1、翻译三级笔译实务分类模拟题 10及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、English Chinese Tran(总题数：5，分数：100.00)1.What“s your earliest childhood memory? Can you remember learning to walk? Or talk? The first time you heard thunder or watched a television program? Adults seldom recall events much earlier than the year or so before
2、 entering school, just as children younger than three or four rarely retain any specific, personal experiences. A variety of explanations have been proposed by psychologists for this “childhood amnesia“(儿童失忆症). One argues that the hippocampus, the region of the brain which is responsible for forming
3、 memories, does not mature until about the age of two. But the most popular theory maintains that, since adults do not think like children, they cannot reflect childhood memories. Adults think in words, and their life memories are like stories or narrativesone event follows another as in a novel or
4、film. But when they search through their mental files for early childhood memories to add to this verbal life story, they don“t find any that fits the pattern It“s like trying to find a Chinese word in an English dictionary. Now psychologist Annette Simms of the New York State University offers a ne
5、w explanation for childhood amnesia. She argues that there simply aren“t any early childhood memories to recall. According to Dr. Simms, children need to learn to use someone else“s spoken description of their personal experiences in order to turn their own short-term, quickly forgotten impressions
6、of them into long-term memories. In other words, children have to talk about their experiences and hear others talk about theirsMother talking about the afternoon spent looking for seashells at the beach or Dad asking them about their day at Ocean park. Without this verbal reinforcement, says Dr. Si
7、mms, children cannot form permanent memories of their personal experiences. （分数：20.00）_2.The horse and carriage is a thing of the past, but love and marriage are still with us and still closely interrelated. Most American marriages, particularly first marriages involving young couples, are the resul
8、t of mutual attraction and affection other than practical considerations. In the United States, parents do not arrange marriages for their children. Teenagers begin dating in high school and usually find mates through their own academic and social contacts Though young people feel free to choose the
9、ir friends from diverse groups, most choose a mate of similar background. This is due in part to parental guidance. Parents cannot select spouses for their children, but they can usually influence choices by voicing disapproval of someone they consider unsuitable. However, marriages between members
10、of different groups (interclass, interfaith, and interracial marriages) are increasing, probably because of the greater mobility of today“s youth and the fact that they are restricted by fewer prejudices than their parents. Many young people leave their home towns to attend college, serve in the arm
11、ed forces, or pursue a career in a bigger city. Once away from home and family, they are more likely to date and marry outside their own social group. In mobile American society, interclass marriages are neither rare nor shocking. Interfaith marriages are on the rise particularly between Protestants
12、 and Catholics. On the other hand, interracial marriage is still very uncommon. It can be difficult for interracial couples to find a place to live, maintain friendships, and raise a family. Marriages between people of different national origin (but the same race and religion) have been commonplace
13、here since colonial times. （分数：20.00）_3.The government has finally grown sick of claims that GCSEs and A-levels are being dumbed down, it seems. In his speech to the Labour Party conference on September 26th, Ed Balls, the schools secretary, said he would create a new watchdog to oversee exams. The
14、current regulator is to be broken in two, with one bit continuing to develop new syllabuses and qualifications and reporting to ministers. The other bit, independent of government and reporting directly to Parliament, is to guard against grade inflation. Mr. Balls draws parallels with Gordon Brown“s
15、 first big step when he became chancellor in 1997. Relinquishing the Treasury“s power to set interest rates to an independent body is still, ten years later, regarded as his finest hour. Mr. Balls, as his chief economic adviser at the time, was one of the architects of that decision. Both men hope t
16、hat the new exams watchdog will lead to similar plaudits. Britain“s secondary-school exam results have every reason to be upwardly mobile. The government wants voters to believe their children are getting a good education, so it is keen on high grades. Schools respond by shopping around among exam b
