urban myths or urban legends课文翻译
新标准大学英语三unit10 第一篇文章 课件
the friend of a friend has seen them several times.
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True story? Probably not. It's a classic example of what's called in many languages an urban myth. An urban myth is a story you hear by word of mouth. It usually describes something which might have happened, an apocryphal, second-hand story told as if it were true, just about plausible enough to be credible, about some event which has supposedly happened to a real person. Factual or not, it's likely to rely on expert storytelling and on a trustworthy source,
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address to return the coat.
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An old woman opens the door of the
house, and the driver explains what has happened. It turns out that the coat does belong to the old woman's daughter, but she was killed several years before on the same stretch of road where the driver picked her up. That day was the anniversary of the accident.
【英语口语】外教讲解 《Urban Legends》and《Fast Food》
Urban Legends 都市传奇A: Have you read all these crazy things that are going on around the world?你读了所有遍布全世界疯狂的事了吗？B: What do you mean?你是什么意思？A: I was reading about how some people get tricked or drugged in their hotel rooms and have their organs removed! Then they are sold on the black market.我读了有关一些人在宾馆里如何被骗或者被麻醉，然后他们的器官被盗走的故事！B: Don't tell me you actually believe all that? Don't be so gullible, they are just urban legends. They are just stories people make up to scare you.别告诉我你全信了？别那么容易上当受骗，那些只是都市传奇。
那些只是人编出来的故事来吓唬人的。
A: Well, I was also reading about how some popular songs have subliminal or even satanic messages if you play them backwards! Can you believe that?嗯，我还读过如果你倒放一些受欢迎歌曲，就会出现有潜意识或者甚至邪恶的信息。
你相信吗？B: You really think an artist or song writer is going to go through the trouble of putting subliminal or satanic messages in a song? Don't be so naive!你真的相信一个艺术家或者作词家能够克服把有潜意识和邪恶信息写在歌曲里的障碍吗？别那么天真了！A: Well maybe you are right, but how about the story of how KFC has rows of headless chickens which are super grown in order to get bigger chickens faster!嗯，也许你是对的，但是肯德基里面有一排没有头的鸡，那些都是能够快速长大的巨型的鸡。
urban myths or urban legends课文翻译
Urbn myths or Urban legends课文翻译都市神话还是都市传奇Urbn myths or Urban legends?London has the most extensive netvork of underground tunnels in the world. But for | some inhabitants, the tunnels are moe than just convenient- they live in them. The London Subterrancans are a race of people who live ben eath the srees. They're human, but they don't speak English, and they have their own cutoms. Occasionally, a few of them come to the surface. They only appar at night through the drains in a dark backstee and if they hea r foseps, they hide in a dark llyway and only come out when it's quiet a gan. And before sunise, they go back under ground. Very few Londoners lave seen them, but the friend of a friend has seen them several times.伦敦有着世界上最为庞大的地下隧道网络。
但是对某些伦敦居民来说，隧道不仅仅给他们的生活提供了便利一一他们还以此为家。
伦牧地下人是生活在街道下面的一族。
研究生英语综合教程上 unit5原文翻译
Unit FiveThe term yoga comes from a Sanskrit word which mean s yoke or union. Traditionally, yoga is a method joining the individual self with the Divine, Universal Spirit, or CosmicConsciousness. Physical and mental exercises ar e designed to help achieve this goal, also called self-tran scendence or enlightenment. On the physical level yoga postures, called asanas, are designed to tone, strengthen, and align me body. These postures are performed to ma ke the spine supple and healthy and to promote blood fl ow to all the organs, glands, and tissues, keeping all the bodily systems healthy. On the mental level, yoga uses b reathing techniques (pranayama) and meditation (dydna )to quiet, clarify, and discipline the mind. However, exp erts are quick to point out that yoga is not a religion, but away of living with health and peace of mind as its aim s. “瑜伽”这个词源于梵语，意思是“结合”或“联合”传统上瑜伽是一种把个人和神，万物之灵或无穷的意识联合在一起的方法。
中英双语版 WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO URBANISM 城市主义怎么了 雷姆库哈斯 孙珂译
W h a t E v e r H a p p e n e d t o Urbanism?城市主义怎么了？REM KOOLHAAS 著(孙珂Kenn Sun 译)译者：内容，译文库哈斯檄文《城市主义怎么了？》发出了对旧有体制的怒吼，嬉笑怒骂，无情的嘲讽，无一不展现了建筑学丰富变幻的明天和那个行将死去时代的落日。
这整个世纪（二十世纪）成了与“量”作战的一场惨败。
在由天文般的人口数量决定的尺度需求中，城市主义不再有创造力也不再有效力，不管早期的它是如何的赐予天真许诺并英勇出姿待敌。
在二十年里：拉哥斯从二百万人口增长到七百万，随后又从一千二百万增长到一千五百万；伊斯坦布尔从六百万翻番至一千二百万。
而中国正在酝酿更惊人规模的增长。
我们要如何解释：既然城市化在数十年的加速发展后已经遍及全球，并且正在建立一种权威性、所向披靡的城市状态，而此时城市主义这一行当却销声匿迹了？ 现代主义的诺言正像炼金术士的行当，它试图通过抽象与简单复制将数量转化为质量的战略已经失败，已经成了一场点石成金的笑话。
它的理念、美学、程序，都已经终结。
总的来说，每一次对一次崭新开始的尝试都使这一崭新的开始变得名声扫地。
这种惨败所造成的大耻辱已经在我们对于现代性和现代化的理解上轰出了醒目的弹坑！ 实际上，当代城市那种有挑衅意味的持续发展和醒目的活力表现正是产生这种惊恐和羞辱（尤其对于建筑师来说）的根源。
而更为过分的是，这种失败是在一种全方位的失败：一切试图作用或影响城市的手段都已经失效——无论是创造性的、修正性的还是政策性的。
“城市专家”们就像是输给了电脑的国际象棋手，眼看一种非正统的无意识机制智胜了所有对城市的觊觎，粉碎了所有权威的野心，它以今日的胜利告知所有激情洋溢的辩解以未来的失败，它正晃晃悠悠的飞行在前往必然未来的航程上，在其中几乎所有被预言的危险性都被它无边无际的城市覆盖物所吸收了。
虽然现在城市化已经举世瞩目勇往直前，但那种逃避现实的行为和态度却像后卫脚上的锁链一样，推迟了对两个行当进行最后审视的日期，它们——城市主义和建筑学——以前是与城市的建立过程联系最密切的行当。
张汉熙高级英语第三版第12 课课文翻译和单词
12 沙漠之舟艾尔•戈尔 我头顶烈日站在一艘渔船的滚烫的钢甲板上。
这艘渔船在丰收季节一天所处理加工的鱼可达15吨。
但现在可不是丰收季节。
这艘渔船此时此刻停泊的地方虽说曾是整个中亚地区最大的渔业基地，但当我站在船头向远处眺望时，却看出渔业丰收的希望非常渺茫。
极目四顾，原先那种湛蓝色海涛轻拍船舷的景象已不复存在，取而代之的是茫茫的一片干燥灼热的沙漠。
渔船队的其他渔船也都搁浅在沙漠上，散见于陂陀起伏、绵延至天边的沙丘间。
十年前，咸海还是世界上第四大内陆湖泊，可与北美大湖区五大湖中的最大湖泊相媲美。
而今，由于兴建了一项考虑欠周的水利工程，原来注入此湖的水被引入沙漠灌溉棉田，咸海这座大湖的水面已渐渐变小，新形成的湖岸距离这些渔船永远停泊的位置差不多有40公里远。
与此同时，这儿附近的莫里那克镇上人们仍在生产鱼罐头，但所用的鱼已不是咸海所产，而是从一千多英里以外的太平洋渔业基地穿越西伯利亚运到这儿来的。
我因要对造成环境危机的原因进行调查而得以周游世界，考察和研究许多类似这样破坏生态环境的事例。
一九八八年深秋时节，我来到地球的最南端。
高耸的南极山脉中太阳在午夜穿过天空中的一个孔洞照射着地面，我站在令人难以置信的寒冷中，与一位科学家进行着一场谈话，内容是他正在挖掘的时间隧道。
这位科学家一撩开他的派克皮大衣，我便注意到他脸上因烈日的曝晒而皮肤皲裂，干裂的皮屑正一层层地剥落。
他一边讲话一边指给我看。
从我们脚下的冰川中挖出的一块岩心标本上的年层。
他将手指．到二十年前的冰层上，告诉我说，“这儿就是美国国会审议通过化空气法案的地方。
”这里虽处地球之顶端，距美国首都华盛顿两大洲之遥，但世界上任何一个国家只要将废气排放量减少一席在空气污染程度上引起的相应变化便能在南极这个地球上最偏而人迹难至的地方反映出来。
迄今为止，地球大气层最重要的变化始于上世纪初的工业命，变化速度自那以后逐渐加快。
工业意味着先是煤、后是石油消耗。
我们燃烧了大量的煤和石油——导致大气层二氧化碳含的增加，这就使更多的热量得以留存在大气层中，从而使地球的候逐渐变暖。
unit10theidiocyofurbanlife课文翻译综合教程四
U n i t10T h eI d i o c y o f U r b a n L i f e课文翻译综合教程四-CAL-FENGHAI.-(YICAI)-Company One1Unit 10The Idiocy of Urban LifeHenry Fairlie1 Between about 3 . and 6 . the life of the city is civil. Occasionally the lonefootsteps of someone walking to or from work echo along the sidewalk. Allwork that has to be done at those hours is useful － in bakeries, for example.Even the newspaper presses stop turning forests into lies. Now and then a car comes out of the silence and cruises easily through the blinking traffic lights.The natural inhabitants of the city come out from damp basements and cellars.With their pink ears and paws, sleek, well-groomed, their whiskers combed,rats are true city dwellers. Urban life, during the hours when they reign, isurbane.2 These rats are social creatures, as you can tell if you look out on the city street during aninsomniac night. But after 6 ., the two-legged, daytime creatures of the city begin to stir;and it is they, not the rats, who bring the rat race. You might think that human beings congregate in large cities because they are gregarious. The opposite is true. Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities are not social places.3 The lunacy of modern city life lies first in the fact that most city dwellers try tolive outside the city boundaries. So the two-legged creatures have createdsuburbs, exurbs, and finally rururbs (rubs to some). Disdaining rural life, they try to create simulations of it. No effort is spared to let city dwellers imaginethey are living anywhere but in a city: patches of grass in the more modestsuburbs, broader spreads in the richer ones further out; prim new treesplanted along the streets; at the foot of the larger backyards, a pretense tobosky woodlands.4 The professional people buy second homes in the country as soon as they canafford them, and as early as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created. The New York intellectuals and artists quaintly say they are “going to the country” for the weekend or the summer, but in fact they have created a little Manhattan-by-the-Sea around the Hamptons, spreading over the LongIsland6 potato fields whose earlier solitude was presumably the reason whythey first went there. City dwellers take the city with them to the country, for they will not live without its pamperings. The main streets of America’s small towns, which used to have hardware and dry goods stores, are now strips ofboutiques. Old-fashioned barbers become unisex hairdressing salons. Thebrown rats stay in the cities because of the filth the humans leave during the day. The rats clean it up at night. Soon the countryside will be just as nourishing to them, as the city dwellers take their filth with them.5 Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family, and churches. But in the city today workand home, family and church, are separated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of their home life. At the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of their work hours in their hours off. They rush from the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool, to work at their play with the same joylessness.6 Even though the offices of today’s businesses in the city are themselves movingout to the suburbs, this does not necessarily bring the workers back closer to their workplace. It merely means that to the rush-hour traffic into the citythere is now added a rush-hour traffic out to the suburbs in the morning, and back around and across the city in the evening. As the farmer walks down to his farm in the morning, the city dweller is dressing for the first idiocy of his day, which he not only accepts but even seeks － the journey to work.7 In the modern office building in the city there are windows that don’t open. This is perhapsthe most symbolic lunacy of all. Outdoors is something you can look at through glass but not to touch or hear. These windows are a scandal because they endanger the lives of office workers in case of fire. But no less grievous, even on the fairest spring or fall day the workers cannot put their heads outside. Thus it is not surprising that the urban worker has no knowledge of the seasons. He is aware simply that in some months there is air conditioning, and in others through the same vents come fetid central heating. Even outside at home in their suburbs the city dwellers may know that sometimes it’s hot, and sometimes it’s cold, but no true sense of the rhythms of the seasons is to be had from a lawn in the backyard and a few spindly trees struggling to survive.8 The city dweller reels from unreality to unreality through each day, always trying to recoverthe rural life that has been surrendered for the city lights. No city dweller, even in the suburbs, knows the wonder of a pitch-dark country lane at night. Nor does he naturally get any exercise from his work.9 Every European points out that Americans are the most round-shouldered people in theworld. Few of them carry themselves with an upright stance, although a correct stance is the first precondition of letting your lungs breathe naturally and deeply. Electric typewriters cut down the amount of physical exertion needed to hit the keys; the buttons of a word processor need even less effort, as you can tell from the posture of those who use them.They rush out to jog or otherwise Fonda-ize their leisure to try to repair the damage done during the day.10 Everything in urban life is an effort either to simulate rural life or to compensate for its lossby artificial means. It is from this day-to-day existence of unreality, pretence, and idiocy that the city people, slumping along their streets even when scurrying, never looking up at their buildings, far less the sky, have the insolence to disdain and mock the useful and rewarding life of the country people who support them. Now go out and carry home a Douglas fir, call it a Christmas tree, and enjoy 12 days of contact with nature. Of course city dwellers don’t know it once had roots.城市生活之蠢行亨利·费尔利1 每天凌晨3点到6点，城市生活文明有礼。
