2008年英语历年考研真题阅读翻译

2008 Text 1
While still catching-up to men in some spheres of modern life, women appear to be way ahead in at least one undesirable category. “Women are particularly susceptible to developing depression and anxiety disorders in response to stress compared to men,” according to Dr. Yehuda, chief psychiatrist at New York’s Veteran’s Administration Hospital.
①Studies of both animals and humans have shown that sex hormones somehow affect the stress response, causing females under stress to produce more of the trigger chemicals than do males under the same conditions. ②In several of the studies, when stressed-out female rats had their ovaries (the female reproductive organs) removed, their chemical responses became equal to those of the males.
③Adding to a woman’s increased dose of stress chemicals, are her increased “opportunities” for stress. “It’s not necessarily that women don’t cope as well. It’s just that they have so much more to co pe with,” says Dr. Yehuda. “Their capacity for tolerating stress may even be greater than men’s,” she observes, “it’s just that they’re dealing with so many more things that they become worn out from it more visibly and sooner.”
Dr. Yehuda notes another di fference between the sexes. “I think that the kinds of things that women are exposed to tend to be in more of a chronic or repeated nature. Men go to war and are exposed to combat stress. Men are exposed to more acts of random physical violence. ④The kinds of interpersonal violence that women are exposed to tend to be in domestic situations, by, unfortunately, parents or other family members, and they tend not to be one-shot deals.The wear-and-tear that comes from these longer relationships can be quite de vastating.”
Adeline Alvarez married at 18 and gave birth to a son, but was determined to finish college. “I struggled a lot to get the college degree. I was living in so much frustration that that was my escape, to go to school, and get ahead and do better.” Later, her marriage ended and she became a single mother. “It’s the hardest thing to take care of a teenager, have a job, pay the rent, pay the car payment, and pay the debt.
I lived from paycheck to paycheck.”
Not everyone experiences the kinds of severe chronic stresses Alvarez describes. But most women today are coping with a lot of obligations, with few breaks, and feeling the strain. ⑤Alvarez’s experience demonstrates the importance of finding ways to diffuse stress before it threatens your health and your ability to function.
在现代生活中女性就算是在某些领域可以追赶上男性，但至少在一个方
面是领先的，尽管是她们不太想要的。