17、oards for the easiest syllabuses and tests, and directing pupils towards the softest subjects. Exam boards navigate between losing the trust of universities and losing the patronage of schools. And the individuals setting and marking exams know that harshness may mean fewer candidates in future. The
18、 new arrangements may ensure that, in schools at least, bad exams do not drive out good. But they will have no effect on universities, where grade inflation is also rife. Three-fifths of all students now get at least an upper second, and between 2002 and 2006 the proportion of first-class honours de
19、grees crept up from 9.7% to 11%. There are also signs that the value of English degrees is being eroded on the international market. On September 25th the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), a think-tank, published the results of a survey of 15,000 English undergraduates. It turns out that the
20、y spend much less time studying than those elsewhere in Europe. The average English student puts in 26 hours a week: 14 taught hours and the rest on independent study, compared with 29 hours in Spain and 41 in Portugal. Nor is it that English students are skimping on their studies to run to paid job
21、s; students in other countries work harder outside university, too. HEPI“s director, Bahram Bekhradnia, cautions against a simplistic interpretation. Hours taught do not equal hours spent learning, he says, pointing out that tailored tutorials for small groups are likely to transmit more knowledge t
22、han the lectures in enormous amphitheatres that are routine at some continental universities. But neither can the results be brushed away, he says. Foreign students may go elsewhere if they think an English undergraduate degree is content-light and poor value for money. This would spell financial di
23、saster for many cash-strapped English universities. In 2004-05, the last year for which figures are available, they received? 1.7 billion in foreign students“ fees. At first sight the results of the third National Student Survey, published on September 12th, make more cheerful reading. That found th
24、at four-fifths of all English students considered their university experience satisfactory. But Graham Gibbs of Oxford University puts a gloomy spin on even this. What these students may be satisfied with, he says, “is an education that makes comparatively low demands on them“. That is perhaps under
25、standable: most undergraduates are not known for their work ethic. But it is short-sighted, both for them and their universities. After all, a currency can only trade for so long on its reputation. （分数：20.00）_4.The vaulting-off point of Ben Ratliff“s biography is the belief that John Coltrane, tenor
26、 and soprano saxophonist, was not only a towering performer but also the last major figure in the evolution of jazz. Indeed, jazz seemed to lose its way after he died in 1967, aged 40. Mr. Ratliff, jazz critic for the New York Times, leaves Coltrane“s private life largely alone. For a jazzman, he ki
27、cked drugs and drink pretty early and afterwards led a remarkably suburban life. Rather, it is a biography of the Coltrane sound: an urgent, non-vibrato intensity that the saxophonist constantly reinventedunlike most jazz musicians who professionally settle into a comfortable groove or who reinvent
28、themselves at most once or twice in their lives. The Coltrane sound, unlike Charlie Parker“s, did not spring fully formed on the listening public. Coltrane was something of a late and hesitant starter. He was nearly 30 when an assuredness settled in and he was able to harness his phenomenal techniqu
29、e and mastery of jazz lore to his urgent driven style, soloing in riffles and cascades of scales and arpeggios. The late 1950s were exceptional years for jazz. Though rock-and-roll had not yet swamped it, jazz big bands were no longer commercially viable. The jazz was in small clubs where quartets a
30、nd quintets played live, and Coltrane was lucky to be hired by two superb bandleaders and teachers, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. But for Coltrane, all this was the beginning of the journey, not the end. At first he attempted to cram ever more into the Western harmony of jazz tunes: an ever-dense
31、r architecture of chord changes. Before long, even his technique exhausted those possibilities. He began to abandon harmony, turning to modes that seemed to speak of older things: African and native-American history, Eastern spiritual power, universal love. Then even the modes started to go. Many of
32、 his audiences lost him as he encouraged younger, more wayward players into his regular group; then his regular musicians went. Asked by a Japanese reporter in 1966 what he wished to be in ten years“ time, Coltrane replied simply that he wanted to be a saint. And that, in many circles, is what after
