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1. 本次考试难度中等偏上。
2. 整体分析：考试文章为三旧，但题目有所改动，涉及社会科学类（P1）、生物类（P2）、科技类（P3）。
3. 主要题型：题目类型延续以往出题的特点，配对题、填空题与判断题为主，辅以单选与多选。篇文章由单选题+填空题+多选题构成，考察对文章细节的把握，需要根据定位词迅速定位；第二篇文章由判断题+Matching段落信息配对题+填空题构成，可将Matching题放到 后做；第三篇文章由Matching描述配对题+Matching段落信息配对题+问答题构成，难度较高，建议把两道Matching合并在一起寻找，提高效率。
4. Passage 1 翻译与同传
Consecutive and Simultaneous Translation
A
When people are faced with a foreign-language barrier, the usual way round it is to find someone to interpret or translate for them. The term ‘translation’, is the neutral term used for all tasks where the meaning or expressions in one language (the source language) is turned into the meaning of another (the ‘target’ language), whether the medium is spoken, written, or signed. In specific professional contexts, however, a distinction is drawn between people who work with the spoken or signed language (interpreters), and those who work with the written language
(translators). There are certain tasks that blur this distinction, as when source speeches turned into target writing. But usually the two roles are seen as quite distinct, and it is unusual to find one person who is equally happy with both occupations. Some writers on translation, indeed, consider the interpreting task to be more suitable for extravert personalities, and the translating task for introverts.
B
Interpreting is today widely known from its use in international political life. Then senior ministers from different language backgrounds meet, the television record invariably shows a pair of interpreters hovering in the background. At major conferences, such as the United Nations General Assembly, the presence of headphones is a clear indication that a major linguistic exercise is taking place. In everyday circumstances, too interpreters are frequently needed, especially in cosmopolitan societies formed by new reiterations of mmigrants and Gastarbeiter. Often, the business of law courts, hospitals, local health clinics, classrooms, or industrial tribunals cannot be carried on without the presence of an interpreter. Given the importance and frequency of this task, therefore, it is remarkable that so little study has been made of what actually happens when interpreting takes place, and of how successful an exercise it is.
C
There are two main kinds of oral translation-consecutive and simultaneous. In consecutive translation the translating starts after the original speech or some part of it has been completed. Here the interpreter’s strategy and the final results depend, to a great extent on the length of the segment to be translated. If the segment is just a sentence or two the interpreter closely follows the original speech. As often as not, however, the interpreter is expected to translate a long speech which has lasted for scores of minutes or even longer. In this case he has to remember a great number of messages; and keep them in mind until he begins his translation. To make this possible the interpreter has to take notes of the original messages, various systems of notation having been suggested for the purpose. The study of, and practice in, such notation is the integral part of the interpreter’s training as are special exercises to develop his memory.
D
Doubtless the recency of developments in the field partly explains this neglect. One procedure, consecutive interpreting, is very old - and presumably dates from the Tower of Babel！Here, the interpreter translates after the speaker has finished speaking, This approach is widely practiced in informal situations, as well as in committees and small conferences. In larger and more formal settings, however, it has been generally replaced by simultaneous interpreting - a recent development that arose from the availability of modern audiological equipment and the advent of increased international interaction following the Second World War.
E
Of the two procedures, it is the second that has attracted most interest, because of the complexity of the task and the remarkable skills required. In no other context of human communication is anyone routinely required to listen and speak at the same time, preserving an exact semantic correspondence between the two modes. Moreover, there is invariably a delay of a few words between the stimulus and the response, because of the time it takes to assimilate what is being said in the source language and to translate it into an acceptable form in the target language. This ‘ear-voice span’ is usually about 2 or 3 seconds, but it may be as much as 10 seconds or so, if the text is complex. The brain has to remember what has just been said, attend to what is currently being said, and anticipate the construction of what is about to be said. As you start a sentence you are taking a leap in the dark, you are mortgaging your grammatical future; the original sentence may suddenly be turned in such a way that your translation of its end cannot easily be reconciled with your translation of its start. Great nimbleness is called for.
