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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?。
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.。
现代大学英语精读3课后翻译
Unit 11.adolescence .青春期2.adolescent .青少年时期3.adulthood.成年4.affection .喜爱5.affirm. 断言6.agenda.日程表7.Approval .同意，批准8.attitudinal .态度的9.counsel .建议10.crisis . 危机11.encyclopedia .百科全书12.endeavor.尝试13.endowment.天赋14.ethical.道德的15.evaluate.估算，评估16.excessive.过分的，极度的17.feminine .女性的18.functional .职务的19.genetic 基因的20.heighten . 提高21.inherit遗传，继承22.inhibition压抑的情绪23.interaction合作24.internalize内化25.masculine 男性的26.newscast 新闻广播27.option 选择28.peer 同龄人29.perceive理解30.prejudiced 偏见31.rebel抗议32.resentment 怨恨33.seminary学院的34.theological神学的35.wardrobe衣橱Unit 236..abate 减弱37..akimbo两手叉腰38..barrel桶39..bookworm极爱读书的人40..careerism追求个人事业成功41..clan家族42..coax 哄骗prise 组成pulsion 冲动45..convent女修道院46..corollary 推论47..couched 表达48..courser骏马49..crayfish小龙虾50..curled卷曲的51..discontented不满足的52..dishearten 让人失去希望53..dogged顽强的54..domino---多米诺骨牌55..equivalent等效56..ethos精神57..exclusivity---排他性，排外性58..flatten使平整59..frigate- 护航舰60..gable---三角墙61..guillotine- 断头台62..hale--健壮的63..installment- 一期64..interior--内部的65..inveterate- 积习难改的，成瘾的66..invincible 太壮而无法击败tter-下半年68..literacy-有文化的69..literati-识字的70..lure 诱惑力71..mockingbird--知更鸟72..ottoman- 奥斯曼帝国73..parallel平行的，同时的74..perplexed- 迷惑的75..plummet--暴跌76..portray-- 描绘，勾画77..prance-欢腾78..prize-对---很重要79..pundit-某一学科的权威，专家80..safari-野外狩猎81..Saint--圣徒，圣人82..sanction-批准83..seduce 诱使84..sling-挂在85..snobbery- 势力86..solace安慰87..solitary-孤独的88..sprawl- 扩张89..subculture-亚文化90..supplant-取代91..sustenance.人或动物赖以生存的食物92..trickle-. 细流93..trolley. 购物车，手推车94..tsar-.沙皇95.undersung. 没受到足够重视或赞扬96..virtue- 优点97..whereas--. 尽管，然而。
现代大学英语精读1课文翻译
TextAToward a brighter future for all奔向更加光明的未来1 Good afternoon! As president of the university, I am proud to welcome you to this university. Your achievement is the triumph of years of hard work, both of your own and of your parents and teachers. Here at the university, we pledge to make your educational experience as rewarding as possible. 下午好！作为校长，我非常自豪地欢迎你们来到这所大学。
你们所取得的成就是你们自己多年努力的结果，也是你们的父母和老师们多年努力的结果。
在这所大学里，我们承诺将使你们学有所成。
2 In welcoming you to the university, I am reminded of my own high school graduation and the photograph my mom took of my dad and me. "Pose naturally," Mom instructed us. "Wait!" said Dad, "Let's take a picture of me handing him an alarm clock." The clock woke me up every morning in college.It is still on my office desk.在欢迎你们到来的这一刻，我想起自己高中毕业时的情景，还有妈妈为我和爸爸拍的合影。
大学英语精读第6册课文全文翻译-中英对照
第六册
RESEARCH REPORTS FOR ING
A surprising amount of one's time as a student and professional is spent reporting the results of one's research projects for presentation to teachers, managers, and clients. Indeed, without basic research skills and the ability to present research results clearly and completely, an individual will encounter many obstacles in school and on the job. The need for some research-writing ability is felt nearly equally by college students in all fields, engineering and science as well as business and the humanities. Graduate study often makes great demands on the student's research-writing skills, and most professions continue the demand; education, advertising and marketing, economics and accounting, science and engineering, psychology, anthropology, the arts, and agriculture may all require regular reporting of research data.
