoe leaf inscribed and secreted in the most intimate place?All superstition has grown from something; there is no smoke without fire. Who was the first one to decide that opening an umbrella in a house is bad luck? Who was the first to walk under a ladder and suffer the consequences? Who smashed a mirror, and spilled salt to spend a life-sentence at the hands of the fates? Who first branded Friday the 13th as a day on which luck would run out? What was the world like that produced and maintained such extraordinary ideas?。
英语精读4_课文_中英文对照
Unit 1BIG BUCKS THE EASY WAY轻轻松松赚大钱"You ought to look into this," I suggested to our two college-age sons. "It might be a way to avoid the indignity of having to ask for money all the time." I handed them some magazines in a plastic bag someone had hung on our doorknob.“你们该看看这个，”我向我们的两个读大学的儿子建议道。
“你们若想避免因为老是向人讨钱而有失尊严的话，这兴许是一种办法。
”我将挂在我们门把手上的、装在一个塑料袋里的几本杂志拿给他们。
A message printed on the bag offered leisurely, lucrative work ("Big Bucks the Easy Way!") of delivering more such bags.塑料袋上印着一条信息说，需要招聘人投递这样的袋子，这活儿既轻松又赚钱。
(“轻轻松松赚大钱!”)"I don't mind the indignity," the older one answered.“我不在乎失不失尊严，”大儿子回答说。
"I can live with it," his brother agreed.“我可以忍受，”他的弟弟附和道。
"But it pains me," I said，"to find that you both have been panhandling so long that it no longer embarrasses you."“看到你们俩伸手讨钱讨惯了一点也不感到尴尬的样子，真使我痛心，”我说。
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1.He has prepared answers to the questions that he expects to confront duringthe interview.2.His sad story touched us so deeply that we nearly cried.3.The two of them are walking hand in hand along the river bank, chatting andlaughing.4.When he heard the exciting news, tears of joy welled up in his eyes.5.People from Shanghai can understand Suzhou dialect with ease, for Shanghaidialect and Suzhou dialect have much in common.6.Henry and his wife are looking into the possibility of buying a new housewithin three years.7.He finally gave in to his daughter’s repeated requests to further her educationabroad.8.We locked all our valuables away before we went on holiday.9.Although we have parted from each other, I hope that we will remain goodfriends and that we will care for and help each other just as we did in the past.10.At that critical moment, the army commander summoned all the officers towork out new strategies and tactics which would make it possible to conquer the enemy.UNIT 31.I am sorry I am late, bu t I was at a meeting and couldn’t get away.2.At the concert, whenever a singer finished singing a beautiful song, theaudience would burst into loud cheers to show their appreciation.3.She is always wearing stylish clothes, but she seldom cares about what sheeats or drinks.4.The nurse told me that the doctors had done wonders for your heart disease.5.When awarding the prize, the chairman complimented the winner on hisgreat contribution to mankind.6.This problem has bothered the experts for many years.7.The crowd of demonstrators melted away when the police arrived.8.Since punctuality is such a good habit, we should pay close attention to it andmake every effort to cultivate it.9.The old man cherishes this girl, as if she were his own daughter.10.It’s just a routine physical checkup, nothing to get worried about.1.I scrambled up the cliff for a good view of the sea.2.He lunged at the burglar and wrestled with him for the weapon.3.I figure that our national economy will continue to develop rapidly.4.The chairman made an effort to reassure the shareholders that the company’sbad results wouldn’t be repeated.5.Stop acting like a baby! Pull yourself together!6.Being very much a private man, he does not confide in anyone.7.We all hate the terrorists’ indiscriminate viole nce against ordinary people.8.Many people in this country are alarmed by the dramatic increase in violentcrimes.9.We anticipated that the enemy would try to cross the river. That was why wedestroyed the bridge.10.I am indebted to all the people who worked so hard to make the party a greatsuccess.UNIT 91.Towering above all others, this mountain peak commands a fine view.2.I have asked my friends to recommend a doctor who is good at treatingchildren.3.The children were swinging on a rope hanging from a tree.4.The government is determined to avoid at all costs a sharp rise in food prices.5.He tried his best to save the drowning boy, but in vain.6.That old woman is always interfering in other people’s affairs.7.After having several influential papers published, he became quitedistinguished in the academic world.8.Pollution is so serious in this area that the villagers can hardly find any waterthat is fit for drinking.9.I packed a suitcase with all the things that might be needed.10.We Chinese usually associate the Spring Festival with family reunion.UNIT111.They hoped to save their marriage by giving birth to a child.2.Secret service men escorted the President and his family everywhere theywent.3.The presidential candidate’s speech was punctuated now and then byoutbursts of applause from the audience.4.As soon as the news of victory came, there was great rejoicing all over thecountry.5.The tertiary industry in our country has been developing by leaps and boundssince the reform and opening drive started.6.The priest preached a sermon to the congregation on the need for charity.7.In order to / To maintain his dignity the employee didn’t kneel on his knees infront of the overbearing boss.8.When the chairman announced the election results, the meeting hall brokeinto a sea of great joy, with the whole assembly clapping and cheering.9.He has a very bad reputation, for he often takes other people’s names in vain.10.The building of the new road has been held up by the bad weather.UNIT 141.He possesses some fine traits: he has refined and gentle manners; he is kindand generous to others; he is always modest and prudent; and he constantly perfects his work.2. 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