urban myths or urban legends课文翻译
粗糙的乌龟壳妻子们和她们的孩子在远处的房子里讲民间故事的时候，她们的低声细语，虽然时不时地为歌声所打断，还是传到了丈夫奥康瓦的耳中。
爱克蔚菲和她的女儿，爱金玛，正坐在地板的垫子上。
现在，轮到爱克蔚菲讲故事了。
突然，窃窃私语的声音停止了，屋里所有人的目光都转向了他们最喜欢和最擅长讲故事的人。
“很久很久以前，”她开始讲到，“所有的鸟儿都被邀请去天上参加一个宴会。
他们都非常高兴，开始为这难得的日子做准备。
他们把自己涂成深红色，用颜料在身上画出漂亮的图案。
”“陆龟见到了这些准备活动。
不久，他就发现了这所有的一切意味着什么。
任何发生在动物界里的风吹草动都难逃他的法眼；而且此公机智狡猾。
一听说天上将举行盛大的宴会，他的喉咙就开始隐隐作痛。
当时正在闹饥荒，陆龟已经有两个月没吃到过一顿好饭了。
他的身子就像一个干柴棍一样，在空壳里发出连续短促的咕噜声。
他开始稳扎稳打地计划怎样上天去了。
”“可是他没有翅膀呀。
”爱金玛提到。
“耐心点，”妈妈回答到，“故事就在这儿。
陆龟没有翅膀，但是他去找鸟类，恳请能被允许跟他们一块儿去。
”“…我们太了解你了，‟听到他的请求后众鸟儿说。
…你不但狡猾无比，而且还忘恩负义。
如果允许你跟我们一块儿去，你不久就会故伎重演。
我们早就知道你会这一套。
”“…你们还是不了解我，‟陆龟说。
…我已经改过自新了。
我已不再是你们过去所知的那个热衷于调皮捣蛋的人了。
相反，我现在遇事沉着，还充满善意。
我已认识到：如果一个人与他人为难，就是跟自己过不去。
请放心，我发誓我不会再给你们制造任何麻烦了。
”“陆龟巧舌如簧，不一会儿，所有的鸟儿一致认为他已洗心革面了；而且，每个鸟儿都给他一根羽毛，这样他就拥有一对绚丽多彩的翅膀了。
”“向往已久的日子终于来临，陆龟第一个到达聚集地。
所有的鸟儿都到齐后，他们就出发前往了。
飞在鸟儿中间，陆龟非常高兴；因为是一个很了不起的演说家，他不久就被公推为他们一行的代言人。
”“…有一件重要的事我们不应忘记，‟陆龟在飞行途中说。
Unit 2 Myths and Legends新编大学英语第二版第三册课文翻译
Unit 2 Myths and LegendsWhy the Tortoise's Shell Is Not SmoothThe distant sound of low voices, broken now and again by singing, reached Okonkwo from his wives' huts as each woman and her children told folk stories. Ekwefi and her daughter, Ezinma, sat on a mat on the floor. It was Ekwefi's turn to tell a story. Suddenly the murmuring stopped and all eyes turned to their favorite and most skillful storyteller."Once upon a time," she began, "all the birds were invited to a feast in the sky. They were very happy and began to prepare themselves for the great day. They painted their bodies deep red and drew beautiful patterns on them with dye."Tortoise saw all these preparations and soon discovered what it all meant. Nothing that happened in the world of the animals ever escaped his notice; he was full of cunning. As soon as he heard of the great feast in the sky his throat began to itch at the very thought. There was a famine in those days and Tortoise had not eaten a good meal for two moons. His body rattled like a dry stick in his empty shell. Slowly but surely he began to plan how he would go to the sky.""But he had no wings," said Ezinma."Be patient," replied her mother. "That is the story. Tortoise had no wings, but he went to the birds and asked to be allowed to go with them."' We know you too well,' said the birds when they had heard him. 'You are full of cunning and you are ungrateful. If we allow you to come with us you will soon begin your mischief. We know you of old.'"'You do not know me,' said Tortoise. 'I am a changed man. I am not the mischievous man you once knew. On the contrary, I am thoughtful and well-meaning. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself. Rest assured, I promise I will not cause you any trouble.'"Tortoise had a sweet tongue, and within a short time all the birds agreed that he was a changed man, and they all gave him a feather, with which he made two splendidly colorful wings."At last the great day came and Tortoise was the first to arrive at the meeting place. When all the birds had gathered together, they all set off together. Tortoise was very happy as he flew among the birds, and he was soon chosen as the man to speak for the party because he was a great orator."' There is one important thing which we must not forget,' he said as they flew on their way. 'When people are invited to a great feast like this, they take new names for the occasion. Our hosts in the sky will expect us to honor this age-old custom."None of the birds had heard of this custom but they knew that Tortoise, in spite of his failings in other areas, was a widely traveled man who knew the customs of different peoples. And so they each took a new name. When they had all taken a new name, Tortoise also took one. He was to be called All of you."At last the party arrived in the sky and their hosts were very happy to see them. Tortoise stood up in his many-colored plumage and thanked them for their invitation. His speech was so eloquent that all the birds were glad they had brought him, and nodded their heads in approval of all he said. Their hosts took him as the king of the birds, especially as he looked somewhat different from the others."After a selection of nuts had been presented and eaten, the, people of the sky set before their guests the most delectable dishes Tortoise had ever seen or dreamed of. The soup was brought out hot from the fire and in the very pot in which it had been cooked. It was full, of meat and fish. Tortoise began to sniff aloud. There was pounded yam and also yam soup cooked with palm oil and fresh fish. There were also pots of palm wine. When everything had been set before the guests, one of the people of the sky came forward and tasted a little from each pot. He then invited the birds to eat. But Tortoise jumped to his feet and asked: 'For whom have you prepared this feast?'"' For all of you,' replied the man."Tortoise turned to the birds and said: 'You remember that my name is All of you. The custom here is to serve the spokesman first and the others later. They will serve you when I have eaten.'"He began to eat and the birds grumbled angrily among themselves. The people of the sky thought it must be their custom to leave all the food for their king. And so Tortoise ate the best part of the food and then drank two pots of palm wine, so that he was full of food and drink and his body grew fat enough to fill out his shell."The birds gathered round to eat what was left and to peck at the bones he had thrown on the floor. Some of them were too angry to eat. They chose to fly home on an empty stomach. But before they left each took back the feather he had lent to Tortoise. And there he stood in his hard shell full of food and wine but without any wings to fly home. He asked the birds to take a message for his wife, but they all refused. In the end Parrot, who had felt more angry than the others, suddenly changed his mind and agreed to take the message."' Tell my wife,' said Tortoise, 'to bring out all the soft things in my house and cover the ground with them so that I can jump down from the sky without hurting myself."Parrot promised faithfully to deliver the message, and then flew away smiling to himself. However when he reached Tortoise's house he told his wife to bring out all the hard and sharp things in the house. And so Tortoise's wife dutifully brought out her husband's hoes, knives, spears, guns, and even his cannon. Tortoise looked down from the sky and saw his wife bringing things out, but it was too far to see what they were. When all seemed ready he let himself go. He fell and fell and fell until he began to fear that he would never stop falling. And then like the sound of his cannon he crashed to the ground.""Did he die?" asked Ezinma."No," replied Ekwefi. "His shell broke into hundreds of pieces. But there was a great medicine man in the neighborhood. Tortoise's wife sent for him and he gathered all the bits of shell and stuck them together. That is why the Tortoise's shell is not smooth."粗糙的乌龟壳妻子们和她们的孩子在远处的房子里讲民间故事的时候，她们的低声细语，虽然时不时地为歌声所打断，还是传到了丈夫奥康瓦的耳中。
《高级英语读写译教程》Unit 12 参考译文及答案
Unit TwelveSection AThe City 参考译文城市[1] 从某种意义上来说，我们可以把美国城市存在的所有问题归咎于一个根源：我们美国人不很喜欢我们的城市。
[2] 这乍看起来荒诞不经。
毕竟我们中四分之三的人目前住在城市，并且每年有更多的人涌进城市。
据说，我们的城市问题正在受到美国政府更多的关心。
专家学者们发现了城市研究中的一个全新领域。
[3] 然而，从历史角度来看，这是千真万确的：在美国人的心理上，城市已经是一个基本上值得怀疑的社会，它充斥了欧洲的腐败现象，完全缺乏边远地区的那种空旷、清纯感和乡村的景色。
[4] 我不敢自命为美国人生活的中研究城市历史的学者。
但是我担任公职十三年，先是美国司法部的一名官员，然后任过国会议员，现在是美国最大城市的市长。
我的经历清楚地告诉我，美国人的思想主流中始终贯穿着一种强烈的反抗城市的观念。
到美国定居很多是因欧洲工业中心的恶劣条件造成的；在美国，人们可以获得土地，可以不受城市的腐败影响而日臻完善，这使多数理论认为在美国是有自由的。
[5] 这和现代城市的尴尬处境有何关系呢？我认为有很大的关系。
因为事实上，美国，特别是历史性地确立了我国优越地位的联邦政府，从来没认为美国的城市值得改造，最起码还没有到需要花费基本资源来改造的地步。
[6] 人们对城市的厌恶出现在来到美国之前。
当工业化驱使欧洲的工人进入欧洲大陆的主要城市时，就出现一些书和小册子，抨击城市是犯罪、腐败、污秽、疾病、罪恶、放荡、颠覆和高物价的根源。
诸如《摩尔·弗兰多斯》之类的一些最早的英国小说的主题都是有关一个单纯的乡下青年来到大城市，遭受到各种恐怖的威胁，最后又回归到乡村生活中去。
[7] 欧洲人的正确看法似乎证实了这一位法国人的观点，他写道：“在乡村，人的思想自由，心情舒畅；但是在城市里，朋友和熟人、自己和他人的事务、荒谬的争吵、礼仪、拜访、胡扯闲聊，以及其他许许多多的纨绔习气和消闲娱乐占去了我们的绝大部分时间，使我们无暇更好地进行必要的工作。
高一英语必修二课文翻译
高一英语必修二课文翻译Unit 1查找琥珀厅弗雷德里克威廉我,普鲁士国王,从未想像过这赏赐与俄罗斯人会令人惊喜的历史。
这个礼物,琥珀屋的,赐给这个名字,由于好几吨的琥珀被用来制造它。
琥珀被选有一个秀丽的黄棕色的颜色就像蜂蜜。
房间的设计是特殊的流行的日子。
这也是一种珍惜用金子来装饰和珠宝,将国家的最好的艺术家们大约10年了。
事实上,这个房间没有是作为礼物送人的。
它是设计出用于弗雷德里克的宫殿。
然而,普鲁士的下一任国王弗雷德里克威廉我、就是琥珀属于,确定不去保持它。
在1716他给了彼得最重要的东西。
作为回报,沙皇送给他一群他最好的士兵。
所以琥珀房成了沙皇的一局部在圣彼得堡冬宫。
大约四米长,房间作为一个小接待大厅为重要的游客。
后来,凯瑟琳二世琥珀屋的搬到一座宫殿外面圣彼得堡她在她的夏天。
她告知她的艺术家添加更多的详情。
在1770年房间是完成了她想要的。
几乎六百蜡烛照亮了房间,它的镜子,图片闪闪发光。
圆满的是,尽管琥珀厅被认为是世界奇迹之一,如今不见了。
在1941年9月期间,纳粹军队近了圣彼得堡。
这是一段时间,两国处于交战状态。
在纳粹寒得赴颐和园,俄国人能够取消一些家具和小艺术品从琥珀厅。
然而,一些的纳粹暗中偷了房间本身。
在不到两天的时间内摆放了10万件27木箱里。
毫无疑问,这些箱子然后穿上了Konigsberg的火车在那时波罗的海边的一个德国城市。
在那之后,琥珀屋的发生了什么照旧是个谜。
Unit 2面试波塞尼亚斯,谁是希利尼人作家,大约有2000年前,取得了魔幻之旅3月18日,2022年了解如今的奥运会。
他如今面试李岩,一名志愿者2022年奥运会。
病人:我的名字叫波塞尼亚斯。
我住在你们称为古希腊时代,我过去总是写关于奥运会的很久以前的事了。
我来你的时间了解如今的奥运会的到来,由于我知道2022年他们曾被关押在我的家乡。
我可以问你一些问题现代奥运会?李:天哪!你真的来自多久以前?当然你可以问任何问题你宠爱的地方。
新译林版高中英语选修三Unit4课文翻译
新译林版高中英语选修三Unit4课文翻译1.ReadingHeritage in danger处境危险的遗产Welcome, everybody. It's wonderful to be here. Before we begin, I want to ask you: have you ever been awed by natural wonders? Have you ever been fascinated by human civilization? If so, you might already understand why UNESCO is fighting to preserve sites of cultural and natural importance to mankind. I have the belief that some of you have heard about UNESCO heritage sites or maybe even visited one! There are currently around 1,100 sites in more than 160 countries worldwide. Unfortunately, they face a variety of dangers and many of them are in urgent need of protection. Let's look at some specific issues.欢迎大家。
很高兴来到这里。
在我们开始之前，我想问你:你曾经对自然奇观感到敬畏吗?你曾经为人类文明而着迷吗?如果是这样，你可能已经明白为什么联合国教科文组织要努力保护对人类具有重要意义的文化和自然遗迹。
我相信你们中的一些人听说过联合国教科文组织的遗产地，或者甚至去过一个!目前，该公司在全球160多个国家拥有约1100个站点。
urbanmythsorurbanlegends课文翻译