大学英语精读第五册课文翻译
大学英语精读第五册(第三版)课文翻译Unit1《一番说教》一番说教也许老师比学生更容易理解,为什么学生在掌握了英语基本结构和句型后英语学习反而变得越来越困难了。
学生们自然感到惊奇并失望地发现本来应该变得越来越容易的学习过程却完全不是那么回事。
学生们并不感到多少安慰,在知道老师在其努力所产生的效果似乎不及一开始明显也会灰心丧气。
他发现那些学生很容易去教,为他们能把所学的知识很快的用于实践。
可现在,他们却面对前阶段中从未学过的大量生词,惯用法显得踌躇不前。
他看到学生们在艰难地努力着,因为他们以前认为已经认识的语言现在似乎充满了令人头昏眼花的成语,陈旧用语以及在不同上下文中有不同含义的惯用词组。
要想让他们相信他们仍朝着精通的方向发展,他们英语就一定提高是很困难的。
并且,只要肯花时间和持之以恒。
有些学生在此情况下厌恶地放弃了学习,这并不出人意外;同时,另一些学生仍然充满希望地盼着老师象开始时那样给他们以满怀信心的指导。
从教师这方面看,由于往往不得不去讲解一些无法说清楚的东西,他常常会对同事们引用一些谚语权充台阶,比如:你能牵马河边走,马不饮水你自愁,或说得比较尊重对方但语法并不严谨:倒不在乎说什么,关键瞧您怎么说。
他的学生则会反唇相讥道:我越学越糊涂。
事实当然并非如此。
师生们正体验着一种共识,即学习中遇到的较复杂的语言结构在表达思想中并非至关重要,因此也就少有可能立刻派上用场。
出于同样的理由,在老师看来,恰当地选择教材变得更困难了。
任选一种食品比从品种繁多的菜单上单挑一道在某个特定日子里你想吃的菜要容易多了。
界定问题易于找出答案。
你可建议学生去讲英语的国家住两三年,这等于撒手不管他们。
没有几个学生陪得起时间花得起钱。
常言道:广泛阅读是最佳替代办法,但读书也应有所选择。
让学生走进图书馆随便拿起他们遇到的第一本书就读,这是无用的。
我会这样劝他们;读无需查字典就懂的书(但并非过眼即懂的书),读你感兴趣的书;读时间允许的书(杂志和报纸,而不是长篇小说,除非你能在一周左右读完它);读现在写的文章,而不是二百年前的文章;读得尽量多一些,并尽量记住写作方法,而不要拘泥于令你困惑的个别单词。
英语精读课文加翻译
第一单元1 The idea of being a writer had e to me off and on since my childhood in Belleville, but it wasn't until my third year in high school that the possibility took hold. Until then I've been bored by everything associated with English courses. I found English grammar dull and difficult. I hated the assignments to turn out long, lifeless paragraphs that were agony for teachers to read and for me to write.从孩提时代，我还住在贝尔维尔时，我的脑子里就断断续续地转着当作家的念头，但直等到我高中三年级，这一想法才有了实现的可能。
在这之前，我对所有跟英文课沾边的事都感到腻味。
我觉得英文语法枯燥难懂。
我痛恨那些长而乏味的段落写作，教师读着受累，我写着痛苦。
2 When our class was assigned to Mr. Fleagle for third-year English I anticipated another cheerless year in that most tedious of subjects. Mr. Fleagle had a reputation among students for dullness and inability to inspire. He was said to be very formal, rigid and hopelessly out of date.To me he looked to be si*ty or seventy and e*cessively prim.He wore primly severe eyeglasses,his wavy hair was primly cut and primly bed. He wore prim suits with neckties set primly against the collar buttons of his white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he seemed a ic antique.弗利格尔先生接我们的高三英文课时，我就准备着在这门最最单调乏味的课上再熬上沉闷的一年。
(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。
英语精读翻译
1. I’ve been spared a lot, one of the blessed of the earth, at least one of its lucky, that privileged handful of the dramatically prospering, the sort whose secrets are asked, like the hundred-year-old man.我一直活得无忧无虑，深得上帝垂爱，至少算个幸运儿，少数人才享有的尊荣富贵，我垂手得之。
就像百岁人瑞总有人讨教，我的秘诀也总有人探询。
2. And so Franklin Roosevelt found that he had, in effect, to recruit an entirely new and temporary government to be piled on top of the old one, the new government to get the tanks and airplanes built, the uniforms made, the men and women assembled and trained and shipped abroad, and the battles fought and won.富兰克林·罗斯福因此意识到他必须招募新班人马，组建临时机构来补强不能胜任的旧政府。
新成立的政府机构专门负责建造坦克飞机，定制军服，招募培训战士。
这些战士将被派往前线，去赢得一场场的战争。
I am a journalist, not a historian, and while this book is an effort to describe a moment in the past, it is less a work of history than of personal reminiscence and reflection. Essentially, it is an account of my own observations and experiences in wartime Washington, supplemented by material drawn from interviews and other sources. I have tried to create out of it all a portrait of the pain and struggle of a city and a government suddenly called upon to fight, and to lead other nations in righting, the greatest war in history, but pathetically and sometimes hilariously unprepared to do so.我是新闻工作者，不是历史学家，所以本书描写的虽然是过往岁月中的一刻，却称不上是一部史学著作，而仅是个人的追思。
大学英语精读1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，然后再选定合适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，但是它会使你比较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．寻找一个合适的地方学习。
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。
在你开始学习时，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结构有了大致的了解。
随后在你正式开始阅读时，你就能辨认出不太重要的材料，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老师讲课的内容。
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。
如果你知道第二天老师要讲述的内容，那你就把这部分材料浏览一下。
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。
大学英语精读第三册翻译
事件的官方说法是，警察受到攻击，只是试图保护自己。
11.Despite the warning that smoking kills, the umber of smokers does
not seem to drop in our coun try.
