2016年北京大学211翻译硕士英语考研真题

2016年北京大学211翻译硕士英语考研真题一、完型填空文章如下：How digital culture is rewiring our brainsOur brains are superlatively evolved to adapt to our environment: a process known as neuroplasticity. The connections between our brain cells will be shaped strengthened and refined by our individual experiences. It is this personalisation of the physical brain driven by unique interactions with the external world that arguably constitutes the biological basis of each mind so what will happen to that mind if the external world changes in unprecedented ways for example with an all-pervasive digital technology?A recent survey in the US showed that more than half of teenagers aged 13 to 17 spend more than 30 hours a week outside school using computers and other web-connected devices. If their environment is being transformed for so much of the time into a fast-paced and highly interactive two-dimensional space the brain will adapt for good or ill. Professor Michael Merzenich of the University of California San Francisco gives a typical neuroscientific perspective.''There is a massive and unprecedented difference in how 'digital natives' brains are plastically engaged in life compared with those of average individuals from earlier generations and there is little question that the operational characteristics of the average modern brain substantially differ'' he says. The implications of such a sweeping ''mind change'' must surely extend into education policy. Most obviously time spent in front of a screen is time not spent doing other things. Several studies have already documented a lixxxxnk between the recreational use of computers and a decline in school performance. Perhaps most important of all we need to understand the full impact of cyber culture on the emotional and cognitive profile of the 21st-century mind.AdvertisementInevitably there is a variety of issues. Let us look at just three.First social networking. Eye contact is a pivotal and sophisticated component of human interaction as is subconscious monitoring of body language and most powerful of all physical contact yet none of these experiences is available on social networking sites. It follows that if a young brain with the evolutionary mandate to adapt to the environment is establishing relationships through the medium of a screen the skills essential for empathy may not be acquired as naturally as in the past.In line with this prediction a recent study from Michigan University of 14000 college students has reported a decline in empathy over the past 30 years which was particularly marked over the past decade.Such data does not of course prove a causal lixxxxnk but just as with smoking and cancer some 50 years ago epidemiologists could investigate any possible connection.The psychologist Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has argued in her recent book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other that the more continuously connected people are in cyberspace the more isolated they feel.Second video games. Neuropsychological studies suggest frequent and continued playing might lead to enhanced recklessness. Data also indicates reduced attention spans and possible addiction. In line with this significant chemical and even structural changes are being reported in the brains of obsessional gamers. No single paper is ever likely to be accepted unanimously as conclusive but asurvey of 136 reports using 381 independent tests and conducted on more than 130000 participants concluded that video games led to significant increases in desensitisation physiological arousal aggression and a decrease in prosocial behaviour.Third search engines. Can the internet improve cognitive skills and learning as has been argued? The problem is that efficient information processing is not synonymous with knowledge or understanding. Even the chairman of Google Eric Schmidt has said: ''I worry that the level of interrupt the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information - and especially of stressful information - is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.'' Given the plasticity of the brain it is not surprising adapting to a cyber-environment will also lead to positives - for example enhanced performance in skills that are continuously rehearsed such as a mental agility similar to that needed in IQ tests or in visuomotor co-ordination. However we urgently need a fuller picture.二、阅读理解（四篇）第三篇原文如下：The rise in female employment also seems to have coincided with (or perhaps precipitated) a similarly steep rise in standards for what it means to be a good parent and especially a good mother. Niggling feelings of guilt and ambivalence over working outside the home together with some social pressures compel many women to try to fulfil idealised notions of motherhood as well says Judy Wajcman a sociology professor at the London School of Economics and author of a new book "Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism".The struggle to "have it all" may be a fairly privileged modern challenge. But it bears noting that even in professional dual-income households mothers still handle the lion's share of parenting—particularly the daily routine jobs that never feelfinished. Attentive fathers handle more of the enjoyable tasks such as taking children to games and playing sports while mothers are stuck with most of the feeding cleaning and nagging. Though women do less work around the house than they used to the jobs they do tend to be the never-ending ones like tidying cooking and laundry. Well-educated men chip in far more than their fathers ever did and more than their less-educated peers but still put in only half as much time as women do. And men tend to do the discrete tasks that are more easily crossed off lists such as mowing lawns or fixing things round the house. All of this helps explain why time for mothers and especially working mothers always feels scarce. "Working mothers with young children are the most time-scarce segment of society" says Geoffrey Godbey a time-use expert at Penn State University. Parents also now have far more insight into how children learn and develop so they have more tools (and fears) as they groom their children for adulthood. This reinforces another reason why well-off people are investing so much time in parenthood: preparing children to succeed is the best way to transfer privilege from one generation to the next. Now that people are living longer parents are less likely to pass on a big financial bundle when they die. So the best way to ensure the prosperity of one's children is to provide the education and skills needed to get ahead particularly as this human capital grows ever more important for success.This helps explain why privileged parents spend so much time worrying over schools and chauffeuring their children to résumé-enhancing activities. "Parents are now afraid of doing less than their neighbors" observes Philip Cohen a sociology professor at the University of Maryland who studies contemporary families. "It can feel like an arms race."No time to loseLeisure time is now the stuff of myth. Some are cursed with too much. Others find it too costly to enjoy. Many spend their spare moments staring at a screen of some kind even though doing other things (visiting friends volunteering at a church) tends to make people happier. Not a few presumethey will cash in on all their stored leisure time when they finally retire whenever that may be. In the meantime being busy has its rewards. Otherwise why would people go to such trouble?Alas time ultimately is a strange and slippery resource easily traded visible only when it passes and often most highly valued when it is gone. No one has ever complained of having too much of it. Instead most people worry over how it flies and wonder where it goes. Cruelly it runs away faster as people get older as each accumulating year grows less significant proportionally but also less vivid. Experiences become less novel and more habitual. The years soon bleed together and end up rushing past with the most vibrant memories tucked somewhere near the beginning. And of course the more one tries to hold on to something the swifter it seems to go.Writing in the first century Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy terribly busy everyone seemed to be mortal in their fears immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along ruing their fortune anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. "People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy" he observed in "On the Shortness of Life" perhaps the very first time-management self-help book. Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting but nearly everyone has enough of it to take some deep breaths think deep thoughts and smell some roses deeply. "Life is long if you know how to use it" he counseled.Nearly 2000 years later de Grazia offered similar advice. Modern life that leisure-squandering money-hoarding grindstone-nosing frippery-buying business left him exasperated. He saw that everyone everywhere was running running running but to where? For what? People were trading their time for all sorts of things but was the exchange worth it? He closed his 1962 tome "Of Time Work and Leisure" with a precision.三、排序文章如下：Modern CriticismDICKSON D. BRUCE JR.W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double ConsciousnessAs scholars have developed a greater understanding of the importance of African American literature to the American tradition they have also developed a real appreciation for the critical place of the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois in both that literature and that tradition in the twentieth century. In particular they have focused on the famous passage from Du Bois's 1897 Atlantic magazine essay "Strivings of the Negro People" -- later republished with revisions in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) -- in which Du Bois spoke of an African American "double consciousness" a "two-ness" of being" an American a Negro; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."Du Bois's use of the idea of double consciousness to characterize issues of race was provocative and unanticipated; however as has only occasionally been noted and never really pursued the term itself had a long history by the time Du Bois published his essay in 1897. Du Bois wrote about double consciousness in a way that drew heavily on that history to create a fairly coherent pattern of connotations in both the essay and the later book. The background of meaning which the term evoked would have been familiar to many if not most of the educated middle- and upper-class readers of the Atlantic one of the foremost popular journals of letters of the day and should have contributed much to the understanding of Du Bois's arguments by those readers.In using the term "double consciousness" Du Bois drew on two main sources. One of these was essentially figurative a product of European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. The other not entirely unrelated and mentioned briefly by historian Arnold Rarnpersad in his ownanalysis of Du Bois's work was initially medical carried forward into Du Bois's time by the emerging field of psychology. Here the term "double consciousness" was applied to cases of split personality; by the late nineteenth century it had come into quite general use not only in professional publications but also in discussions of psychological research published for general audiences as well .The figurative sources for Du Bois's idea of double consciousness are in some ways the most telling. Although one can identify from nineteenth-century literature several possible precedents for Du Bois's use of the term-from Whittier for example or George Eliot-Werner Sollors has described this figurative background as Ernersonian and indeed one of the earliest such occurrences of the term may be found in Emerson's works; In an 1843 essay entitled "The Transcendentalist" a piece he had delivered earlier as a lecture Emerson employed the term "double consciousness" to refer to a problem in the life of one seeking to take a Transcendental perspective on self and world. Constantly he wrote the individual is pulled back from the divine by the demands of daily life. The Transcendentalist knows" moments of illumination" and this makes his situation all the more difficult because lie then sees his life from the perspective those moments create as too much dominated by meanness and insignificance. As Emerson wrote "The worst feature of this double consciousness is that the two lives of the understanding and of the soul which lie leads really show very littlerelation to each other: one prevails now all buzz and din; the other prevails then all infinitude and paradise; and with the progress of life the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves." Concerned with different issues Emerson used the term in a way that was not exactly the same as Du Bois's. But there was more than enough similarity to make Emerson's a useful background to what Du Bois was trying to say.In Emerson's essay "double-consciousness" evoked a set of oppositions that had become commonplace in Transcendentalism and as other scholars have shown in Romanticism generally. In the passage itself was a dichotomy between "the understanding" and "the soul" but even that referred to a more general set all organized around a central division between world and spirit. The double consciousness plaguing the Transcendentalist summarized the downward pull of life in society -- including the social forces inhibiting genuine self-realization and the upward pull of communion with the divine; the apparent chaos of things as they are and the unity of Nature comprehended by universal law; and the demanding cold rationality of commercial society and the search for Truth Beauty and Goodness -- especially Beauty-that ennobled the soul. Human beings in the world could not escape its downward pull. The worldly was an essential part of living one's life. The Transcendental double consciousness grew out of an awareness that Nature and the soul were so much more.A similar set of oppositions was an important part of Du Bois's argument in his "Strivings of the Negro People." Although in the essay Du Bois used "double consciousness" to refer to at least three different issues -- including first the real powerof white stereotypes in black life and thought and second the double consciousness created by the practical racism that excluded every black American from the mainstream of the society the double consciousness of being both an American and not an American -- by double consciousness Du Bois referred most importantly to an internal conflict in the African American individual between what was "African" and what was "American." It was in terms of this third sense that the figurative background to "double consciousness" gave the term its most obvious support because for Du Bois the essence of a distinctive African consciousness was its spirituality a spirituality baxxxxsed in Africa but revealed among African Americans in their folklore their history of patient suffering and their faith. In this sense double consciousness related particularly to Du Bois's efforts to privilege the spiritual in relation to the materialistic commercial world white America. "Negro blood has a message for the world" he wrote and this message as he had been saying since at least 1888 was of aspiritual sense and a softening influence that black people could bring to a cold and calculating world. What Sherman Paul says of Emerson's stress on the "feminine eye" one may also say of Du Bois's stress on the African soul that it serves as an alternative to a dominant inability to "see" apart from the possibilities for action and profit a notion Du Bois played on when guided by his important figure of the "veil" lie described the African American as gifted with a kind of "second sight."四、作文computer translation 的发展前景，以后需不需要人力的参与，以此为话题写作文，要求尤其讨论人力的参与与否。