urbanmythsorurbanlegends课文翻译urban myths or urban legends课文翻译都市神话还是都市传奇伦敦有着世界上最为庞大的地下隧道网络。
但是对某些伦敦居民来说，隧道不仅仅便利——他们还住在那里。
伦敦地下人是生活在街道下面的一族。
他们属于人类，却不会说英语，他们有自己的风俗习惯。
他们种的个别人偶尔也会到地面上来。
他们只有在晚上才会从一条黑魆魆的偏僻街道的下水道里钻出来，到地面上活动，而且一听到脚步声，他们就会躲到黑暗的小巷子里，直到没有了动静才出来。
日出之前，他们回到地下。
没有几个伦敦人真正见过他们，但是某人的朋友的朋友曾经见过他们好几次。
真事吗？很可能不是。
这是在很多语言中被称为都市神话的一个典型例子。
都市神话是你通过口口相传听来的故事，讲述的是一些可能发生过的事情，一个杜撰的、二手的故事，却被当做真事来讲，听起来像真的似的。
不论是真是假，都市神话依赖的是讲故事的技巧以及来源的可靠性，比如“这件事发生在我弟弟的朋友的母亲的身上”。
但是，有一些学者认为都市神话并非真正的神话。
在他们看来，神话故事对于讲故事和听过故事的人来说都有某种宗教或精神层面的意义，而且神话帮助人们表达共同的信仰和价值观。
不管一个神话看上去是多么匪夷所思，对于那些从属于这些文化的人来说，它们永远是真实可信。
那么我们该不该用“都市神话”这个术语呢？让我们来看一下经久不衰的都市神话之一：“消失的搭车客”。
故事的大概是：一个司机独自开车行驶在漆黑的乡村公路上，他看到一位年轻女子在路边要搭车。
司机停下来，让她上了车。
很快司机就把她送到了目的地，他们相互道别。
可直到后来停车时司机才发现，这个年轻女子落了一件外套在车上，兜里还装着一个钱包，有的版本是兜里装着个旧信封。
于是他按照钱包里或信封上的地址把外套送回去。
一位老妇人开了门，司机向她讲述了事情的经过。
原来，这件外套的确是老夫人女儿的，而她的女儿已经在几年前的车祸中去世了，车祸的地点正是司机让她上车的那个地方。
Unit 10 The Idiocy of Urban Life课文翻译综合教程四
Unit 10The Idiocy of Urban LifeHenry Fairlie1 Between about 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. the life of the city is civil. Occasionally the lonefootsteps of someone walking to or from work echo along the sidewalk. All work that has to be done at those hours is useful －in bakeries, for example. Even the newspaper presses stop turning forests into lies. Now and then a car comes out of the silence and cruises easily through the blinking traffic lights. The natural inhabitants of the city come out from damp basements and cellars. With their pink ears and paws, sleek, well-groomed, their whiskers combed, rats are true city dwellers. Urban life, during the hours when they reign, is urbane.2 These rats are social creatures, as you can tell if you look out on the city streetduring an insomniac night. But after 6 a.m., the two-legged, daytime creatures of the city begin to stir; and it is they, not the rats, who bring the rat race. You might think that human beings congregate in large cities because they are gregarious. The opposite is true. Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities are not social places.3 The lunacy of modern city life lies first in the fact that most city dwellers try tolive outside the city boundaries. So the two-legged creatures have created suburbs, exurbs, and finally rururbs (rubs to some). Disdaining rural life, they try to create simulations of it. No effort is spared to let city dwellers imagine they are living anywhere but in a city: patches of grass in the more modest suburbs, broader spreads in the richer ones further out; prim new trees planted along the streets; at the foot of the larger backyards, a pretense to bosky woodlands.4 The professional people buy second homes in the country as soon as they canafford them, and as early as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created.The New York intellectuals and artists quaintly say they are “going to the country”for the weekend or the summer, but in fact they have created a little Manhattan-by-the-Sea around the Hamptons, spreading over the Long Island6 potato fields whose earlier solitude was presumably the reason why they first went there. City dwellers take the city with them to the country, for they will not live without its pamperings. The main streets of America’s small towns, which used to have hardware and dry goods stores, are now strips of boutiques. Old-fashioned barbers become unisex hairdressing salons. The brown rats stay in the cities becauseof the filth the humans leave during the day. The rats clean it up at night. Soon the countryside will be just as nourishing to them, as the city dwellers take their filth with them.5 Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family, and churches. But in the citytoday work and home, family and church, are separated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of their home life. At the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of their work hours in their hours off. They rush from the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool, to work at their play with the same joylessness.6 Even though the offices of today’s businesses in the city are themselves movingout to the suburbs, this does not necessarily bring the workers back closer to their workplace. It merely means that to the rush-hour traffic into the city there is now added a rush-hour traffic out to the suburbs in the morning, and back around and across the city in the evening. As the farmer walks down to his farm in the morning, the city dweller is dressing for the first idiocy of his day, which he not only accepts but even seeks －the journey to work.7 In the modern office building in the city there are windows that don’t open. Thisis perhaps the most symbolic lunacy of all. Outdoors is something you can look at through glass but not to touch or hear. These windows are a scandal because they endanger the lives of office workers in case of fire. But no less grievous, even on the fairest spring or fall day the workers cannot put their heads outside. Thus it is not surprising that the urban worker has no knowledge of the seasons. He is aware simply that in some months there is air conditioning, and in others through the same vents come fetid central heating. Even outside at home in their suburbs the city dw ellers may know that sometimes it’s hot, and sometimes it’s cold, but no true sense of the rhythms of the seasons is to be had from a lawn in the backyard and a few spindly trees struggling to survive.8 The city dweller reels from unreality to unreality through each day, alwaystrying to recover the rural life that has been surrendered for the city lights. No city dweller, even in the suburbs, knows the wonder of a pitch-dark country lane at night.Nor does he naturally get any exercise from his work.9 Every European points out that Americans are the most round-shoulderedpeople in the world. Few of them carry themselves with an upright stance, althougha correct stance is the first precondition of letting your lungs breathe naturally anddeeply. Electric typewriters cut down the amount of physical exertion needed to hit the keys; the buttons of a word processor need even less effort, as you can tell fromthe posture of those who use them. They rush out to jog or otherwise Fonda-ize their leisure to try to repair the damage done during the day.10 Everything in urban life is an effort either to simulate rural life or to compensatefor its loss by artificial means. It is from this day-to-day existence of unreality, pretence, and idiocy that the city people, slumping along their streets even when scurrying, never looking up at their buildings, far less the sky, have the insolence to disdain and mock the useful and rewarding life of the country people who support them. Now go out and carry home a Douglas fir, call it a Christmas tree, and enjoy 12 days of contact with nature. Of course city dwellers don’t know it once had roots.城市生活之蠢行亨利·费尔利1 每天凌晨3点到6点，城市生活文明有礼。
urban space 翻译7——翻译资料文档
THE MODERN PARKFor the modern public park, properly so called, where the story starts is mostly a matter of definition. One candidate is the Englischer Garten in Munich, begun in 1804 to a design by Friedrich Ludwig Sckell and an American named Benjamin Thompson. In defense of the claim, we can adduce the urban site, and the fact that the new landscape in the English manner is not related to any official building like a castle or a palace but is its own excuse. But the patronage puts the park in the princely tradition; it was missioned by the Elector Karl Theodor when his seat of government had been moved from Mannheim to Munich.The Englischer Garten is interesting for another reason. It was an early attempt, not very wellrealized, at a Volksgarten——a German concept of the late 18th century that stressed the park asa medium for public education and the mingling of social classes. The Munich park was meant to have buildings with pictures of national history, statues of heroes, and monuments to important events.The social mix is important, because the opened up royal park and the public promenade often had a genteel bias. This was shown in the preference for carriage and equestrian traffic. Period pictures usually show elegant people in fancy coachesor on horseback; in London's Regent's Park, thrown open in 1838, it was necessary to "be a man of fortune, and take exercise on horseback or in a carriage," and no provisions of any kind were made for pedestrians. Earlier, under George II, when Kensington Gardens were opened to public visits on Sundays, sailors, soldiers and servants in livery were explicitly excluded. St. James's Park was for a long time open only to those who had received royal permission to use it, and the issuance of a key. And in Denmark, when the royal garden of Frederiksborg was opened to the public in the early 18th century, small enclosures were reserved "into which ordinary people could be driven, when it pleased the Royal family to take the air in the garden.The person who is most monly credited with proposing the idea of a public park as we think of it today is J. C. Loudon, in the 1820s. Eoudon thought it a means to "raise the intellectual character of the lowest classes of society." He considered this ideal fulfilled in his Derby Arboretum, on a then peripheral site given to the town by a philanthropist. The park was meant to excite monBut the first genuine park, as against an arboretum or botanical garden, was probably Birkenhead Park, across the Mersey from Liverpool, designed by Joseph Paxton in 1843. It is distinguished by its separation of different types of traffic, a feature that influenced Oirnsted at Central Park a few years later. Of Birkenhead he wrote:in democratic America, there was nothing to be thought of as parable with this People's Garden. . . . And all this magnificent pleasure-ground is entirely, unreservedly, and for ever the people's own. The poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its parts as the British Queen."Another candidate, this one debatable because the site was a royal grant, is Victoria Park in East London, intended especially for the working classes and enacted by Parliament in 1842. It was created in a congested urban situation, and meant to make amends for the fact that all ofLondon's parks at the time——Hyde, St. James's, Kensington, Regent's, Crown properties evenwhen open to the public——were at the fashionable West End of town. That was the extent of a public park tradition until mid-century, even though "after 1837 largely due to the exertions ofJoseph Hume in the House of Commons, all parliamentary enclosure acts were required to contain provisions for some public open space."By the1860s most areas of London and the northern industrial towns had public parks, though none of the distinction of Birkenhead. In the meantime