英译汉指导：大学英语四级考试翻译练习1

　　练 习 一

　　Directions: Read the underlined sentences carefully, and then translate them into Chinese. You may check your answers after you finish them.

　　Passage One

　　If women are mercilessly(无情地)exploited year after year, they have only themselves to blame. Because they tremble at the thought of being seen in public in clothes that are out of fashion, they are always taken advantage of by the designers and the big stores. Clothes which have been worn only a few times have to be put aside because of the change of fashion. When you come to think of it, only s women is capable of standing in front of a wardrobe (衣柜) packed full of clothes and announcing sadly that she has nothing to wear.

　　Changing fashions are nothing more than the intentional creation of waste. Many women spend vast sums of money each year to replace clothes that have hardly been worn. Women who cannot afford to throw away clothing in this way, waste hours of their time altering the dresses they have. Skirts are lengthened or shortened; neck-lines are lowered of raised, and so on.

　　No one can claim that the fashion industry contributes anything really important to society. Fashion designers are rarely concerned with vital things like warmth, comfort and durability(耐用). They are only interested in outward appearance and they take advantage of the fact that women will put up with any amount of discomfort, as long as they look right. There can hardly be a man who hasnt at some time in his life smiled at the sight of a woman shaking in a thin dress on a winter day, or delicately picking her way through deep snow in highheeled shoes.

　　When comparing men and women in the matter of fashion, the conclusions to be drawn are obvious. Do the constantly changing fashions of womens clothes, one wonders, reflect basic qualities of inconstancy and instability? Men are too clever to let themselves be cheated by fashion designers. Do their unchanging styles of dress reflect basic qualities of stability and reliability? That is for you to decide. Passage Two

　　For some time past it has been widely accepted that babies-and other creatures-learn to do things because certain acts lead to rewards and there is no reason to doubt that this is true. But it used also to be widely believed that effective rewards, at least in the early stages, had to be directly related to such basic physiological drives(生理欲望)as thirst or hunger. In other words, a baby would learn if he got food or drink or some sort of physical comfort, not otherwise.

　　It is now clear that this is not so. Babies will learn to behave in ways that produce results in the world with no reward except the successful outcome.

　　Papousek began his studies by using milk in the normal way to reward the babies and so teach them to carry out some simple movements, such as turning the head to one side or the other. Then he noticed that a baby who had had enough to drink would refuse the milk but would still go on making the learned response with clear signs of pleasure. So he began to study the childrens responses in situations where no milk was provided. He quickly found that children as young as four months would learn to turn their heads to right or left if the movement switch on a display of lights-and indeed that they were capable of learning quite complex turns to bring about this result, for instance, two left or two right, or even to make as many as three turns to one side.

　　Papouseks light display was placed directly in front of the babies and he made the interesting observation that sometimes they would not turn back to watch the lights closely although they would smile and bubble(发出咯咯声) when the display came on. Papousek concluded that it was not primarily the sight of the lights which pleased them, it was the success they were achieving in solving the problem, in mastering the skill, and that there exists a fundamental human urge to make sense of the world and bring it under intentional control.

　　Passage Three

　　A breakthrough(突破)in the provision of energy from the sun for European Economic Community could be brought forward by up to two decades, if a modest increase could be provided in the EECs research effort in this field, according to the senior EEC scientists engaged in experiments in solar energy at EECs scientific laboratories at Ispra, near Milan.

　　The senior West German scientist in charge of the Communitys solar energy program, Mr. Joachim Gretz, told journalists that at present levels of research spending it was most unlikely that solar energy would provide as much as 3% of the Communitys energy requirements even after the year 2000. But he said that with a modest increase in the present sums, devoted by the EEC to this work it was possible that the breakthrough could be achieved by the end of the next decade.

　　Mr. Gretz calculates that if solar energy only provided 3% of the EECs needs, this could still produce a saving of about a billion pounds in the present bill for imported energy each year. And he believes that with the possibility of utilizing more advanced technology in this field it

　　might be possible to satisfy a much bigger share of the Communitys future energy needs.