F
How it is all done is not at all clear. That it is done at all is a source of some wonder, given the often lengthy periods of interpreting required, the confined environment of an interpreting booth, the presence of background noise, and the awareness that major decisions may depend upon the accuracy of the work. Other consideration such as cultural background also makes it aim to pay full attention to the backgrounds of the authors and the recipients, and to take into account differences between source and target language.
G
Research projects have now begun to look at these factors-to determine, for example, how far successful interpreting is affected by poor listening conditions, or the speed at which the source language is spoken. It seems that an input speed of between 100 and 120 words per minute is a comfortable rate for interpreting, with an upper limit of around 200 w.p.m. But even small increases in speed can dramatically affect the accuracy of output. In one controlled study, when speeds were gradually increased in a series of stages from 95 t0 164 w.p.m., the ear-voice span also increased with each stage, and the amount correctly interpreted showed a clear decline. Also, as the translating load increases, not only are there more errors of commission (mistranslations, cases of vagueness replacing precision), there are also more errors of omission, as words and segments of meaning are filtered out. These are important findings, given the need for accuracy in international communication. What is needed is a more detailed identification of the problem areas, and of the strategies speakers, listeners, and interpreters use to solve them. There is urgent need to expand what has so far been one of the most neglected fields of communication research.
试题待回忆
5. Passage 2 动物自疗
Health in the Wild
Many animals seem able to treat their illnesses themselves. Humans way have a thing or two to learn from them.
A
For the past decade Dr Engel, a lecturer m environmental sciences at Britain’s Open University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behavior in wild animals. She recently published a book on the subject. In a talk at the Edinburgh Science Festival earlier this month, she explained that the idea that animals can treat themselves has been regarded with some skepticism by her colleagues in the past. But a growing number of animal behaviourists now think that wild animals can and do deal with their own medical needs.
B
One example of self-medication was discovered in 1987. Michael Huffman and Mohamedi Seifu, working in the Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania, noticed that local chimpanzees suffering from intestinal worms would dose themselves with the pith of a plant called Veronia. This plant produces poisonous chemicals called terpenes. Its pith contains a strong enough concentration to kill gut parasites, but not so strong as to kill chimps (nor people, for that matter; locals use the pith for the same purpose). Given that the plant is known locally as “goat-killer”, however, it seems that not all animals are as smart as chimps and humans. Some consume it indiscriminately, and succumb.
C
Since the Veronia-eating chimps were discovered, more evidence has emerged suggesting that animals often eat things for medical rather than nutritional reasons. Many species, for example, consume dirt-a behaviour known as geophagy. Historically, the preferred explanation was that soil supplies minerals such as salt. But geophagy occurs in areas where the earth is not a useful source of minerals, and also in places where minerals can be more easily obtained from certain plants that are known to be rich in them. Clearly, the animals must be getting something else out of eating earth.
D
The current belief is that soil-and particularly the clay in it-helps to detoxify the defensive poisons that some plants produce in an attempt to prevent themselves from being eaten. Evidence for the detoxifying nature of clay came in 1999, from an experiment carried out on macaws by James Gilardi and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis. Macaws eat seeds containing alkaloids, a group of chemicals that has some notoriously toxic members, such as strychnine. In the wild, the birds are frequently seen perched on eroding riverbanks eating clay. Dr Gilardi fed one group of macaws a mixture of a harmless alkaloid and clay, and a second group just the alkaloid. Several hours later, the macaws that had eaten the clay had 60% less alkaloid in their bloodstreams than those that had not, suggesting that the hypothesis is correct.
E
Other observations also support the idea that clay is detoxifying. Towards the tropics the amount of toxic compounds in plants increases-and so does the amount of earth eaten by herbivores. Elephants lick clay from mud holes all year round, except in September when they are bingeing on fruit which, because it has evolved to be eaten, is not toxic. And the addition of clay to the diets of domestic cattle increases the amount of nutrients that they can absorb from their food by 10-20%.