the park had bee an integral part of a city plan in Haussmann's Paris, where Alphand and others redesigned the Bois de Boulogne and created the Pare Monceau, Pare Montsouris and Buttes-Chaumont as well as 2s4 smaller public gardens or squares. Olmsted and Vaux's Central Park and Prospect Park (Brooklyn) brought the public park to American cities. And the idea spread further afield. A Cabinet Proclamation in 1873 required each prefecture of Japan to designate sites suitable for parks."Olmsted's importance was to see that towns can be planned around parks, and to create parkway systems like those at Buffalo and Boston. His influences were Andrew Jackson Downing, the transatlantic counterpart of London and the first American, along with William Cullen Bryant, to campaign for public parks; the American rural cemetery; and Birkenhead, which Olmsted visited in 1850.The Olmstedian park was also to be for all classes, and the aspiration was that the habits of the worker would be improved as he came into contact with his social superiors in these contemplative surroundings. In America "the worker" was a positive term for the despised immigrant. Through the uplifting experience of park attendance, Olmsted hoped to crush the separate ethnic identities of immigrant groups, the street culture of Italian and Irish neighborhoods, and create the homogenized American. He would deny the worker the rough pleasures of sport; he would insist on an unadulterated rural experience, and bring him face to face with what he called "a specimen of God's handiwork."Sports were a contentious issue since the early history of the public park. Birkenhead did think of play, and had a simple open space devoted to sports. In Manchester, Joshua Major argued for the provision of such areas as early as 1844. But the perception that sports were inpatible with the peaceful enjoyment of nature was strong. Only after the rise of organized sports in the 1870s did the tide turn in favor of opening up the parks to a variety of physical and cultural activities.This early generation of public parks and their successors have seen periods of decline and neglect, and called up repeated campaigns of reform. And despite the intentions of designers like Loudon and Olmsted, these leafy urban enclaves often seem to be the setting of the conflict"mon ground where public culture is expressed and munity life developed. " The safer and more well-behaved these places are, the likelier it is that this mission has been inhibited. Today many parks post long lists of disallowed activities at their entrances; at dusk they are likely to be locked up. Here and there, to be the safest of all, the park is off limits permanently. The lovely central park of the little town of Sausalito on the San Francisco Bay is roped off and has posted a sign with this sad message upon it:THIS PARK IS FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE. DO NOT ENTER.A public place could have no terser epitaph.THE PUBLIC PLACES OF TODAYBut the story of the public place is far from over. The old squares of historic cities continue to beused, of course. A number have been radically altered to inject them with a vitality more attuned to modern sensibilities. At the same time, an impressive array of new squares has seen the light of day on all continents.One of the most ambitious programs was undertaken by the post-Franco Socialist city government of Barcelona in 1080. New squares and parks were seen as an opportunity to revitalize shabbier districts, as well as to exorcize forty years of dictatorship which had seen the city's public places as potentially threatening arenas of Catalan insurrection. Barcelona's new urban open spaces are striking in their unpromising modernity. Hard surfaces and steely constructivist pavilions characterize the Plaza dels Paisos Catalans, next to the Sants railroad station. A towering mosaic-encrusted figure by Miro lords over the Pare de l'Escorxador on a site previously occupied by abandoned slaughterhouses. At the Pare del Clot, rambling greenery, an open plaza used for ball games, and fragments of 19th-century industrial architecture are knit together masterfully.PUBLIC PLACESWithin the dense press of the built fabric the greatest luxury of all is empty space. Whether it is used for the spectacle of pomp or for play, the open frame is politically charged; the activities enpassed, freighted with consequence. Only here can a representative portion of the populace mass to make its mood known at a glance.Public space as it is successively reshaped is an artifact of the collective passions that bind society: from civic protest or regimented ceremonies of consensus, to leisure）pursued in an arcadian idyll, or through the ritualized consumption of products and aestheticized environments. Even at its most trivial, the mere presence of a public realm is testimony to the insistence of our need periodically to rediscover the physical fact of munity.Cities with sites lacking a genuine landscape of time have been happy to invent one. Squares planted in new towns or on the blank slate of sweeping urban redevelopments often set out to recreate some of the layered wealth and authenticity of historic Old World squares, and do so by adopting one of two strategies. They might seek to distill and translate esthetic "essences": this is the "townscape" confraternity of Gordon Cullen and the Krier brothers, concerned with Sitte-esque volumetrics and the visual incident. The alternate strategy resides in recalling more or less directly specific frames of history. In New Orleans, Charles Moore's Piazza d'ltalia, where lurks the spirit of Rome's Piazza di Trevi, does it with humor and in a refracted way, as historical collage. At Tsukuba Center (1983), north of Tokyo, Arata Isozaki embeds a recognizablefacsimile of Michelangelo's Campi- doglio——but less as plaza than "a garden in the Zentradition, into which the visitor looks rather than walks. "Other newly created squares, paradoxically, set out to recapture what their designers seem to consider a lost cause. At its most rudimentary, the old names are called forth as if they might instigate a round of imitative magic. The French new town of Evry calls its public place the Agora. Columbus, Indiana, has designated its retail mall The Commons. The "Town Square" of the English new town of Runcorn is the atrium hub of its shopping center, recently described,without any sense of irony, as serving all "the traditional purposes——for meeting people,chatting, sitting around shrubs, and trees and sculpture, for public meetings, exhibitions, the Christmas carols and so on——but with everything in all-weather, air-conditioned fort.Even Paris has given itself a Forum: the sunken plaza bracketed by three descending tiers of luxury boutiques at Les Halles.Harmless and witty as all this public banter may be, it delays the moment of our reckoning. We must be willing to accept the fact that the social world of cities that played itself out in the old town square is dying; we will not bring it back by designing imitations of the Piazza S. Marco or the Hauptmarkt of Nuremberg.The slow demise started more than a century ago. Sitte was only the most articulate of its early witnesses. As progress spread, the piazza died. Newspapers first, and then radio and television, preempted the role of the piazza as the disseminator, and maker, of news. Modern water systems killed the socializing power of the public fountain. A revolution in mass marketing and consumption drained the piazza of its pivotal role in economic life. Crime, which once had been a desecration of munitas and so required a ritual public cleansing, now spirited its consequences to the seclusion of the jail. With the neutralizing or outright dismissal of kings, and the laicization of culture, power and faith muted their public manifestations. The royal monument made way for monumentalized abstractions: Louis ie Grand turned into Liberty, and then a holed hulk by Henry Moore.Efforts to reinvest the urban plaza with purpose emphasize the use of public space as an artist'scanvas. We are shown signature designs by artists, architects or landscape architects——each a unique and idiosyncratic creative vision——and given a chance to consume an esthetic experience in lieu of the kind of social experience that was the town square's metier：the freeinteraction of strangers. In contrast, the "grand manner" tradition as a whole believed in standard, almost interchangeable designs that followed rules and shared mon features. Today's "designer squares" reject the role of a neutral space for the artful display of architecture, civic monuments and people: now the space itself demands to be interpreted, admired, enjoyed as a theme park might be enjoyed.An influential and premonitory project was Robert V enturi's of 1966 forspace with a grid of trees, tall lampposts and stepped mounds. Instead of "an open space to acmodate a non-existing crowd," he proposed a private experience for those who strolled through the maze or sat in a sheltered corner. American plazas devoted to esthetic introspection are mostly private initiatives, focal accents for speculative office plexes (a topic I will return to). Examples include the psychedelic melange of paving patterns and reflective glass at Harlequin Plaza (1982-)in Greenwood, Colorado, and the more sedate Williams Square (1985) ——Las Colinas,Texas.The trend is expressed in European projects as well. The projected Ludgate Square in London, floating over railroad tracks, features a huge lilted slab of lawn leaning up against a wall, a two-ton rock atop a horizontal window looking down onto the rails, and a fountain that holds no water. The 1985 renovation of the cour d'honneur of Cardinal Richelieu's baroque Palais Royal in Paris added a cryptic grid of boldly striped columns truncated at varying heights: the low ones perfect, we are told, "for sporty joggers who can gallop over them," others just right "for a picnictable or for mimicking a stylite." These proposed uses are clearly after-the-fact rationalizations: gone is the solicitude that would consider real public utility as the generator of form. When popular opinion rose against the lack of amenities in Barcelona's hard-edged "Plaza de Sants," the city's architect-in-chief characterized the outcry as "regressive" and "ignorant." "This discussion about 'hard' or 'soft' squares," he countered, "shows a strange lack of culture in ourcountry. The 'Plaza de Sants' is the most important urbanistic event of our day."The self-importance of the "designer square" as a status-laden art environment traces its immediate ancestry to the image-making function of the corporate highrise plaza. The notion of enhancing a building economically and esthetically