第4版块科技新闻类题材英汉翻译真题

第4版块科技新闻类题材

一、背诵政府工作报告相关表达

二、英译汉：

1. （浙江工商大学2014）Before we replace angst about housing, mortgages and credit markets with anxiety about rising oil prices, consider what we've learned in the past several months. We had a housing bubble; that's now obvious. But how did it happen? Why was its bursting so painful? Without answers, we can't hope to reduce chances of a repeat.

Boil it down to the three R's: rocket scientists, regulators, and ratings agencies.

The rocket scientists are the wizards of Wall Street who invented securities that supposedly dispersed risk widely but actually created much more leverage than proved wise.

In a modern capitalist system, regulators provide guardrails to keep markets from driving the economy off a cliff. The regulators failed. Whether regulators should or could have restrained innovation on Wall Street or prohibited business deals between consenting, sophisticated adults is a tough question.

Among their many failings, the regulators allowed lenders to make a fundamental mistake: To lend not against the borrower's cash flow and income, but instead to lend against the seemingly inexorable increase in the value of the collateral. Mortgages were made to people who couldn't afford the payments because the lender (or investor) figured that if the borrower defaulted, the house would always be worth more than the loan.

Then there are the rating agencies, mainly Moody's and Standard & Poor's. 'Credit-rating agencies assigned high ratings to complex structured subprime debt based on inadequate historical data and, in some cases, flawed models,' the Financial Stability Forum, a collection of regulators and central bankers, said in an April report. 'As investors realized this, they lost confidence in ratings of securitized products more generally.'

But investors who relied on the rating agencies -- particularly supposedly sophisticated pension funds and other institutions -- are at fault, too. Rating firms became a crutch for investors who simply didn't want to spend the time and money required to be prudent investors at a time when low interest rates had everyone reaching for higher returns without contemplating the higher risks.

A little 'back to basics' in banking and investing would go a substantial way toward avoiding a repeat of the Panic of '08.

2. （南开大学2012）Unintended consequences can be a byproduct of sweeping change. When Henry Ford invented the automobile, the world was transformed by its speed and convenience, but few people considered what millions of automobiles might mean for the world's energy supply and climate a century down the road.

Similarly, with the proliferation of the personal computer, businesses and consumers quickly realized the cost-and time-saving benefits of the Internet, e-mail and high-speed broadband. Information technology transformed the information age -- and global commerce -- by making it dramatically easier to manage information, communicate, perform research, play and shop. Nowhere is this more evident than in our nation's efforts to reduce energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. The days when businesses could send a product into the marketplace