凡违反公司的安全规章应当当场解雇。
4.This is a very formal occasion」t is not appropriate to wear casual pants or休闲裤或裙子.
5.All the questi ons the police asked revolved around what she had bee n doing on the ni ght of the robbery.
of teach ing will be used in all subseque nt trai ning programs.
Dr.Smith开始第一个训练计划他自己，他的教学方法等，将在所有后 续培训课程中使用。
3.Whoever disobeys the company's safety regulations shall be dismissed on the spot.
rge-scale studies are n eeded toe on firm the en couragi ng results we have obta ined so far.
需要大规模的研究来证实我们迄今取得的令人鼓舞的结果。
2.Dr.Smith is starting the first training program himself, and his methods
现代大学英语精读第二版课文翻译
Pompeii1.Not very far from Naples, a strange city sleeps under the hot Italian sun. It is the city of Pompeii, and there is no other city quite like it in all the world. Nothing lives in Pompeii except crickets and beetles and lizards, yet every year thousands of people travel from distant countries to visit it.1. 在离那不勒斯不远的地方，一座奇特的小城寂静的沉睡在意大利炙热的骄阳之下。
那就是庞培城。
全世界再没有任何一个城市和庞培城相像。
在庞培城中，除了蟋蟀、甲虫和蜥蜴之外，别无其他生物，然而每年都有成千上万的人从不同国度不远万里前来参观。
2.Pompeii is a dead city. No one has lived there for nearly two thousand years----not since the summer of the year A.D. 79, to be exact.2.庞培是一座死城。
确切的说自从公元79年的那个夏天开始，两千年来没有人在这里生活过。
3.Until that year Pompeii was a prosperous city of 25,000 people. Nearby was the Bay of Naples, an arm of the blue Mediterranean. Rich men came down from wealthy Rome to build seaside villas. Farmlands surrounded Pompeii. Rising behind the city was the 4000-foot Mount Vesuvius, a grass-covered slope where the shepherds of Pompeii took their goats to graze. Pompeii was a busy city and a happy one.3.直到那年夏天庞培成还是一座拥有25000人的繁荣城市，离那不远就是蓝色地中海之臂的那不勒斯湾。
大学英语精读第一册课文翻译
大学英语精读第三版第一册课文翻译Unit1课程开始之际，就如何使学习英语的任务更容易提出一些建议似乎正当其时。
Some Strategies or Learning English学习英语绝非易事。
它需要刻苦和长期努力。
虽然不经过持续的刻苦努力便不能期望精通英语，然而还是有各种有用的学习策略可以用来使这一任务变得容易一些。
以下便是其中的几种。
1. 不要以完全同样的方式对待所有的生词。
你可曾因为简直无法记住所学的所有生词而抱怨自己的记忆力太差？其实，责任并不在你的记忆力。
如果你一下子把太多的生词塞进头脑，必定有一些生词会被挤出来。
你需要做的是根据生词日常使用的频率以不同的方式对待它们。
积极词汇需要经常练习，有用的词汇必须牢记，而在日常情况下不常出现的词只需见到时认识即可。
你会发现把注意力集中于积极有用的词上是扩大词汇量最有效的途径。
2．密切注意地道的表达方式。
你可曾纳闷过，为什么我们说 "我对英语感兴趣"是"I'm interested in English"，而说"我精于法语"则是"I'm good at French"？你可曾问过自己，为什么以英语为母语的人说"获悉消息或秘密"是"learn the news or secret"，而"获悉某人的成功或到来"却是"learn of someone's success or arrival"？这些都是惯用法的例子。
在学习英语时，你不仅必须注意词义，还必须注意以英语为母语的人在日常生活中如何使用它。
3．每天听英语。
经常听英语不仅会提高你的听力，而且有助你培养说的技能。
除了专为课程准备的语言磁带外，你还可以听英语广播，看英语电视和英语电影。
第一次听录好音的英语对话或语段，你也许不能听懂很多。
大学英语精读第5册1-5课文全文翻译