by providing a margin of greenery and air around it was recognized early in the 20th century by one of the chief spokesmen for the American City Beautiful movement, Charles Mulford Robinson. He argued that although the recent crop of grand urban plazas failed to realize their social potential, they still had esthetic and economic benefits; adding variety, beauty and stateliness to cities, and increasing the value of adjacent buildings by assuring light and conspicuousness of vantage point.The first plaza-equipped highrise project of major consequence, and handily the most popular solution of all, is New York's Rockefeller Center tightly scaled sequence ofthat lead down to a sunken plaza used as a cafe or skating rink. The architecture respects the defining wall of the avenue, trapping its public open space within the mass of the buildings and behind the legitimate line of the sidewalk.Post-war developments of parable scale seriously changed the ground rules. Skyscrapers usually occupied only between one-fourth and one-third of the total site, leaving generous offerings of open space in response to the newly popular Modernist urban esthetic, but promising the continuity of the streetscape in the process. The practice of elevating the plaza on a podium as much as a story above street level, popularized by Gateway Center (1950-33) in Pittsburgh, and the Seagram Building (1954-58) and Chase Manhattan Bank (1961) in New York, reinforced the private control of these open spaces by divorcing them from the street edge.The prevalent economic theory, promoted by architects, was that the amenity value of open space would justify charging higher rents, which would bring in more revenue than the owner stood to lose from the unoccupied space. When the first returns did not bear out this prediction, many American cities, anxious to increase their public realm at private expense, began in the late 1950s and early 1960s to extend zoning exemptions allowing a premiumof extra stories to towers which left open space on their site. This the developer did by pulling the skyscraper back from the street line on one or more sides. But since the law did not set down design criteria for this bonus public space, the plazas were mostly inhospitable stretches of hard paving or unnegotiable pools of water, perhaps adorned by a sculptural piece of renown, but otherwise barren of amenities for inhabiting and enjoying the corporation's gift to the city.New York arrested and reversed this disintegrative trend in 1976；other North American citiessoon followed its lead. The nature of the public space to be provided by the developer favored with a code variance was now spelled out. Options ranged from a simple sidewalk widening that would befriend cafe crowds to midblock pedestrian concourses and public "outdoor rooms,'" be they plazas integrated with the street environment or intimate "vest pocket parks." In all cases it would be the responsibility of the developer to furnish the public space with trees, kiosks, movable seating, and other amenities that would encourage daily use, and to guarantee the maintenance of this apparatus.Also a 1970s phenomenon was the atrium, a covered public place within the building block that had the benefit of safety and climate control. Of the early examples, the most impressive was the Crystal Court, the enormous plaza of the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1068-73), covered with aclear plastic and steel-truss grid and encircled by a walkway providing access to upper levelshops. The architects maintained that given the Court's central location, it would conjure "a genuine old- world public square on which the entire town converges. "In fact, the analogy is specious. As long as the public space has been provided through the courtesy of a private concern in line with its own interests, that space cannot stand in for a genuine town square. This is so, first, because the consignment of urban memory to a corporate atrium would be tantamount to debauching the principles of munity; and also, because the extent to which a private gift can be considered authentically public is always conditional. When the IDS Center was acquired by a new management pany several years ago, one of their first moves was to remove all public seating from the Crystal Court. Loitering for more than a few minutes there will now rouse the private security personnel. And the former users of the space, mostly older folk whiling away a few hours in conversation, have no recourse: the matter is entirely outMost radically, perhaps, our own peculiar rituals of social interaction have eased into a set of privatized public places unique to our time, including the atrium, theme parks, shopping malls, and those "festival marketplaces" made popular in the United States by developer James Rouse. They are flourishing as the social accouterments of a suburban settlement pattern that dominates most of North America, and which is making rapid headway in much of Europe as well. Its spatially discontinuous landscape of detached houses and office parks is woven into a seamless succession of private realms by the automobile's cocoon of seclusion. Encounters withtraditional public places——and with the traditional city center itself——are increasinglysuperfluous to the daily rounds of suburbanites. Only the call to consume forces them back into something akin to a public realm, and of the most antiseptic and regulated sort at that. I am referring, of course, to the shopping mall.Pioneered in 1956 by Victor Gruen's Southdale Shopping Center in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the enclosed mall is a speculator's rendition of a downtown built to serve a motorized clientele. On the outside are acres of parking and bland, windowless walls enclosing retail space;or more large department stores. Gruen recognized that this indoor circulation space could prove a major attraction in its own right, and at Southdale loaded it with eating areas and a children's zoo.Replicated hundreds of times over throughout the United States and Canada, the shopping mall is now a fact of life. It is extremely important to whole classes of people, especially teenagers and the elderly. And it presents us with some interesting social and political issues. Shopping malls are run by private holding panies, not by the city or the merchants. These owners control the "mix" of businesses, and they prefer chains. There is also the issue of free speech. In 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court voted that no distinction could be made between public places like streets and the privately-owned mall, in so far as exercise of First Amendment rights like picketing and leaflet distribution were concerned. The decision was reversed in 1971. But then again in 1980 the Court said that freedom of speech on private property can be protected under doctrines derived from State constitutions. California and several other States have since then identified shopping malls as new public places in the American social landscape.Eccentric behavior, however it might be defined by mall management panies, is still grounds for ejection, though. Toronto's Eaton Center forcibly removed about 30,000 people in 1985 alone;police there regularly issue trespass tickets to undesirables. Taking photographs on the premisesof a mall, even in the parking lot, is often enough to bring out security guards. Urban sociologist William Whyte reports that some elderly mall visitors have learned to evadeaccusations of loitering by carrying a single shopping bag to mimic active consumption.Questions regarding one's civil freedoms within this tenuous shadow zone between public and private domains will soon be posed world-wide. The American mall formula, which stresses location at strategic junctions of major highways, arrived in France in the late1960s. One of the first, Parly 2 near Versailles, was patterned closely on Southdale by French developer Jean-Louis Solal, who went on to build more than thirty other malls in France, Spain and Belgium. England experimented with malls in its second generation of New Towns in the early 1970s. I have already mentioned Runcorn's; Milton Keynes,the last of the New Towns, encloses its retail services in a shopping center as well. By the mid 1970s London had gotten its first true suburban mall: Brent Cross, at the junction of the Mi and the North Circular. Since then, regional megamalls have risen close to Gateshead (Metrocentre), Dudley (Merry Hill), and Sheffield (Meadowhall).Today, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo both have malls by the dozen. Guatemala City boasts the Peri Roosevelt Mall; Uruguay, the Montevideo Shopping Center; Reykjavik, Iceland, the Kringland Mall. The arrival of the Christmas shopping season at The Mall in Kuala Lumpur is heralded by indoor styrofoam snow flurries, Malaysia's bow to the latest North American trend which mixes retailing and theme park entertainment. The exemplar being studied by developers around the world is the megamall outside Ldmonton, Canada. Few can hope to match its carnival cornucopia, a partial inventory of which includes reproductions of New Orleans's Bourbon Street and of a Parisian street, a golf course, an indoor ocean pool with rubber beach and water slides, and a reproduction of a gallion floating in a tropical lagoon with live fish and four submarines. But to entice a public for whom retail entertainment and socializing is just one of a host of possible leisure activities, even small operators have followed suit. California's Santa Monica Place hired an artist to build a 200-ton sandcastle. The Potteries Shopping Centre in Britain's historic ceramics-producing town of Stoke-on-Trent lures the souvenir-hungry in for a look at theworld's largest teapot——made of Fiberglas, of course.Our public places were proud repositories of a mon history. We have largely abandoned that sense of a shared destiny, and our public places show it. What is left may not be much, but it is crucial. We still want to be with other people, if not engaging them directly at least watching them stroll by. The public places unique to our time may be thoroughly privatized. Their motive may be no more noble than to lure us to buy. But having been drawn to the mall or boutiqued-up old town square for "recreational shopping" and the obligatory stop for food, we discover each other and might remember the place when we want to stage a public event, or celebrate a private event in public. And, who knows, we may yet learn to do better. After all, was not the messy crossroads prelude to forum and Miinsterplatz, and the shapeless market outside the city walls sire to the straitlaced plaza mayor?。
the urban legend beth Johnson
