翻译三级笔译实务分类模拟题11及答案解析.doc

1、翻译三级笔译实务分类模拟题 11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.Although it symbolises a bright idea, the traditional incandescent light bulb is a dud. It wastes huge amounts of electricity, radiating 95% of the energy it consumes as heat rather than light. Its life is also relat

2、ively short, culminating in a dull pop as its filament fractures. Now a team of researchers has devised a light bulb that is not only much more energy-efficientit is also expected to last longer than the devices into which it is inserted. Moreover, the lamp could be used for rear-projection televisi

3、ons as well as general illumination. The trick to a longer life, for light bulbs at least, is to ensure that the lamp has no electrodes. Although electrodes are undeniably convenient for plugging bulbs directly into the lighting system, they are also the main reason why lamps fail. The electrodes we

4、ar out. They can react chemically with the gas inside the light bulb, making it grow dimmer. They are also difficult to seal into the structure of the bulb, making the rupture of these seals another potential source of failure. Scientists working for Ceravision, a company based in Milton Keynes, in

5、Britain, have designed a new form of lamp that eliminates the need for electrodes. Their device uses microwaves to transform electricity into light. It consists of a relatively small lump of aluminium oxide into which a hole has been bored. When the aluminium oxide is bombarded with microwaves gener

6、ated from the same sort of device that powers a microwave oven, a concentrated electric field is created inside the void. If a cylindrical capsule containing a suitable gas is inserted into the hole, the atoms of the gas become ionised. As electrons accelerate in the electric field, they gain energy

7、 that they pass on to the atoms and molecules of the gas as they collide with them, creating a glowing plasma. The resulting light is bright, and the process is energy-efficient. Indeed, whereas traditional light bulbs emit just 5% of their energy as light, and fluorescent tubes about 15%, the Cerav

8、ision lamp has an efficiency greater than 50%. Because the lamp has no filament, the scientists who developed it think it will last for thousands of hours of usein other words, for decades. Moreover, the light it generates comes from what is almost a single point, which means that the bulbs can be u

9、sed in projectors and televisions. Because of this, the light is much more directional and the lamp could thus prove more efficient than bulbs that scatter light in all directions. Its long life would make the new light ideal for buildings in which the architecture makes changing light bulbs complic

10、ated and expensive. The lamps“ small size makes them comparable to light-emitting diodes but the new lamp generates much brighter light than those semiconductor devices do. A single microwave generator can be used to power several lamps. Another environmental advantage of the new design is that it d

11、oes not need mercury, a highly toxic metal found in most of the bulbs used today, including energy-saving fluorescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes and the high-pressure bulbs used in projectors. And Ceravision also reckons it should be cheap to make. With lighting accounting for some 20% of electricity

12、use worldwide, switching to a more efficient system could both save energy and reduce emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. （分数：20.00）_2.As The Economist went to press, Steve Fossett, a famed and fearless aviator who went missing over the Nevada desert on September 3rd, had not been found.

13、 But it was not for want of trying. Mr. Fossett has been the subject of one of the most intensive civilian manhunts in historyand also, fittingly, one of the most technological. Besides the usual panoply of search-and-rescue aircraft deployed by America“s Civil Air Patrol, which wound down its searc

14、h on September 17th, a different sort of search effort is being conducted online, using satellite photographs. These pictures of the search area are being provided by two firms that supply information to Google Earth: GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. The search itself is being co-ordinated by a corner of th

15、e Amazon empire called Mechanical Turk. This is an online job market which farms out tasks that humans are good at, but for which software is poorly equipped, like labeling images and transcribing speech. For the Fossett hunt, volunteers comb through the images and flag any that include what might b

16、e a plane or its wreckage. Among those who keep track of slightly less high-profile missing-person cases, the story will be strikingly familiar. In January Jim Gray, one of Microsoft“s programming gurus, disappeared while sailing near San Fransisco Bay. Mr. Gray was as big a celebrity among computer