纽约的退伍军管理医院精神科首席医
生Yehuda博士说道，和男性相比，女性面对压力时，更容易受到影响，导致
抑郁和紧张。

对于动物和人类的研究都显示出性激素会在某种程度去影响面对压力的
反应，导致在同样的条件下，女性产生更多的致病化学物质。

在几项研究中，
当受到压力的雌鼠的卵巢（雌性的生殖器官）被拿掉后，它们的化学反应变
得和那些雄性的一样了。

对于女性来说，除了产生更多的导致压力的化学物质外，她们产生压力
的“机会”也更多。

“并不是女性要处理的事情太少，而是她们有更多的事情要
处理。

”Yehuda博士说道。

“她们对于压力的承受能力有时候甚至比男性的还大”，她观察到，“她们只是需要处理的事情太多，看起来会更容易精疲力尽。

”
Yehuda博士注意到了另一个男女之间的不同点。

“我认为，女性通常要做
的事是慢性的，重复的。

而男人去战场，承受的是格斗的压力。

男性面临的
更多的是随意的身体上的暴力。

女性面对的人与人之间的暴力是在家庭环境
中的。

不幸的是，她们与父母还有其他的家庭成员之间不是能够一次性解决
的问题。

这种长期的关系的磨合是更有破坏性的。

Adeline Alvarez 18岁结婚并生了个儿子，但她决定完成大学学业。

“我尽
了很大的努力拿到大学学位，因为我在实际生活中有很多的挫折，而这就是
我的逃避，去学校，争取上游，做到更好。

”不久后，她离了婚变成一个单亲
母亲。

“除了照顾一个十几岁的孩子，还要工作，付房租，养车，还债是最难
的事情了。

我的生活就是不停的支付自己的账单。

”
不是每个人经历着和Alvarez describes一样的长期的压力，但是大多数女
性都在处理着太多的责任，很少得到喘息，从而感到了压力。

Alvarez的经历
证明了当压力威胁你的健康和正常生理功能之前解压是非常重要的。

2008 Text 2
2008 Text 2
It used to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors’ names and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review. Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal.
No longer.①The Internet –and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it –is making access to scientific results a reality.The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just issued a report describing the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, by John Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits. But it goes further than that. It signals a change in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavor.
The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specializing in these subjects. They publish more than 1.2 million articles each year in some 16,000 journals.
This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of scholarly
journals are now online. Entirely new business models are emerging; three main ones were identified by the report’s authors. There is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay for access to a collection of online journal titles through site-licensing agreements. There is open-access publishing, typically supported by asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper to be published. Finally, there are open-access archives, where organizations such as universities or international laboratories support institutional repositories.②Other models exist that are hybrids of these three, such as delayed open-access, where journals allow only subscribers to read a paper for the first six months, before making it freely available to everyone who wishes to see it. All this could change the traditional form of the peer-review process, at least for the publication of papers.
原本一切都很简单。