Urban LegendBeth JohnsonA group of college freshmen were sitting around in a friend’s dorm room one night, eating popcorn and comparing notes on classes. Eventually the talk drifted away from academics and into the area of spooky (令人毛骨悚然的) stories. Tales of haunted houses were being giggled and shivered over when a girl from a small town in Michigan broke in. “I know a scarier story than any of those!”she announced. “And the scariest thing is, this one is true. It happened to a girl my sister knew.”She began her story.“This girl went to baby-sit at a house way out in the country one evening. It was a stormy night, and she was feeling a little nervous anyway when the phone rang. When she answered, a man said, “Have you checked the children?”and laughed weirdly. She was scared to death and ran to check the kids. They were all right, but a few minutes later the guy called again and said again, “Have you checked the children?”and laughed like crazy. She called the operator to see if she could get the calls traced.A few minutes later, the operator called back to say, ‘Get out of the house! He’s in the house with you!’ So she hurried and grabbed the kids and ran out into the rain just as the police pulled up. They found this escaped homicidal (有杀人嗜好的) maniac(疯子) in the parents’ upstairs bedroom. She was lucky to get out alive.”“Wow! What an awful story!” the girl’s roommate exclaimed.“But wait a minute!” called out another friend, this one from Iowa. “That didn’t happen in Michigan. It happened near my hometown, back when my mother was in high school. The guy had escaped from an asylum in Cedar Rapids.”“Well, it sounds an awful lot like something that happened a few years ago to a friend of my cousin’s in Colorado,”said another freshman. “Only the guy actually caught the babysitter.”What’s going on here? How could the same event have happed to three different babysitters in three different parts of the country at three different times?Urban legend is what’s going on.Urban legend is the modern-day equivalent of the Paul Bunyan story. We’re too sophisticated these days to believe in Babe the blue ox or men who use pine trees to comb their beards. But we haven’t quite given up our need for scary stories that are a little too good to be true. So we’ve developed our own type of slightly more believable tall tales. They’re modern. They sound real. They include a humorous, unexpected, or frightening twist. And they probably never happened.The deadly hairdo. Kentucky fried rats. The nude surprise party.Do any of those ring a bell? Have you heard them told as true? Have you told them as true? If you’ve believed them, don’t be embarrassed. You’ve got lots of company. And if you’ve helped spread them, well, you’re just continuing a great American folk tradition.Urban legends have come in for some serious attention in the last couple of decades. Their biggest fan is a University of Utah professor of English named Jan Harold Brunvand. Professor Brunvand has devoted years to collecting, researching,and analyzing urban legends all across the United States and even in other countries. He’s written two books, The Vanishing Hitchhiker and The Mexican Pet. These books are jampacked(塞满的) with the stories we love to tell and will swear are true---despite all evidence to the contrary.Americans love their automobiles, and so some of the most familiar urban legends involve cars. One of the best-known is the classic story of teenagers parked late at night in a lovers’ lane. The couple are listening to music on a car radio when a news bulletin comes on: a dangerous maniac has escaped from a nearby mental asylum. (Escaped madmen are common characters in urban legends.) Frightened, the girl demands to be taken home. But when the boy tries to start the car, it won’t run. The boy gets out, locks the girl in the car, and walks off to find help.The girl huddles in the cold car, becoming more and more frightened as minutes and then hours go by with no sign of her boyfriend. Her fright turns to terror when she begins to hear a soft “click, click” noise on top of the car. Finally, just as dawn breaks, police cars arrive at the scene. Cops surround the car, help the girl out, and tell her, “Just walk to the police car and get in. Don’t look back.” Naturally, though, she does look back. Her boyfriend’s body, suspended from a rope, is hanging upside down from a tree. As he sways back and forth in the breeze, his class ring scrapes---“click, click”---against the roof of the car.But not all “car” urban legends are so horrible. “The Playboy’s Car” tells of a man who is in the market for a luxury sports car. He sees an ad in the newspaper for a nearly new Porsche for $29.95. He figures the price is a mistake but goes to check it out anyway. A woman greets him at the house, assures him that the price is correct, and invites him to test-drive the Porsche. He drives a few miles. The car is in mint condition（崭新的）. Hardly believing his luck, he hurries back to the house to close the deal. As the ownership papers are changing hands, he blurts out, “I can’t stand out knowing. Why are you selling this car so cheap?”The woman smiles and answers, “My husband left me and moved in with his secretary last week. He asked me to sell his Porsche and send him the money.”How do these stories spread from coast to coast---and sometimes beyond? They probably begin wherever people gather: slumber parties, bowling nights, breaks at the office water cooler, transcontinental airplane flights. Eventually, they make their way into our modern communications network: telephones, television, radio, and newspapers. They sometimes even slip into local and national publications as true events. The fact that the stories have shown up in the media convinces the public that they must be true. People clip the articles and send them to friends and family and also to columnists and radio and television talk-show hosts, who give them further publicity. And the more the stories travel, the more realistic-sounding details they pick up, and the more variations develop.Another category of urban legends demonstrates, Brunvand believes, the great American concern with cleanliness and health. “The Spider in the Hairdo,” popular in the 1950s and 1960s, told of the girl with a fashionable “beehive” hairdo. She rarely washed her highly teased and sprayed hair. So----wouldn’t you know it----a black widow spider got there, bit her, and she died. A subcategory of the “cleanliness”stories is the set of “dreadful contamination” stories. These include tales about people finding pieces of mice in their bottled soft drinks, or the poor girl who bit into an oddly shaped piece of restaurant chicken, only to discover that it was a batter-fried rat.And then there are the stories concerning nudity. They sound familiar to any of us who’ve ever had the agonizing dream of being at work or on stage with no clothes on. There’s the man left naked by the roadside when his wife (not knowing he’d stepped out) drove off with their trailer. Or the crafty host who gave his female guests bathing suits that fell apart when they got wet. Or the poor woman who, feeling playful on her birthday, came downstairs naked to surprise her husband---and walked into her own birthday party.What purpose do these stories serve? Why have they developed? They’re part of a long tradition that includes Aesop’s fables---remember the hare and the tortoise? ---- and the morality plays of the Middle Ages, where “Truth” and “virtue”were actual characters. They are stories that touch some of our deepest fears and concerns. And they teach us lessons. Don’t park on lonely lovers’lanes. Don’t pick up strangers. Don’t fool around on your spouse. Don’t eat food you’re not sure of. Bathe regularly. It’s all the same stuff your parents told you, but only one appropriate response. He backed it’s told in a far more entertaining way.One more story? Well, have you heard about the cement-truck driver who stopped in to say hello to his wife during the day? When he got to his house, he found a brand-new Cadillac in his driveway. Becoming suspicious, he looked in the window and saw his wife and a strange man drinking coffee in the kitchen and laughing. Aha, he thought. So this is what she does all day. He could think of this truck up to the caddy, filled it full of cement, and then drove away.When the truck driver got home that night, he found his wife hysterical. “Honey,”she sobbed. “I’ve been saving my money for twenty years to buy you a wonderful present. It came today, and when the man that delivered it left the house---well, just go look at your car. (1515 words)。
UrbanLegend（都市传说）
UrbanLegend（都市传说）网友评论相关文章网友Tintin来信说：网络上常有的各种危言耸听的多种版本的流言，希望能讨论一下有关Urban Legend（都市传说）。
都市传说，当前正通过电子邮件和博客论坛广泛流传，这些故事从荒谬怪诞到惊悚恐怖都有，你是否也收到过一些似真似假的传说邮件？这些传说能引起听者的共鸣，有时是让人感觉不错的，更多的时候是让人恼火，特别是当它以一种愚弄人的病毒形式出现的时候。
网友Tintin说：网络上常有的各种危言耸听的多种版本的流言，这些故事就是Urban Legend，希望能发表文章讨论一下所谓的都市传奇就是现代的民间传说，它们的来源已不可考，却在社会上广为流传，再加上人们以讹传讹，这些故事从荒谬怪诞到惊悚恐怖都有。
美国新英格兰地区的普德顿大学也流传着一个都市传奇：三十年前，校内有一名异常心理学教授在史丹利大楼疯狂杀死六名学生后自杀。
校内兄弟会的学生，每年都举办狂欢派对纪念这事件。
三十年后的今天，校园突然发生一连串的凶杀案，一位很有主见的学生娜塔莉认为凶手是根据都市传奇做案手法杀人，她的好友布兰黛、新闻系学生保罗和爱玩闹的戴蒙都说这纯属巧合。
可是当事情发展下去，他们却不得不怀疑，而他们也都成为凶手的下一个目标。
别怕，这是电影《Urban Legend》（都市传奇）的情节。
都市传奇既是一部电影，也是一个当代流行的民间传说，所谓“都市传奇”（或翻译为都市传说），是指过去的真实事件，经过不断地复述和转述，逐渐变成一个神秘的故事，这种故事带有一些对现实的不满或讽刺的味道，在网络上很容易被广泛传播。
以下是一篇关于Urban Legend的介绍：Q. What is an urban legend?问：什么是都市传奇？FYI：Urban legend: A story, which may at one time have been true, that has grown from constant retelling into a mythical yarn.参考信息：都市传奇：一个故事，过去发生过的真实事件，在事件的不断传播中逐渐成为一个神秘的传奇事件。
选修八英语课文翻译