Defining the problem is easier than providing the solution. One can suggest that students should spend two or three years in an English-speaking country, which amounts to washing one's hands of them. Few students have the time or the money to do that. It is often said that wide reading is the time or the money to do that. It is often said that wide reading is the best alternative course of action but even here it is necessary to make some kind of selection. It is no use telling students to go to the library and pick up the first book they come across. My own advice to them would be: "read what you can understand without having to look up words in a dictionary (but not what you can understand at a glance); read what interests you; read what you have time for (magazines and newspapers can read the whole novel in a week or so); read the English written today, not 200 years ago; read as much as you can and try to remember the way it was written rather than individual words that puzzled you." And instead of "read", I could just as well say "listen to."
现代大学英语精读2课后翻译
现代⼤学英语精读2课后翻译精读21.在不带现⾦的旅途中，⼈们对他的态度使作者深信；⼈们依然可以依靠陌⽣⼈（的帮助）。
The way people helped him during his joureny when he had no money convined the writer that people can still depend on stranger.2.随着时间的推移，我们不可避免地会越来越多地卷⼊国际事务。
⽽冲突必然会发⽣，因为国家之间总有不同的观点和利益。
As time going on we are inevitably going to get more involve in international affairs. And conflicts are sure to occur because there always exist different views and interests among nations.3. 健康保健必须为所有公民所享受，不管他们有什麽不同。
我们没有理由⽀持那些不为⽣活在农村的⼤量⼈⼝所享有的政策。
Health care must be available to all citizens regardless of their differences. We cannot justify a policy that denies medical care to the large population living in the countryside.4.我住在我叔叔家农场的时候常常出洋相。
⽐如要我在稻⽥除草的时候，我常常分不清草和秧苗。
I often made a fool of myself when I was living with my uncle on his farms. Whenasked to get rid of the weeds in the rice fields, foe example, I often failed to tell apart the weeds and the rice seedling.5. 稻⼦需要⼤量的⽔，很多科学家警告我们，不管我们如何节约⽤⽔，总有⼀天我们会为有限的⽔资源打仗。
现代大学英语精读第二版_第一册_课文翻译
《现代大学英语精读》第二版第一册课文翻译第一课半日1我走在父亲的一侧，牢牢地抓着他的右手。
我身上穿的，戴的全是新的：黑鞋子，绿校服，红帽子。
然儿我一点儿也高兴不起来，因为今天我将第一次被扔到学校里去。
2母亲站在窗前望着我们缓缓前行，我也不时的回头看她，希望她会救我。
我们沿着街道走着，街道两旁是花园和田野，田野里栽满了梨树和椰枣树。
3“我为什么要去上学？”我问父亲，“是我做错了什么了吗？”4“我不是在惩罚你，”父亲笑着说道，“上学不是一种惩罚。
学校是把孩子培养成才的地方。
难道你不想象你哥哥们那样，成为一个有用的人吗？”5我不相信他的话。
我才不相信把我从家里拽出来，扔进那个大大的，高墙围绕的建筑里对我有什么真正的好处呢。
6到了学校门口，我们看到了宽阔的庭院，站满了孩子。
“自己进去吧，”我父亲说，“加入他们。
笑一笑，给其他的孩子做个好榜样。
”7我紧抓着父亲的手，犹豫不决。
但是父亲却把我轻轻地推开了。
“拿出点男子气概来，”他说，“从今天起你就要真正开始自己的生活了。
放学时我会在这等你的。