一组研究员在实验室里共同完成一个试验，把结果
提交给某刊物，刊物的编辑把作者姓名及相关信息隐去，把报告交给这些研
究者的同行去审阅。

根据评论意见，编辑将决定是否发表。

因此，版权留在
刊物出版社手上，辛苦探求知识的研究者反倒要花钱订阅刊物。

现在不再是这样了。

提供资金的机构施加压力，质疑为什么商业刊物可
以通过限制刊载的手段从政府投资的研究项目中牟利，互联网使得阅读科研
结果成为现实。

经济合作及发展组织近日发布一项调查，描述了这一现象所
造成的深远影响。

澳大利亚维多利亚大学的John Houghton和经合组织的Graham Vickery联合完成这一报告，内容使目前为止收入丰厚的出版商们感
到汗颜。

但是这项报告的意义远远不止于此，它标志着科学尝试的一项关键
性因素即将发生改变。

在某种程度上来说，知识的价值和公共投资能否取得较高回报，取决于
是否能够得到广泛的流通、人们是否能够比较容易地获取这些研究成果。

这
是一项很大的产业。

在美国，核心科研出版市场产值每年在70亿美元到110
亿美元左右。

国际科学、技术和医学出版社集团宣称全世界专业出版本类期
刊的出版商有2000多家。

他们每年在16000种刊物上发表120万篇以上文章。

这个数字现在有所变化。

根据OECD报告，目前有75%的专业期刊在互
联网上有在线阅读。

全新的商务模式正在形成，报告作者总结出其中三种。

第一种是所谓的大订单模式，即机构团体订阅者通过签订网站协议付钱购买
阅读一批刊物文章题目的权限。

第二种为开放式出版模式，这种方式的典型
特点是要求作者（或其雇主）付费发表文章。

最后一种为开放式档案模式，
即一些组织，比如大学或者国际实验室建立和维护的一些机构数据库。

其他
的模式都是对这三种的不同组合，比如延期开放式是指某一些期刊在发表文
章的前六个月只允许付费阅览，此后转为免费阅读。

至少对论文的发表来说，
这些都将颠覆传统的同行审阅模式。

2008 Text 3
In the early 1960s Wilt Chamberlain was one of only three players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) listed at over seven feet. ①If he had played last season, however, he would have been one of 42. ②The bodies playing major professional sports have changed dramatically over the years, and managers have been more than willing to adjust team uniforms to fit the growing numbers of bigger,
longer frames.
The trend in sports, though, may be obscuring an unrecognized reality: Americans have generally stopped growing. ③Though typically about two inches taller now than 140 years ago, today’s people – especially those born to families who have lived in the U.S. for many generations – apparently reached their limit in the early 1960s. And they aren’t likely to get any taller. “In the general population today, at this genetic, environmental level, we’ve pretty much gone as far as we can go,” says anthropologist William Cameron Chumlea of Wright State University. In the case of NBA players, their increase in height appears to result from the increasingly common practice of recruiting players from all over the world.
④Growth, which rarely continues beyond the age of 20, demands calories and nutrients – notably, protein – to feed expanding tissues. At the start of the 20th century, under-nutrition and childhood infections got in the way. But as diet and health improved, children and adolescents have, on average, increased in height by about an inch and a half every 20 years, a pattern known as the secular trend in height. Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average height –5′9″ for men, 5′4″ for women –hasn’t really changed since 1960.
Genetically speaking, there are advantages to avoiding substantial height. During childbirth, larger babies have more difficulty passing through the birth canal. Moreover, even though humans have been upright for millions of years, our feet and back continue to struggle with bipedal posture and cannot easily withstand repeated stra in imposed by oversize limbs. “There are some real constraints that are set by the genetic architecture of the individual organism,” says anthropologist William Leonard of Northwestern University.
Genetic maximums can change, but don’t expect this to happe n soon.⑤Claire C. Gordon, senior anthropologist at the Army Research Center in Natick, Mass., ensures that 90 percent of the uniforms and workstations fit recruits without alteration. She says that, unlike those for basketball, the length of military uniforms has not changed for some time. And if you need to predict human height in the near future to design a piece of equipment, Gordon says that by and large, “you could use today’s data and feel fairly confident.”
在20世纪60年代早期，Wilt Chamberlain是美国国家篮球协会中仅有的
身高超过7英尺的三个人之一。