33、 his death he became. To the cult“s adherents, Coltrane“s music by the end had ascended to a plane of intensity that was close to godliness, and could not be questioned. A Church of St John Coltrane exists in San Francisco: the founders first claimed that the musician was an incarnation of god, but
34、later demoted him to sainthood. Mr. Ratliff“s biography is particularly good in exploring Coltrane“s afterlife. Cohrane“s musical presence remains so powerful that even today jazz musicians, particularly horn players, are influenced by itunless they define themselves in sharp contradistinction to it
35、. But Mr. Ratliff investigates the charge that, if jazz as an evolutionary folk form died with Coltrane, it was he who killed it: pulling down its harmonic structure, destroying its sense of swing and knocking the pleasure and fun out of it in an ecstasy of self-indulgence. The late Robert Lowell, a
36、n American poet, spoke of “the monotony of the sublime“; this could be applied to Coltrane. On the charge of destroying jazz, Mr. Ratliff finds Coltrane not guilty. But it is hard to escape a sense, both among those jazz players who followed him out to the wilder edges or those who struggled to brin
37、g the idiom back to its earlier harmonic forms, that jazz has been chasing its tail ever since he died. Had Coltrane“s life not been cut short, where would his sound have chased next? （分数：20.00）_5.Walk along the River Warnow, in northern Germany, and you may be lucky enough to spot a SeaFalcon, a sl
38、eek, white machine with two propellers, two wings and a distinctly unbirdlike tail. It looks like an aircraft. Which is what it is. Except, it isn“t. It is a shipat least in the eyes of the International Marine Organisation, which regulates such things. That matters, because ships are much more ligh
39、tly regulated than aircraft. The SeaFalcon is really a ground-effect vehicle. It flies only over water and only two metres above that water. This means the air beneath its wings is compressed, giving it additional lift. In effect, it is floating on a cushion of air. That makes it far cheaper to run
40、than a plane of equivalent size, while the fact that it is flying means it is far fasterat 80-100 knotsthan a ship of any size. Its designer, Dieter Puls, thus hopes it will fill a niche for the rapid transport of people and light goods in parts of the world where land and sea exist in similar propo
41、rtions. The theory of ground-effect vehicles goes back to the 1920s, when Carl Wieselsberger, a German physicist, described how the ground effect works. There was then a period of silence, followed by a false start. In the 1960s the Soviet armed forces thought that ground-effect vehicles would be id
42、eal for shifting heavy kit around places like the Black Sea. Their prototypes did fly, but were never deployed in earnest and their jet engines consumed huge amounts of fuel. This did, however, prove that the idea worked. And two German engineers, Mr. Puls and Hanno Fischer (whose version is called
43、Airfish 8), have taken it up and made it work by using modern, composite materials for the airframes, and propellers rather than jets for propulsion. One reason the Soviet design was so thirsty is that the power needed to lift a ground-effect vehicle is far greater than that needed to sustain it in
44、level flight. The Soviet design used heavy jet engines to deliver the power needed for take-off. But the SeaFalcon uses a hydrofoil to lift itself out of the water, and Airfish 8 uses what Mr. Fischer calls a hoverwinga system of pipes that takes air which has passed through the propeller and blasts
45、 it out under the craft during take-off. The next stage, of course, is to begin production in earnestand that seems to be about to happen. Mr. Puls says he has signed a deal with an Indonesian firm for an initial order of ten, while both he and Mr. Fischer are in discussions with Wigetworks, a Singa
46、porean company, with a view to starting production next year. South-East Asia, with its plethora of islands and high rate of economic growth is just the sort of place where ground-effect vehicles should do well. All of which sounds optimistic. But a note of caution is needed. For another sort of gro
47、und-effect vehicle was also expected to do well and ended up going nowhere. The hovercraft differed from the vehicles designed by Messrs Puls and Fischer in that it relied on creating its own cushion of air, rather than having one provided naturally. That meant it could go on land as well as seawhic
48、h was thought at the time (the 1950s) to be a winning combination. Sadly, it was not. Hovercraft have almost disappeared. But then, in the eyes of the regulators, they counted as aircraft. （分数：20.00）_翻译三级笔译实务分类模拟题 10答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、English Chinese Tran(总题数：5，分数：100.00)1.What“s your earliest childhood memory? Can you remember learning to walk? Or talk? The first time you heard thunder or watched a television program? Adults seldom