”8我走了几步，便看见了一些孩子的面孔。
他们中我一个也不认识。
他们也没有一个认识我的。
我感觉自己像是一个迷了路的陌生人。
然而这时有些男孩开始好奇的打量我，其中一个走过来问到，“谁带你来的？”9“我爸爸”我小声说道。
10“我爸爸死了，”他简短地说。
11我不知道该说些什么。
这时学校的门已经关上了，有些孩子哭了起来。
接着，铃响了，一位女士走了过来，后面跟着一群男人。
那些人把我们排成几行。
使我们形成一个错综复杂的队行，站在那四周高楼耸立的院子里。
每层楼都有长长的阳台，阳台上带有木制顶棚，从阳台上可以俯视到我们。
12“这是你们的新家，”那位女士说道，“这儿有你们的父母。
一切能带给你们快乐，对你们有益的事物，这儿都有。
因此擦干你们的眼泪，快快乐乐地面对生活。
”13这样看来我之前的顾虑都是毫无根据的了。
从一开始我就结交了许多朋友，并且爱上了许多女孩。
大学英语精读第三册课文翻译
Unit 1 A Brush with the Law一个青年发现，在大街上毫无明显目的地游逛会招致警方的责罚。
误会一个接一个发生，最终他只得出庭受审……与警察的一场小冲突我平生只有一次跟警方发生纠葛。
被捕和出庭的整个过程在当时是一件非常不愉快的事，但现在倒成了一篇很好的故事。
这次经历令人可恼之处在于围绕着我的被捕以及随后庭上审讯而出现的种种武断专横的情况。
事情发生在大约12年前，其时正是2月。
几个月前我中学毕业了，但上大学要等到10月。
当时我还在家中居住。
一天早晨，我来到里士满。
这里是伦敦的一个郊区，离我住的地方不远。
我在寻找一份临时工作，以便积些钱去旅游。
由于天气晴朗，当时又无急事，我便慢悠悠看看橱窗，逛逛公园。
有时干脆停下脚步，四处张望。
现在看来，一定是这种明显的毫无目的的游逛，使我倒了霉。
事情发生在11点半钟光景。
我在当地图书馆谋职未成，刚刚走出来，便看到一个人穿越马路，显然是要来跟我说话。
我以为他要问我时间，不料他说他是警官，要逮捕我。
起先我还以为这是在开玩笑，但又一个警察出现在我的面前，这次是位身着警服的，这一下使我确信无疑了。
“为什么要抓我?”我问道。
“到处游荡，企图作案，”他说。
“作什么案?”我又问。
“偷窃，”他说。
“偷什么?”我追问。
“牛奶瓶，”他板着面孔说道。
“噢，”我说。
事情原来是这样的，在这一地区多次发生小的扒窃案，特别是从门前台阶上偷走牛奶瓶。
接着，我犯了一个大错误。
其时我年方19，留一头蓬乱的长发，自认为是60年代“青年反主流文化”的一员。
所以我想装出一副冷漠的、对这一事件满不在乎的样子。
于是我尽量用一种漫不经心的极其随便的腔调说，“你们跟踪我多久啦?”这样一来，在他们眼里，我就像是非常熟悉这一套的了，也使他们更加确信我是一个地地道道的坏蛋。
几分钟后，开来了一辆警车。
“坐到后面去，”他们说。
“把手放到前排座位的靠背上，不准挪动。
”他们分别坐在我的两边。
这可再也不是闹着玩的了。
大学英语精读第二册课文翻译（全）
大学英语精读第二册课文翻译(全)UNTH 2-1It is humorous essay. 这是一篇幽默的文章。
But after reading it you will surely find that the author is most serious in writing it.但是读过之后你将会发现作者写这篇文章的时候是很严肃的。
Is There Life on Earth? 地球上有生命吗？Art Buchwald阿特.布奇沃德There was great excitement on the planet of V enus this week. 金星上本周异常热闹。
For the first time V enusian scientists managed to land a satellite on the plant Earth, 那里的科学家首次成功地将一颗卫星送上了地球，and is has been sending back signals as well as photographs ever since. 从此卫星便一直不断地发回信号和照片。
The satellite was directed into an area know as Manhattan 卫星被发射到一个叫曼哈顿的地区(named after the great V enusian astronomer Prof. （它是用金星上伟大的天文学家曼哈顿教授的名字命名的, Manhattan, who first discovered it with his telescope 20,000 light years ago). 两万光年前是他首次用望远镜发现了该地区）。
Because of excellent weather conditions and extremely strong signals, 由于良好的天气条件以及高质量的信号，V enusian scientists were able to get valuable information 使得金星上的科学家们能够获得宝贵资料as to the feasibility of a manned flying saucer landing on Earth. 有关载人飞碟能否在地球上着陆。
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?。
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广泛阅读.广泛阅读很重要,因为在我们的学习环境中,阅读是最重要,最可靠的语言输入来源.在选择阅读材料时,要找你认为有趣的,不需要过多依赖词典就能看懂的东西.开始时每天读一页是个好办法.接下去,你就会发现你每天可以读更多页,而且能对付难度更高的材料.