可是如果他参加了上个赛季的话，他就变成
了42分之一了。

这些年来在较大的职业体育运动中的运动员的身体状况发生
了很大的改变，而他们的经理人也更愿意调整队员的运动服来适应队员们更大，更高的身材。

虽然体育界的这种趋势可能蒙蔽了一个没有被承认的现实：美国人基本
上停止生长了。

虽然现在人们比140年前高了2英寸，特别是那些出生在已
移民美国很多代的那些人，但是明显的，在二十世纪60年代早期，已经到达
了他们的身高的极限。

他们已经不可能再长得更高了。

“在这个基因和环境的
条件下，现在整体的人们已经长到我们能够达到的范围了，”Wright州大学的
人类学家William Cameron Chumlea说道。

拿NBA球员来说，他们身高的增
加主要由于从世界各地招募到了球员。

身高的增长一般在20岁以后就停止了，而发育是需要能量和营养的，其
中的蛋白质用来供给组织的生长。

在20世纪初，营养不良和儿童疾病妨碍了
整体的发育。

但是当饮食和健康的促进，儿童和青少年平均每20年都增长了
大概1.5英寸，这就是长高的趋势。

根据疾病防治中心，从1960年开始，人
们的平均身高，男性5英尺9英寸，女性5英尺4英寸，就没有怎么改变了。

总的说来，避免太高的身高是有很多优点的。

在生产时，较大的婴儿通
过产道是有更多的问题的。

而且，就算人类已经直立行走已经几百万年了，
我们的脚和背部继续对抗着巨大的压力，这些压力来源于双足直立的姿势和
巨大的肢体。

“有一些限制是个体器官的基因结构导致的。

”西北大学的人类
学家William Leonard说道。

基因的最大化可以改变，但是不要期待它会马上就能发生。

Mass州的Natick的军队研究中心的高级人类学家Claire C. Gordon确信百分之九十的入
伍新兵不需要更换新的制服和工作站。

她说，不像那些篮球制服，军队的制
服长度很长时间都没有改变了。

如果你需要在不远的将来预测人类的身高而
去设计一款新的设备，Gordon说基本上，“你都能够使用现在的数据并且觉得
非常地自信。

”
Text 4
In 1784, five years before he became president of the United States, George Washington, 52, was nearly toothless. So he hired a dentist to transplant nine teeth into his jaw – having extracted them from the mouths of his slaves.
That’s a far different image from the cherry-tree-chopping George most people remember from their history books. But recently, many historians have begun to focus on the roles slavery played in the lives of the founding generation.①They have been spurred in part by DNA evidence made available in 1998, which almost certainly proved Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings. And only over the past 30 years have scholars examined history from the bottom up. Works of several historians reveal the moral compromises made by the nation’s early leaders and the fragile nature of the country’s infancy. More significantly, they argue that many of the Founding Fathers knew slavery was wrong –and yet most did little to fight it.
More than anything, the historians say, the founders were hampered by the culture of their time. While Washington and Jefferson privately expressed distaste for slavery, they also understood that it was part of the political and economic bedrock of the country they helped to create.
For one thing, the South could not afford to part with its slaves. Owning slaves was “like having a large bank account,” says Wiencek, author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. ②The southern states would not have signed the Constitution without protections for the “peculiar institution,” including a clause that counted a slave as three fifths of a man for purposes of congressional representation.
And the statesmen’s political lives depended on slavery. The three-fifths formula handed Jefferson his narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 by inflating the votes of the southern states in the Electoral College. Once in office, Jefferson extended slavery with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; the new land was carved into 13 states, including three slave states.
Still, Jefferson freed Hemings’s children –though not Hemings herself or his approximately 150 other slaves. Washington, who had begun to believe that all men were created equal after observing the bravery of the black soldiers during the Revolutionary War, overcame the strong opposition of his relatives to grant his slaves their freedom in his will. Only a decade earlier, such an act would have required legislative approval in Virginia.
1784，52岁的乔治?华盛顿在成为美国总统5年前，牙齿就几乎已经掉光了。

他专门请牙医从他的奴隶口中拔出九颗牙齿种在自己的身上。

这跟很多人在历史书上读到过的那个砍樱桃树的华盛顿有点大相径庭。

但是最近开始，历史学家开始越来越关注奴隶制在美国开国一代人的生活中
所扮演的角色。

他们多半是受了1998年DNA事件的影响。

那个事件证明托
马斯?杰弗逊至少和他的奴隶萨利?赫明思生过一个孩子。

学者们从头至尾地
研究历史还是近三十年的事情。

一些历史学家揭示了早期开国者们的道德妥
协和早期国家的不稳定性。

更重要的是，他们认为很多开国元勋知道奴隶制
是错误的，但是大多数并没有去反抗。

最主要的原因，就是建国者们受到了当时文化的束缚。

当华盛顿和杰弗
逊私底下表示对奴隶制的不满时，他们也明白奴隶制同时也是他们努力建造
的这个国家的政治经济基础的一部分。

一方面，南方各州无法认同废除奴隶制度。

如《不完美的上帝：乔治?华
盛顿、他的奴隶和美国的建立》一书作者Wiencek所描述，拥有努力“就像拥
有一笔巨额存款”。

如果没有对于这种“特殊制度”的保护，南方各州不会同意
签署宪法。

这种特殊的制度保护包括：在国会代表人数中一个奴隶可以算作
五分之三个公民。

政治家的政治生命也取决于奴隶制度。

正由于这个五分之三公式，南方
选举团的选票扩大了，杰弗逊才在1800大选中险胜。

入主白宫之后的1803年，杰弗逊通过购买路易斯安那州扩大了奴隶制度，这片土地后来被划分为
了13个州，其中包括3个蓄奴州。

然而，杰弗逊还是解放了赫明思的孩子们，虽然没有同样解放赫明思和
其他150名奴隶。

华盛顿在目睹了美国独立战争中黑人士兵的英勇之后开始
相信人人生就平等。

于是，不顾亲属的反对，他解放了自己所有的努力。

而
仅仅在十年前，解放奴隶的法案才在弗吉尼亚得以批准。