17、 geeks as Mr. Fossett is among thrill-seekers, and the story played out in the same way. A friend at Amazon, Werner Vogels, got in touch with DigitalGlobe, and the firm provided thousands of images. Within four days, Mechanical Turk was hosting the images and more than 10,000 volunteers were sifting

18、 through themthough to no avail, as Mr. Gray was never found. Mechanical Turk“s director, Peter Cohen, says that now the search protocol has been established, conducting such “distributed“ searches is much easier. The limiting factor is the satellite imagerywhich obviously has to be up-to-date. At t

19、he moment, only three commercial satellites provide the kind of resolution that can help in efforts like the Fossett hunt. The firms that own them have governments as their main customers. This makes search-and-rescue imaging a secondary concern. That looks set to change, though. DigitalGlobe launch

20、ed its second satellite, WorldView-1, on September 18th, and will launch a third late next year. GeoEye will launch its second next spring. This machine should set a new record for commercial satellite resolution: just 41cm (though that will still not be quite good enough to spot people as well as p

21、lanes). In total, these launches will double the amount of satellite time that can be dedicated to requests for instant pictures. Cost, however, is less of a problem. Area such as the Nevada desert and San Francisco Bay are not strategic, so taking photographs of them does not displace paying custom

22、ersindeed, DigitalGlobe is not charging for the pictures being used in the Fossett hunt. With the extra capacity provided by the new satellites, the cost will drop even further. And Mr. Cohen is convinced that the internet will always come up with the few thousand volunteers needed to scour the resu

23、lting images. Far from being the invasion of privacy it was recently claimed to be, the technology behind Google Earth may in time grow to be a standard search-and-rescue tool. （分数：20.00）_3.People remember emotionally charged events more easily than they recall the quotidian. A sexual encounter trum

24、ps doing the grocery shopping. A mugging trumps a journey to work. Witnessing a massacre trumps pretty well anything you can imagine. That is hardly surprising. Rare events that might have an impact on an individual“s survival or reproduction should have a special fast lane into the memory bankand t

25、hey do. It is called the 2b-adrenoceptor, and it is found in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing strong emotions such as fear. The role of the 2b-adrenoceptor is to promote memory formationbut only if it is stimulated by adrenaline. Since emotionally charged events are often acc

26、ompanied by adrenaline secretion, the 2b-adrenoceptor acts as a gatekeeper that decides what will be remembered and what discarded. However, the gene that encodes this receptor comes in two varieties. That led Dominique de Quervain, of the University of Zurich, to wonder if people with one variant w

27、ould have better emotional memories than those with the other. The short answer, just published in Nature Neuroscience, is that they do. Moreover, since the frequencies of the two variants are different in different groups of people, whole populations may have different mixtures of emotional memory.

28、 The reason Dr. de Quervain suspected the variants might work differently is that the rarer one looks like the commoner one when the latter has a memory-enhancing drug called yohimbine attached to it. His prediction, therefore, was that better emotional memory would be associated with the rarer vers

29、ion. And that did, indeed, turn out to be the case in his first experiment. This involved showing students photographs of positive scenes such as families playing together, negative scenes such as car accidents, and neutral ones, such as people on the phone. Those students with at least one gene for

30、 the rarer version of the protein (everyone has two such genes, one from his father and one from his mother) were twice as good at remembering details of emotionally charged scenes than were those with only the common version. When phone-callers were the subject, there was no difference in the quali

31、ty of recall. That is an interesting result, but some of Dr. de Quervain“s colleagues at the University of Konstanz, in Germany, were able to take it further in a second experiment. In fact, they took it all the way along a dusty road in Uganda, to the Nakivale refugee camp. This camp is home to hun

32、dreds of refugees of the Rwandan civil war of 1994. In this second experiment the researchers were not asking about photographs. With the help of specially trained interviewers, they recorded how often people in the camp suffered flashbacks and nightmares about their wartime experiences. They then c