F
A third instance of animal self-medication is the use of mechanical scours to get rid of gut parasites. In 1972 Richard Wrangham, a researcher at the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania, noticed that chimpanzees were eating the leaves of a tree called Aspilia. The chimps chose the leaves carefully by testing them in their mouths. Having chosen a leaf, a chimp would fold it into a fan and swallow it. Some of the chimps were noticed wrinkling their noses as they swallowed these leaves, suggesting the experience was unpleasant. Later, undigested leaves were found on the forest floor.
G
Dr Wrangham rightly guessed that the leaves had a medicinal purpose-this was, indeed, one of the earliest interpretations of a behaviour pattern as self-medication. However, he guessed wrong about what the mechanism was. His (and everybody else’s) assumption was that Aspilia contained a drug, and this sparked more than two decades of phytochemical research to try to find out what chemical the chimps were after. But by the 1990s, chimps across Africa had been seen swallowing the leaves of 19 different species that seemed to have few suitable chemicals in common. The drug hypothesis was looking more and more dubious.
H
It was Dr Huffman who got to the bottom of the problem. He did so by watching what came out of the chimps, rather than concentrating on what went in. He found that the egested leaves were full of intestinal worms. The factor common to all 19 species of leaves swallowed by the chimps was that they were covered with microscopic hooks. These caught the worms and dragged them from their lodgings.
I
Following that observation, Dr Engel is now particularly excited about how knowledge of the way that animals look after themselves could be used to improve the health of livestock. People might also be able to learn a thing or two-and may, indeed, already have done so. Geophagy, for example, is a common behaviour in many parts of the world. The medical stalls in African markets frequently sell tablets made of different sorts of clays, appropriate to different medical conditions.
J
Africans brought to the Americas as slaves continued this tradition, which gave their owners one more excuse to affect to despise them. Yet, as Dr Engel points out, Rwandan mountain gorillas eat a type of clay rather similar to kaolinite-the main ingredient of many patent medicines sold over the counter in the West for digestive complaints. Dirt can sometimes be good for you, and to be “as sick as a parrot” may, after all, be a state to be desired.
试题待回忆
6. Passage 3 电报
Sir Francis Ronalds and Telegraph （相关文章参考）
A
RONALDS, Sir FRANCIS (1788-1873), inventor of the electric telegraph and meteorologist, son of Francis Ronalds, a London merchant, and of his wife, Jane, daughter of William Field, was born in London on 21 Feb. 1788. Ronalds was educated at a private school at Cheshunt by the Rev. E. Cogan. At an early age he displayed a taste for experiment, and he acquired great skill later in practical mechanics and draughtsmanship. Under the influence of Jean Andre de Luc (1727-1817), whose acquaintance he made in 1814, he began to devote himself to practical electricity. In 1814 and 1815 he published several papers on electricity in Tilloch’s Philosophical Magazine’, one of which records an ingenious use of De Luc’s ’electric column’ as a motive power for a clock.
B
Ronalds’ name is chiefly remembered as the inventor of an electric telegraph. Since 1753, when the first proposal for an electric telegraph worked by statical electricity was made by a writer signing C. M. (said to be Charles Morrison) in the ‘Scots Magazine’, successive advances had been made abroad by Volta, Le Sage, Lomond, Cavallo, Salva, and others; but much was needed to perfect the invention.
C
In 1816 Francis Ronalds, then living at Upper Mall, Hammersmith, built in his back garden two frames to accommodate eight miles of wire for his new invention of an electrostatic telegraph. It used clockwork-driven rotating dials, engraved with letters of the alphabet and numbers, synchronised with each other, at both ends of the circuit. For the past three or four years, encouraged by the octogenarian Swiss meteorologist, Jean Andre De Luc, Ronalds had been enthusiastically experimenting with electrostatic clockwork devices. When someone desired to send a message he earthed the wire at his end at the moment when the dial indicated the desired letter. At the receiving end the pith balls would fall together when earthed and the recipient noted the letter showing on his dial at that moment. The system was slow and depended on the two dials staying in step, but Ronalds successfully transmitted and received letters over 150 metres of wire; later he succeeded in sending messages through eight miles of iron wire suspended above his garden in London.
