21世纪大学英语读写教程第四册Reading_aloud及其翻译(1-8)

Unit 1

If great achievers share anything, said Simonton, it is an unrelenting drive to succeed. “There's a tendency to think that they are endowed with something super-normal,” he explained. “But what comes out of the research is that there are great people who have no amazing intellectual processes. It's a difference in degree. Greatness is built upon tremendous amounts of study, practice and devotion.

He cited Winston Churchill, Britain's prime minister during World War 2, as an example of a risk-taker who would never give up. Thrust into office when his country's morale was at its lowest, Churchill rose brilliantly to lead the British people. In a speech following the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, he inspired the nation when he said, “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end... We shall never surrender.”

西蒙顿说，如果成就巨大者具有什么共性的话，那就是一种坚持不懈地追求成功的动力。“往往有人认为他们具备一些超常非凡的东西，”他解释道。“但研究表明，有些伟人并没有惊人的智力,有的只是程度上的差异而已。伟大是建立在大量的学习、实践和献身精神的基础之上的。”

他举了二战时期的英国首相温斯顿?丘吉尔作为永不放弃敢于冒险的典范。丘吉尔在全国士气最为低落的时候被推上了台，并出色地领导了英国人民。在1940年盟军敦刻尔克大撤退之后的一次演讲中，他的话激励了全国人民，“我们决不会退缩、永不失败。我们一定要坚持到底......我们永远不会屈服。”

Unit 2

Some persons refrain from expressing their gratitude because they feel it will not be welcome. A patient of mine, a few weeks after his discharge from the hospital, came back to thank his nurse. “I didn't come back sooner,” he explained, “because I imagined you must be bored to death with people thanking you.”

“On the contrary,” she replied, “I am delighted you came. Few realize how much we need encouragement and how much we are helped by those who give it.”

Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build up their philosophy of life.

有些人不愿表达感激之情，因为他们觉得这不会受欢迎。我的一个病人在出院的后几个星期回到医院感谢他的护士。“我没有早点回来，”他解释说，“因为我猜想你们对别人的感激一定厌烦得要命。”

“正好相反，”她回答说，“我很高兴你来。很少有人明白我们多么需要鼓励，我们从那些鼓励我们的人身上获得了多大的帮助。”

我们所给予的感激永远不会过多。因为我们身边的人在构筑他们的人生哲学时所依据的正是这些微笑，正是我们所表示的感谢以及表示感激的小小的举动。

Unit 3

The normal Western approach to a problem is to fight it. The saying , “when the going gets tough ,the tough get going,” is typical of this aggressive attitude towards problem-solving. No matter what the problem is or the techniques available for solving it, the frame work produce by our Western way of thinking is fight. Dr.de Bono calls this vertical thinking: the traditional, sequential, Aristotelian thinking of logic, moving firmly from one step to the next, like toy blocks is incorrectly placed, then the whole structure collapses. Impasse is reached, and frustration, tension, feeling of fight take over.

Later thinking, Dr.de Bono says, is a new technique of thinking about things—a technique that avoids this fight altogether, and solves the problem in an entirely unexpected fashion.

Lateral thinking sounds simple. And it is. Once you have solved a problem laterally, you wonder how you could ever have been hung up on it. The key is making that vital shift in emphasis, that sidestepping of the problem, instead of attacking it head-on.

Dr. A. A. Bridger, psychiatrist at Columbia University and in private practice in New York, explains how lateral thinking works with his patients, “Many people come to me wanting to stop smoking, for instance,”he says. “Most people fail when they are trying to stop smoking because they wind up telling themselves, …No，I will not smoke; no, I shall not smoke; no, I will not; no, I cannot ...‟”It's a fight and what happens is you end up smoking more.

“So instead of looking at the problem from the old way of no, and fighting it, I show them a whole new point of view—that you are your body's keeper, and your body is something though which you experience life. If you stop thinking about it, there's really something helpless about your body. It can do nothing for itself. It has no choice, it is like a baby's body. You begin then a whole new way of looking at it—…I am going to take care of myself, and give myself some respect and protection, by not smoking.‟”