33、ompared those results with the 2b-adrenoceptor genes in their volunteers. As predicted, those with the rare version had significantly more flashbacks than those with only the common one. Besides bolstering Dr. de Quervain“s original hypothesis, this result is interesting because only 12% of the refu

34、gees had the rarer gene. In Switzerland, by contrast, 30% of the population has the rare varietyand the Swiss are not normally regarded as an emotional people. Whether that result has wider implications remains to be seen. Human genetics has a notorious history of jumping to extravagant conclusions

35、from scant data, but that does not mean conclusions should be ducked if the data are good. In this case, the statistics suggest Rwanda may have been lucky: the long-term mental-health effects of the war may not be as widespread as they would have been in people with a different genetic mix. On the o

36、ther hand, are those who easily forget the horrors of history condemned to repeat them? （分数：20.00）_4.The proportion of children in America who are overweight has tripled over the past 20 years and now exceeds 17%, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The health problems

37、 that this causes include hypertension and type-2 diabetes, formerly known only among the nation“s overweight adult population. A group sponsored by the National Institute on Ageing has warned that this may be the first generation ever to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. All the while, th

38、e proportion of children who take part in daily exercise at high school has dropped from 42% in 1991 to only 28% in 2004, according to the CDC. Snacking has greatly increased; the Government Accountability Office found in 2003 that 99% of America“s high schools now sell snacks and other food as well

39、 as providing lunches. In an attempt to get the problem tackled at local level, Congress in 2004 passed an act directing school districts that get money from the national school-lunch programme to create “wellness“ policies by the start of the 2006-07 school year. The districts were told to set stan

40、dards for nutrition, physical activity and education about good food, then make sure that schools actually implement them. One year after the deadline, the results are haphazard. School districts“ plans range from a few paragraphs long to more than 25 pages. Some states, like Texas and Arkansas, hav

41、e pre-emptively set standards for school districts under their jurisdiction, forcing schools to ban fizzy drinks and junk food while increasing the amount of exercise the pupils take. Others offer guidelines rather than man-dates, with no repercussions for schools that don“t comply. And in some area

42、s, schools are being eased into change very slowly. Oregon“s legislature passed a bill in June that gives its schools ten years to meet its new physical-education requirements. Last October the School Nutrition Association (SNA), a pressure group, analysed health policies from the 100 largest school

43、 districts in the country, which account for almost a quarter of the nation“s primary-and-secondary-school students. Many districts had indeed created guidelines for nutrition education, physical activity and school food, as required, but the rules tended to be fairly broad. Some policies merely def

44、aulted to the state recommendations and some to the federal government“s minimal requirements. The physical-activity guidelines were also varied; only 62% of schools made physical education obligatory. Action for Healthy Kids, another schools-oriented NGO, also looked at a smattering of policies las

45、t year. Of the 112 districts it analysed, only 30% specified a time requirement for physical-education classes and 42% offered only general guidelines for the sort of food and drink allowed to be sold in the schools. Cafeterias where nachos, French fries and cookies are tucked alongside salads, juic

46、e and fresh fruit do not encourage children to eat well. The SNA has now done a follow-up. It found that less than half of the schools were implementing their nutrition-education guidelines and enforcing vending-machine rules. The sporty bits fared better, with 64% of the schools meeting their physi

47、cal-education requirements. Bringing the issue to a local level is meant to make up for the dearth of guidelines from the federal government. Other than banning chewing-gum and sweets from the cafeteria at lunchtime, there are no national guidelines for food sold outside the school lunch programme,

48、nor are there any requirements for physical education. So far, the 2004 act does not seem to be doing enough to change that. （分数：20.00）_5.As the importance of recycling becomes more apparent, questions about it linger. Is it worth the effort? How does it work? Is recycling waste just going into a landfill in China? Here are some answers. It is an awful lot of rubbish. Since 1960 the amount of municipal waste being collected in America has nearly tripled, reaching 245m tonnes in 2005. According to European Union statistics, th