D
After sending messages along his wires on the frame, he developed another version in which the wires were enclosed in glass tubes buried in the ground. At each end of the line a clockwork mechanism turned synchronously revolving discs with letters on them. A frictional-electricity machine kept the wire continuously charged, while at each end two pith balls hung from the wire on silk threads, and since they were similarly charged from the wire they stayed apart. Ronalds’ instrument was of real practical use, and the brilliant idea of using synchronously rotating discs, now employed in the Hughes printing apparatus, was entirely his own. The only defect in his invention was the comparative slowness with which a succession of symbols could be transmitted.
E
With communications between London and Portsmouth in mind, he believed his telegraph would work over distances of 800km. In the same year, Ronalds wrote to offer his invention to the Admiralty. In fact, in 1806, Ralph Wedgwood submitted a telegraph based on frictional electricity to the Admiralty, but was told that the semaphore was sufficient for the country. In a pamphlet he suggested the establishment of a telegraph system with public offices in different centres. Francis Ronalds, in 1816, brought a similar telegraph of his invention to the notice of the Admiralty, and was politely informed that ‘telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary’. John Barrow, Secretary to the Admiralty, replied that “Telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary; and no other than the one now in use will be adopted.”(The one in use was a semaphore system). Only a year after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Admiralty saw no need for improved communications, even though the semaphore was usable only in daylight and good weather.
F
After this disappointment, Ronalds set off for the continent. He travelled throughout Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, taking notes, sketching and collecting scientific books between 1816 and 1823. He had begun collecting his large library of works on electricity and kindred subjects. The last activity formed the beginnings of the Ronalds Library, left in trust to the IEE (now the IET) after his death. In a small pamphlet published in 1823, Ronalds described His invention and listed some of its possible uses, “Why should not government Govern at Portsmouth almost as promptly as in Downing Street? Why Should our defaulters escape by default of our foggy climate? Let us have Electrical Conversazione offices communicating with each other all over the kingdom if we can.” In 1825 he invented and patented a perspective tracing instrument, intended to facilitate drawing from nature, which he improved about 1828, and described in a work called ‘Mechanical Perspective’. These instruments seem to be the only ones for which he took out patents.
G
However, Ronalds never patented his invention in electric telegraph. Ronalds seems to have made few or no practical contributions to science. In the meanwhile, one person did benefit from this work-Charles Wheatstone who saw the telegraph as a boy. When Charles Wheatstone was quite a child, his father had seen the Ronalds telegraph at work. Later, The invention of an electric telegraph had been marvelously developed by Wheatstone, who had seen many of the Hammersmith experiments, in conjunction with Mr. William Fothergill Cooke, and these two men together devised and patented in 1837 the first electric telegraph used publicly and commercially in
England. When, in1855, a controversy arose between Wheatstone and Cooke with regard to their respective shares in the invention, Wheatstone at once acknowledged his direct debt to Ronalds, and Cooke, though less fully, acknowledged the priority of Ronalds’ work; Until 1855 Ronalds’ share in the invention had been forgotten by the public.
H
Early in 1843 Ronalds was made honorary director and superintendent of the Meteorological Observatory, which was then established at Kew by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He began work on a system for registering meteorological data using photography and this time was awarded a grant to continue his work. A similar system was developed independently by Charles Brooke, aided like Ronalds by grants from the Royal Society, had invented independently about this time. But the British Association confirmed Ronalds’ priority. This was the beginning of automatic, accurate recording of meteorological data and remained in use for some years after Ronalds’ death.
I
Ronalds lived long enough to see his prophecies come to fruition and to receive belated official recognition: in 1870, three years before he died, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I, for his“early And remarkable labours in telegraphic investigations.”
试题待回忆
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