6. Write regularly. Writing is a good way to practice what you already know. Apart from compositions assigned by your teacher, you may find your own reasons for writing. A pen pal provides good motivation; you will learn a lot by trying to communicate with someone who shares your interests, but comes from a different culture. Other ways to write regularly include keeping a diary, writing a short story and summarizing the daily news.
5. Read widely. It is important to read widely because is our learning environment; reading is the main and most reliable source of language input. When you choose reading materials, look for things that you find interesting, that you can understand without relying too much on a dictionary. A page a day is a good way to start. As you go on, you will find that you can do more pages a day and handle materials at a higher lever of difficulty.
经常写,写作是练习你已经学会的东西的好方法.除了老师布置的作文,你还可以找到自己要写的理由.有个笔友可以提供很好的动力;与某个跟你趣味相投但来自不同文化的人进行交流,你会学到很多东西.经常写作的其他方式还有记日记,写小故事或概述每天的新闻.
Language learning is a process of accumulation. It pays to absorb as much as you can from reading and listening and then try to put what you have learned into practice through speaking and writing.
密切注意地道的表达方式.你可曾纳闷过,为什么我们说 “我对英语感兴趣”是 “I’m interested in English”, 而说 “我精于法语”则是 “I’m good at French”? 你可曾问过自己,为什么以英语为母语的人说 “获悉消息或秘密”是 “learn the news or secret”, 而 “获悉某人的成功或到来”是 “learn of someone’s success or arrival”?这些都是惯用法的例子.再学习英语时,你不仅必须注意词义,还必须注意以英语为母语的人在日常生活中如何使用它.
抓住机会说.的确,在学校里必须用英语交流的场合并不多,但你还是可以找到练习的英语的机会.例如,跟你的同班同学进行交谈可能就是得到一些练习的一种轻松愉快的方式.还可以找校园里以英语为母语的人跟他们随意交谈.或许练习讲英语最容易的方式是高声朗读,因为这在任何时间,任何地方,不需要搭档就可以做到.例如,你可以看着图片或身边的物件,试着对它们详加描述.你还可以复述日常情景.在商店里购物或在餐馆里吃完饭付过账后,假装这一切都发生在一个讲英语的国家,试着用英语把它表演出来.
语言学习是一个积累的过程.从读和听中吸收尽量多的东西,然后再试着把学到的你的听力,而且有助你培养说的技能.除了专为课程准备的语言磁带外,你还可以听英语广播,看英语电视和英语电影.第一次听录好音的英语对话或语段,你也许不能听懂很多.先试着听懂大意,然后再反复地听.你会发现每次重复都会听懂很多更多的东西.
4. Seize opportunities to speak. It is true that there are few situations at school where you have to communicate in English, but you can seek out opportunities to practice speaking the language. Talking with your classmates, for example, can be an easy and enjoyable way to get some practice. Also try to find native speaker on your campus and feel free to talk with them. Perhaps the easiest way to practice speaking is to rehearse aloud, since this can be done at any time, in any place, and without a partner. For instance, you can look at pictures or objects around you and try to describe them in detail. You can also rehearse everyday situations. After you have made a purchase in a shop or finished a meal in a restaurant and paid the check, pretend that all this happened in an English-speaking country and try to act it out in English.
18:26 2011/10/312. Watch out for idiomatic ways of saying things. Have you ever wondered why we say, “I am interested in English”, but “I am good at French”? And have you ever asked yourself why native English speakers say, “learn the news or secret”, but “learn of someone’s success or arrival”? These are all examples of idiomatic usage. In learning English, you must pay attention not only to the meaning of a word, but also to the way native speakers use it in their daily lives.
3. Listen to English every day. Listening to English on a regular basis will not only improve your ear, but will also help you build your speaking skills. In addition to language tapes especially prepared for your course, you can also listen to English radio broadcasts, watch English TV, and see English movies. The first time you listen to a taped conversation or passage in English, you may not be able to catch a great deal. Try to get its general meaning first and listen to it over and over again. You will find that with each repetition you will get something more.