选修八英语课文翻译选修八英语课文翻译导语:课文是指教科书中的正文,区别于注释和习题等,一般在语文或地理中出现.英语,有对话和短文.以下是店铺收集整理的选修八英语课文翻译,希望大家喜欢!Unit1 CALIFORNIA加利福尼亚California is the third largest state in the USA but has the largest population.加州是美国第三大洲, 而且是人口最多的州.It also has the distinction of being the most multicultural state in the USA, having attracted people from all over the world.加州与众不同之处在于它也是美国最具多元文化的一个州.它吸引了来自世界各地的人们.The customs and languages of the immigrants live on in their new home.这些移民的风俗习惯以及语言在他们的新家都得以延续.This diversity of culture is not surprising when you know the history of California.当你了解了加利福尼亚的历史,你就不会对其文化的多样性感到惊奇了.NATIVE AMERCANS美洲土著人Exactly when the first people arrived in what we now know as California, no one really knows.最早一批人具体是什么时候来到我们现在了解的加利福尼亚地区的, 谁也说不清楚.However, it is likely that Native Americans were living in California at least fifteen thousand years ago.然而,可能至少在一15,000年以前美洲土著人就住在加利福尼亚了.Scientists believe that these settlers crossed the Bering Straitin the Arctic to America by means of a land bridge which existed in prehistoric times.科学家们认为这些迁居者通过一条史前时期曾经存在的大陆桥穿越北极地区的白令海峡到达美洲.In the 16th century, after the arrival of the Europeans, the native people suffered greatly.欧洲人在16世纪到来这里之后,土著人遭受了极大的苦难.Thousands were killed or forced into slavery.成千上万人被杀或被迫成为奴隶.In addition, many died from the diseases brought by the Europeans.另外, 欧洲人带来的疾病,使许多人染病而死.However, some survived these terrible times, and today there are more Native Americans living in California than in any other state. 不过,还是有一些人经历了这些恐怖时期而活下来了.今天住在加利福尼亚的美洲土著人比任何其他州的都要多. THE SPANISH西班牙人In the 18th century California was ruled by Spain.在18世纪的时候,加利福尼亚是被西班牙统治的.Spanish soldiers first arrived in South America in the early 16th century, when they fought against the native people and took their land.西班牙士兵最早是在16世纪初期来到南美洲的,他们同土著人打仗,夺去了他们的土地.Two centuries later, the Spanish had settled in most parts of South America and along the northwest coast of what we now call the United States. 两个世纪以后, 西班牙人在南美洲大部分地区定居下来,而且还在我们现在称之为美国的西北沿海地区住下来.Of the first Spanish to go to California, the majority were religious men, whoseministry was to teach the Catholic religion to the natives.在首批移居加利福尼亚州的西班牙人中,大部分是宗教人士,他们的职责是向原住居民传授天主教.In 1821, the people of Mexico gained their independence from Spain.1821年,墨西哥人从西班牙获得了独立.California then became part of Mexico.加利福尼亚于是成了墨西哥的一部分.In 1846 the United States declared war on Mexico, and after the war won by the USA, Mexico had to give California to the USA.1846年美国向墨西哥宣战,美国赢得战争胜利后,墨西哥被迫把加利福尼亚割让给美国.However, there is still a strong Spanish influence in the state.但是,这个州至今仍然保留着很强的西班牙文化的影响.That is why today over 40 of Californians speak Spanish as a first or second language.这就是为什么今天还有40%的加利福尼亚人仍然把西班牙语作为第一或第二语言的缘故.RUSSIANS俄罗斯人In the early 1800s, Russian hunters, who had originally gone to Alaska, began settling in California.在19世纪初期,一批最初到阿拉斯加的俄罗斯猎人开始在加利福尼亚定居下来.Today there are about 25,000 Russian-Americans living in and around San Francisco.今天,住在旧金山及其周边地区的美籍俄罗斯人大约25,000人.GOLD MINERS金矿工In 1848, not long after the American-Mexican war, gold was discovered in California.1848年,美墨战争后不久,在加利福尼亚发现了金矿.The dream of becoming rich quickly attracted people fromall over the world.发财梦很快就吸引了来自世界各地的人.The nearest, and therefore the first to arrive, were South Americans and people from the United States.距离最近因而来的最早的是南美洲人和美国人.Then adventurers from Europe and Asia soon followed.随后跟着来的有欧洲和亚洲的探险家.In fact, few achieved their dream of becoming rich.事实上, 很少有人圆了发财梦.Some died or returned home, but most remained in California to make a life for themselves despite great hardship. They settled in the new towns or on farms.许多人死了或回家了,但是尽管条件十分艰苦,大多数人仍然留在了加利福尼亚劳作谋生,在新的城镇或农场里定居下来.By the time California elected to become the thirty-first federal state of the USA in 1850, it was already a multicultural society.到1850年加利福尼亚成为美国第31个州的时候, 它已经是一个有着多元文化的社会了. LATER A RRIVALS后来的移民Although Chinese immigrants began to arrive during the Gold Rush Period, it was the building of the rail network from the west to the east coast that brought even larger numbers to California in the 1860s.虽然中国移民在淘金热期间就开始来到(美国),但是更大批量的中国移民却是在十九世纪六十年代为了修建贯穿美国东西海岸的铁路而来的.Today, Chinese-Americans live in all parts of California, although a large percentage have chosen to stay in the of Los Angeles and San Francisco.今天,加利福尼亚州各地都有美藉华人居住,尽管有很大比例的华人还是选择住在洛杉矶和旧金山的中国里.Other immigrants such as Italians, mainly fishermen but also wine makers, arrived in California in the late 19th century.十九世纪后期,其他国家的移民,比如意大利人来到加利福尼亚,他们主要是渔民,也有些酿酒工人.In 1911 immigrants from Denmark established a town of their own, which today still keeps up their Danish culture.1911年丹麦移民建立了他们自己的城镇,至今仍保留着丹麦文化.By the 1920s the film industry was well established in Hollywood, California.到了二十世纪二十年代,电影产业在加利福尼亚州的好莱坞建立了起来.The industry boom attracted Europeans including many Jewish people.这个行业吸引了许多欧洲人包括许多犹太人.Today California has the second largest Jewish population in the United States.今天,加利福尼亚的犹太人口在美国占第二位.Japanese farmers began arriving in California at the beginning of the 20th century, and since the 1980s a lot more have settled there.日本的农民是在20世纪初期开始到加利福尼亚来的,而从20世纪80年代以来就有更多的日本人在加利福尼亚定居了.People from Africa have been living in California since the 1800s, when they moved north from Mexico.非洲人从19世纪就在加利福尼亚住下来,他们是从墨西哥向北迁来的.However, even more arrived between 1942 and 1945 to work in the ship and aircraft industries.然而更多的非洲人在1942年到1945年之间来到加利福尼亚的,当时他们是到船厂和飞机厂工作的.MOST RECENT ARRIVALS最近期的移民In more recent decades, California has become home to more people from Asia, including Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians.在最近几十年里,加利福尼亚成了亚洲人的家,包括柬埔寨人、朝鲜人、越南人和老挝人.Since its beginning in the 1970s, the computer industry has attracted Indians and Pakistanis to California.从20世纪70年代开始发展计算机工业以来,加利福尼亚又吸引了印度人和巴勒斯坦人的到来.THE FUTURE未来展望People from different parts of the world, attracted by the climate and the lifestyle, still immigrate to California.世界各地的人,由于受气候条件和生活方式的吸引,仍然在继续迁入加利福尼亚..It is believed that before long the mix of nationalities will be so great that there will be no distinct major racial or cultural groups, but simply a mixture of many races and cultures.人们认为, 要不了多久,多种国籍的混合将会非常之大,以至于不可能存在一种主要的种族或文化群体,而只是多种族、多文化的混合体.Unit2 THE RETURN OF THE DINOSAURS?恐龙的回归?The possibility of cloning fierce and extinct wild animals has always excited film makers.克隆凶猛和灭绝的野生动物的可能性一直使电影制片商感到兴奋.And they are not the only ones!然而他们并不是唯一对此感到兴奋的人.The popularity of films such as Jurassic Park, in which a scientist clones several kinds of extinct dinosaurs, proves how the idea struck a mixture of fear and excitement into people's hearts.在《侏罗纪公园》这部影片中,有一位科学家克隆了好几种不同的绝种恐龙.类似这样的电影很受欢迎,证明了这一想法使人们感到既兴奋又恐惧.But in fact we are a long way from being able to clone extinct animals.但事实上,想要克隆绝种动物,我们还要很长的路程要走.Scientists are still experimenting with cloning mammals.科学家们现在还在进行克隆哺乳动物实验,This is because the cloning of mammals is still a new science and its story only began seriously in the 1950s as this list shows: 这是因为克隆哺乳动物仍然还是一门新的科学,它是从20世纪50年代才开始进行认真研究的,如下表所示:1950s cloning of frogs 1996 first clone of a mammal: Dolly the sheep 1970s research using the embryos of mice 2000 cow gave birth to a bison 1979 work on embryos of sheep and mice 2001 China's first cloned twin calves 1981 first experimental clones of mice 2002 first cloned cats 1983 first experimental clones of cows 2005 first cloned dogFrom time to time people suggest that extinct animals like dinosaurs, can possibly be brought back to life through cloning.不时地会有人提议,克隆技术将有可能使地球上已经消失的动物(如恐龙)复活.Unfortunately, with what we know now, this is either impossible or unsuitable. There are many reasons.不幸的是,据我们现在所知这是不可能的,也是不合适的.其原因有很多:◎ The initial requirement is that you need perfect DNA (which gives information for how cells are to grow).首先要求你有完好的DNA,以提供有关细胞将如何生长的信息.◎ All efforts of cloning an animal will be in vain if there is not enough diversity in the group to overcome illnesses.如果某个动物群体没有足够的多样性以战胜疾病,那么克隆这种动物的所有努力都将是无用的.Diversity in a group means having animals with their genes arranged in different ways.群体的多样性是指这群动物的基因要以不同的方式排列.The advantage is that if there is a new illness some of these animals may die, but others will survive and pass on the ability to resist that disease to the next generation.其优点是,如果发生了某种新的疾病,这类动物中的一些可能会死去,而另外一些却能存活下来,并且把这种免疫力传给下一代.The great drawback to cloning a group of animals is that they would all have the same arrangement of genes and so might die of the same illness. Then none of them would be left to continue the species.经过克隆的动物群体的最大缺点是:它们的基因排列有可能完全相同,因而它们有可能会死于同一种疾病,这样它们也可能一个也留不下来传种接代了.◎ It would be unfair to clone any extinct animals if they were to live in a zoo.你如果克隆出任何绝种动物,而它们必须生活在动物园里那是不公平的.A suitable habitat would be needed for them to lead a natural life.它们需要适当的栖息地过正常的野生生活.Based on what we know now, you cannot clone animals that have been extinct longer than 10,000 years.就我们现在所知,你不可能克隆那些已经绝种了一万年以上的动物.Actually, dinosaurs disappeared 65,000,000 years ago.事实上恐龙在6,500万年以前就已经消失了,So the chance of dinosaurs ever returning to the earth ismerely a dream.所以说恐龙回归地球的可能性仅仅是个梦想罢了!Unit 3 THE PROBLEM OF THE SHRIKES 蛇的困扰When I called up my mother in the countryside on the telephone she was very upset.我给住在乡下的母亲打电话的时候,她感到很心烦.She told me that our yard had some snake.我们院子里有几条蛇她告诉我说,they seem to have made their home here, not far from the walnut tree. Can you get rid of them please?蛇时不时地爬到屋子边上来.可这几条蛇似乎是在屋子附近离胡桃树不远的地方安家了.你能不能把它们赶走?I felt very proud.我感到很自豪,Here was a chance for .me to distinguish myself by inventing something merciful that would catch snakes but not harm them.这回我有机会来表现一下自己了.我要发明某种仁慈的东西.既可以把蛇捉住,而又不会伤害它们.I knew my parents would not like me to hurt these living creatures!我知道我的父母亲是不会让我伤害这些生物的.The first thing I did was to see if there were any products that might help me, but there only seemed to be powders designed to kill snakes.我所做的第一件事就是看看有没有现成的产品能帮助我.但是,看来只有一种毒杀蛇的药粉.A new approach was clearly needed.很明显,我得找一种新的方法了.I set about researching the habits of snakes to find the easiest way to trap them.于是我就着手研究蛇的习性,以便能找到最容易的方法捉住它们.Luckily these reptiles are small and that made the solution easier.好在这些爬行动物都很小,问题比较容易解决.Prepared with some research findings, I decided on three possible approaches:经过一番研究准备之后,我决定采用三种可能的方法:firstly, removing their habitat;第一,铲除蛇的栖息地;secondly, attracting them into a trap using male or female perfume or food;第二,用男人或女人用的香水或食物把它们引进陷阱;and thirdly cooling them so that they would become sleepy and could be easily caught.第三,降低它们的体温,使它们困乏,这样就容易把它们捉住.I decided to use the last one.我决定采用最后一种方法.I bought an ice-cream maker which was made of stainless steel. Between the outside and the inside walls of the bowl there is some jelly, which freezes when cooled.我买了一个制冰淇淋的不锈钢碗,在碗的内壁和外壁之间有些胶状物,冷却后会冻结.I put the bowl into the fridge and waited for 24 hours.我把这个碗放进冰箱,冷冻了24小时.At the same time I prepared some ice-cubes.与此同时,我还准备了一些冰块儿.The next morning I got up early before the sun was hot.第二天早晨太阳光还不太热,我就早早起床了.I placed the frozen bowl over the snakes' habitat and the ice-cubes on top of the bowl to keep it cool.我把冰冻的碗放在蛇窝的.上方,再把小冰块放在碗上,以使碗保持冷却状态.Finally I covered the whole thing with a large bucket.最后再用一个大桶把碗罩住.于是我就等着.Then I waited. After two hours I removed the bucket and the bowl.过了两个小时我才把桶和碗一起拿开.The snakes were less active but they were still too fast for me.蛇不像以前那么活跃了. They abruptly disappeared into a convenient hole in the wall.但是对于我来说,它们行动还是太快了,突然一下子就消失在附近的墙洞里去了.So I had to adjust my plan.于是我只得调整我的计划.For the second attempt I froze the bowl and the ice-cubes again but placed them over the snakes' habitat in the evening, as the temperature was starting to cool.第二次试验我用的还是冰冻的碗和冰块儿,但是这次我是在夜晚气温开始变凉的时候把它们放在蛇窝的上方,Then as before, I covered the bowl with the bucket and left everything overnight.然后用桶把碗罩住,通宵放在那儿. Early the next morning I returned to see the result.第二天一早我就去看结果.This time with great caution I bent down to examine the snakes and I found them very sleepy.这一次我蹲下去检查的时候,发现蛇都是睡意浓浓的.But once picked up, they tried to bite me.但是一把它们提起来,它们就要咬我.As they were poisonous snakes, I clearly needed to improvemy design again.因为它们都是毒蛇,所以很显然我还得改进我的捕蛇方案.My third attempt repeated the second procedure.第三次试验重复了第二次的程序,The next morning I carried in my hand a small net used for catching fish. This was in the expectation that the snakes would bite again.第二天早晨我的手里拿了一个捕鱼的小网,这是因为我预料蛇还会再咬人.But monitored carefully, the snakes proved to be no trouble and all went according to plan.经过仔细的监视,证明这些蛇不会惹麻烦,一切都按计划进行着.I collected the passive snakes and the next day we merrily released them all back into the wild.我把这些温顺的蛇收集起来,第二天就把他们全部释放到野外了.Pressed by my friends and relations, I decided to seize the opportunity to get recognition for my successful idea by sending my invention to the patent office.由于朋友和亲戚的敦促,我决定抓住这次机会把我的发明送到专利局去,请他们对我这次成功的思路给予认可.Only after you have had that recognition can you say that you are truly an inventor. 只有你得到这种承认,你才可以说是一个真正的发明家.The criteria are so strict that it is difficult to get new ideas accepted unless they are truly novel.(评定)专利标准非常严格,除非新的想法真是新颖的,否则很难被接受.In addition, no invention will get a patent if it is:此外,你的想法如果属于下列情况,那么你也不可能得到专利:a discovery一种发现a scientific idea or mathematical model一种科学理论或数学模式literature or art文学或艺术a game or a business一场游戏或一笔交易a computer programme一个电脑程序a new animal or plant variety一种新的动植物物种Nor will you receive a patent until a search has been made to find out that your product really is different from everyone else's.你的产品要经过仔细调查,证明它确实与众不同的,你才能获得专利.There are a large number of patent examiners, too, whose only job is to examine whether your claim is valid or not.专利局还有一大批审查人员,他们的唯一职责就是审查你的专利申请是否有效.If it passes all the tests, your application for a patent will be published 18 months from the date you apply.如果通过了所有这些审查,你申请的专利就会在你提出申请的18个月之后公布出来.So I have filled in the form and filed my patent application with the Patent Office.于是,我填了表,向专利局提交了申请书.Now it's a matter of waiting and hoping.现在就是等待和期盼了.You'll know if I succeed by the size of my bank balance!将来你看看我的银行结余金额就会知道我是否成功了.Wish me luck!祝我好运吧!Unit3 ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL亚历山大·格雷厄姆·贝尔Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Scotland, but when he was young his family moved to Boston, USA.亚历山大·格雷厄姆·贝尔1847年出生于苏格兰.但在他还小的时候,他家就搬到了美国的波士顿.His mother was almost entirely deaf, so Alexander became interested in helping deaf people communicate and in deaf education.他的母亲几乎全聋了,因此他有志于帮助聋人交流,并从事聋人教育事业.This interest led him to invent the microphone.这一爱好促使他发明了麦克风.He found that by pressing his lips against his mother's forehead, he could make his mother understand what he was saying.他发现他把嘴唇放在母亲的额头上,并以一定的方式来移动额骨,就可以使她听懂他所说的话.He believed that one should always be curious and his most famous saying was:他认为一个人应该总是有好奇心理.他最有名的一句话是:he beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 偶尔离开平路去寻求困境.Every time you do you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before.每次当你这样做的时候,你一定会发现你从未见过的东西.Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind.跟踪下去,不断探索,不知不觉中,你就会发现某种值得思考的东西盘踞着你的头脑.All really big discoveries are the result of thought.所有真正伟大的发现都是思考的结果It was this exploring around problems and his dynamic spiritthat led to his most famous invention - the telephone in 1876. 正是这种对问题的探索和富有活力的精神造就了他那最著名的发明--1876年的电话.Bell never set out to invent the telephone and what he was trying to design was a multiple telegraph.贝尔并非一开始就想要发明电话的,他本来想设计的东西是多路电报.This original telegraph sent a message over distances using Morse code (a series of dots tapped out along a wire in a particular order).这种原始的电报是在一段距离中用莫尔斯电码传递信息(莫尔斯电码是通过电线发出的以特定的次序敲击出的一连串点划),But only one message could go at a time.但是这样只能一次发一个信息.Bell wanted to improve it so that it could send several messages at the same time.贝尔想改进电报通讯方式,以便同时能发出好几个信息.He designed a machine that would separate different sound waves and allow different conversations to be held at the same time.他设计了一种机器,以使声波分成不同的音调,从而有可能在同一时间里进行不同的通话.But he found the problem difficult to solve.但是他发现这个问题很难解决.One day as he was experimenting with one end of a straw joined to a deaf man's ear drum and the other to a piece of smoked glass,有一天做实验,他把一根干草的一端和一个聋子的耳鼓膜连接起来,另一端连接一块被烟熏过的玻璃.Bell noticed that when he spoke into the ear, the straw drewsound waves on the glass.贝尔发现,当他对着耳朵说话的时候,这根干草就把声波画在被烟熏过的玻璃上.Suddenly he had a flash of inspiration.突然间他灵机一动,灵感来了.If sound waves could be reproduced in a moving electrical current, they could be sent along a wire.如果声波能够以连续运动的电波形式复制的话,那么声波就可以沿着导线传送出去了.In searching to improve the telegraph,Bell had invented the first telephone!在探求改进电报的过程中,贝尔发明了第一台电话机!Bell was fully aware of the importance of his invention and wrote to his father:贝尔完全懂得这项发明的重要性,他写信告诉他的父亲说:be laid on to houses just like water or gas – and friends will talk to each other without leaving home.这样的一天即将到来.到那时,电报线将会铺到各家各户,就像水和煤气通到各家各户一样.朋友之间不必离开家就可以彼此通话了.The patent was given in 1876, but it was not until five days later that Bell sent his first telephone message to his assistant Watson.这项专利是1876年发布的,但是贝尔是在五天以后才跟他的助手华生通了第一次电话.The words have now become famous:他说的话现在已成为名言了.Alexander Graham Bell was not a man to rest and he interested himself in many other areas of invention.亚历山大·格雷厄姆·贝尔是个闲不住的人,他对许多其他领域的发明都感兴趣.He experimented with helicopter designs and flyingmachines.他试验直升飞机和飞行器.While searching for a kite strong enough to carry a man into the air, Bell experimented putting triangles together and discovered the tetrahedron shape.他寻找一种强度足以把人带上天空的风筝,与此同时,他又试着把三角形拼装在一起,因而发现了四面体.Being very stable, it has proved invaluable in the design of bridges.这种四面体非常稳定,被证明是在桥梁设计中的无价之宝.Bell was an inventor all his life.贝尔的一生都在发明创造.He made his first invention at eleven and his last at seventy- five.他11岁时就有了第一项发明,而他的最后一项发明则是在他75岁高龄的时候.Although he is most often associated with the invention of the telephone, he was indeed a continuing searcher after practical solutions to improve the quality of everybody's life.虽然人们常把他与电话的发明联系在一起,但是他的确是一位永不停息的探索家,不断寻求着改善人们生活质量的途径.Unit4 PYGMALION皮格马利翁 MAIN CHARACTERS:主要人物:Eliza Doolittle (E): a poor flower girl who is ambitious to improve herself伊莱扎·杜立特尔(伊):穷苦的卖花姑娘,立志要改善自己的生活Professor Higgins (H): an expert in phonetics, convinced that the quality of a person's English decides his/her position in society希金斯教授(希):语言学专家,坚信一个人的英语水平决定这个人的社会地位Colonel Pickering (CP): an officer in the army and later afriend of Higgins' who sets him a task皮克林上校(皮):陆军军官,后来成了希金斯教授的朋友.希金斯还给上校安排了一项任务Act One FATEFUL MEETINGS第一幕决定性的会面11 :15 pm in London, England in 1914 outside a theatre.1914年某日晚上11点15分,在英国伦敦某剧场外.It is pouring with rain and cab whistles are blowing in all directions.下着倾盆大雨,四处响着出租车的鸣笛声.A man is hiding from the rain listening to people's language and watching their reactions.有一位男士在躲雨,边听人们谈话,边观察着人们的反应.While watching, he makes notes.一边观察,一边做记录.Nearby a flower girl wearing dark garments and a woollen scarf is also sheltering from the rain.附近有一个卖花姑娘也在躲雨.A gentleman (G) passes and hesitates for a moment.这时有位先生(先)从这儿路过,他迟疑了片刻.E: Come over’ere, cap’in, and buy me flowers off a poor girl. 伊:长官,过这边来呀,买我这个苦命孩子一束花把! G: I'm sorry but I haven't any change. 先:对不起,我没有零钱. E: I can giv’ou change, cap’in. 伊:长官,我可以给你找零钱呀.G: (surprised) For a pound? I'm afraid I've got nothing less. 先:(惊奇地)一个英镑你找得开吗?没有再小的钱了.E: (hopefully) Oah! Oh, do buy a flower off me, Captain. Take this for three pence. (holds up some dead flowers)伊:(带有希望的神色)啊!好啦,买一束吧.拿这一束,只要三个便士.(举起一束已经枯萎的花)G: (uncomfortably) Now don't be troublesome, there's agood girl. (looks in his wallet and sounds more friendly) But, wait, here's some small change. Will that be of any use to you? It's raining heavily now, isn't it? (leaves)先:(不舒服地)别烦我了,好姑娘.(在钱包里找什么,这时语气好些了)等一等,这儿有几个零钱.这点钱对你有用吗?雨下大了,不是吗?(说完就走了)E: (disappointed at the outcome, but thinking it is better than nothing) Thank you, sir. (sees a man taking notes and feels worried) Hey! I ain’t done nothing wrong by speaking to that gentleman. I've a right to sell fl owers, I have. I ain’t no thief. I'm an honest girl I am! (begins to cry)伊:(对先生付的钱表现出失望的样子,但是有总比没有好)先生,谢谢了.(看到有人在记什么,感到很担心)嗨,我跟那位先生说话,又没有做错什么事情.我有权卖花吧,我有权嘛!我不是小偷,我是个老实姑娘,老老实实的.(开始哭起来)H: (kindly) There! There! Who's hurting you, you silly girl? What do you take me for? (gives her a handkerchief) 希:(友善地)好啦,好啦!谁伤害你了,傻姑娘!你把我当成什么人了?(递给她一条手帕)E: I thought maybe you was a policeman in disguise.伊:我还以为你是一个便衣警察呢.H: Do I look like a policeman?希:我像警察吗?E: (still worried) Then why did 'ou take down my words for? How do I know whether 'ou took me down right? 'ou just show me what 'ou've wrote about me!伊:(仍在担心)那你为什么要把我说的话记下来呢?我怎么知道你是不是写对了呢?那你把你写的东西给我看看.H: Here you are. (hands over the paper covered in writing) 希:你看吧!(把写满字的纸递给她)。
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urban myths or urban legends课文翻译
都市神话还是都市传奇
伦敦有着世界上最为庞大的地下隧道网络。
但是对某些伦敦居民来说，隧道不仅仅便利——他们还住在那里。
伦敦地下人是生活在街道下面的一族。
他们属于人类，却不会说英语，他们有自己的风俗习惯。
他们种的个别人偶尔也会到地面上来。
他们只有在晚上才会从一条黑魆魆的偏僻街道的下水道里钻出来，到地面上活动，而且一听到脚步声，他们就会躲到黑暗的小巷子里，直到没有了动静才出来。
日出之前，他们回到地下。
没有几个伦敦人真正见过他们，但是某人的朋友的朋友曾经见过他们好几次。
真事吗？很可能不是。
这是在很多语言中被称为都市神话的一个典型例子。
都市神话是你通过口口相传听来的故事，讲述的是一些可能发生过的事情，一个杜撰的、二手的故事，却被当做真事来讲，听起来像真的似的。
不论是真是假，都市神话依赖的是讲故事的技巧以及来源的可靠性，比如“这件事发生在我弟弟的朋友的母亲的身上”。
但是，有一些学者认为都市神话并非真正的神话。
在他们看来，神话故事对于讲故事和听过故事的人来说都有某种宗教或精神层面的意义，而且神话帮助人们表达共同的信仰和价值观。
不管一个神话看上去是多么匪夷所思，对于那些从属于这些文化的人来说，它们永远是真实可信。
那么我们该不该用“都市神话”这个术语呢？让我们来看一下经久不衰的都市神话之一：“消失的搭车客”。
故事的大概是：一个司机独自开车行驶在漆黑的乡村公路上，他看到一位年轻女子在路边要搭车。
司机停下来，让她上了车。
很快司机就把她送到了目的地，他们相互道别。
可直到后来停车时司机才发现，这个年轻女子落了一件外套在车上，兜里还装着一个钱包，有的版本是兜里装着个旧信封。
于是他按照钱包里或信封上的地址把外套送回去。
一位老妇人开了门，司机向她讲述了事情的经过。
原来，这件外套的确是老夫人女儿的，而她的女儿已经在几年前的车祸中去世了，车祸的地点正是司机让她上车的那个地方。
那一天也正是车祸的周年纪念日。
事实上，和许多别的神话一样，这个故事可以追溯到20世纪或是21世纪的汽车和公路出现之前的其他国家和地区，比如瑞典和东非。
这个故事还具有传统神话所共有的其他一些特征。
正如我们所看到的，这个故事是讲给那些愿意相信它并持有相同的文化价值观的人听的。
多年以来，这个故事被人们讲了又讲，在不同的地方还被添加了专属于各地文化的一些元素。
最后，这个故事变得好玩、刺激，引人入胜。
另外一个很有名的都市神话是关于佛罗里达小短吻鳄鱼的故事，大人们去佛罗里达度假，回纽约的时候给孩子们带了几条小鳄鱼。
后来短吻鳄越长越大，不像小时候那么可爱了。
大人们只好把它们扔进抽水马桶里冲掉。
但是其中一些短吻鳄活了下来，所以现在有一些成年短吻鳄在纽约曼哈顿街区下面游荡。
这也是一个神话，因为它描绘了一个城市或地区的地理状况，提醒人们注意某些潜在的危险。
在希腊神话中，奥德修斯在意大利大陆和西西里岛之间狭窄而危险的海峡里航行，左有女海妖斯库拉，右有海妖卡律布狄斯。
同样的，短吻鳄的故事是提醒纽约人，坐地铁的时候要注意安全。
都市神话也可以是道德故事或是“警示”故事。
这其中最有名的是，一个男子坐在旅馆的酒吧间喝酒，有一个人请他喝了一杯。
等他醒来的时候，发现自己
躺在房间的浴缸里，身子被埋在冰块下面。
墙上贴了一张纸条告诉他不要乱动，立刻打911。
接线员遇到过很多这样的情况，他让他去摸一下后背下部，动作一定要缓慢。
如果脊部插着一根管子，那就说明他的肾被人摘走了，卖掉供人移植了。
这个故事的寓意是：如果有人请你喝东西时，你一定要提高警惕。
同样，传统神话也告诉人们在各自的社会中应该如何恰当地为人处世。
在神话中，神之所以如此行事，是要为人类树立一个好榜样。
神话中人的行为高尚且勇敢。
有时候神话中的人类英雄在历史上可能确有其人，可能正因为他们的高尚行为而变成了神。
近年来，越来越多的都市神话不是通过口口相传，而是通过电子邮件的形式广为流传的，这些邮件通常是告诉大家要小心某一种病毒，它会删除你硬盘里的文件。
通常只要看到那种“如果不把这封信转发给别人，就会有灾难性的后果”的警告，而且用了很多大写字母和惊叹号，你就知道这是一个都市神话。
还有很多网络传言，它们对一些微不足道的小事添油加醋，或者是异想天开，在流传过程中加入了越来越多的虚假证据，以证明它们的真实性。
但这是神话吗？不是，不是传统意义上的神话。
事实上，有一个更为准确的词“骗局”，就是一些看上去是真的，而最终发现是假的，并且是用来故意误导人的东西。
真正的神话其动机总是善意的。
都市神话具有所有神话所共有的一些特征：它们通常记录了一些事件，人们相信它们的真实性，它们以口头形式代代相传，并且被逐渐夸大，它们通常包含一个道德寓意，或是警示某种特定情形或情况下可能存在的危险，它们告诉人们应该做什么、怎么做。
从形式上看，对于21世纪的听众来说，它们和希腊、罗马、凯尔特、维京、美索不达米亚以及中国的神话一样真实可信。
但区别在于，真正的神话里总是有神或者接近神的英雄人物，有的神话讲述了创造世界和世界上的一些自然现象，如雷电、圣山之类的。
与之相反，都市神话更为世俗化。
伦敦的地下人和神灵没有半点儿关系，那个搭车客和司机也不是什么英雄，纽约的短吻鳄不代表什么自然现象，那个倒霉的商人的故事虽然是警示性的，但也绝对说不上是为英雄行为树立了榜样。
总之，都市神话根本就不是神话，而是一种传奇，它讲的是一些新近发生的事情，故事是依据历史事件和人类英雄，或者仙女、女巫及其他的虚构人物来编排的。
都市神话中的神话这个词我们只能从它的次要义项去理解：一些并非真实的东西。