[英语考试]2010年下半年二级笔译英译汉试题.doc

CATTI 2010年下半年二级笔译英译汉试题文章 红字是试题原文Passage OneScottish City Prepares for Life Beyond OilBy REUTERSPublished: October 21, 2009ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND Offshore supply vessels resembling large, floating trucks fill Victoria Dock, unable to find charters, in a sign of the downturn in the British oil industry.With British North Sea production of oil and natural gas 44 percent below its peak, Aberdeen, the self-styled oil capital of Europe, fears the slowdown is not simply cyclical.An oil industry that at one stage inspired talk of Scotland as “the Kuwait of the West” has already outlived most predictions, having enjoyed a hydrocarbon heyday of almost five decades. As it prepares for the end of oil, Aberdeen is remaking itself, putting its hopes in renewable energy and tourism.“Im steering my kids away from anything to do with oil,” said John Irvine, a truck driver who used to work on the rigs. “Its not going to last forever.”The oil industry has been good to Aberdeen. BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes are plentiful in the traffic jams that clog the roads at rush hour, and Jaguar, Aston Martin and Porsche sports cars with personalized license plates are evident in the city, which has about 200,000 inhabitants.The North Sea industry, with current output of 2.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, pays more to the British governments coffers than any other industry, is one of the highest spenders on goods and services and is an important employer.About 40 percent of the Aberdeen areas economy worth 10.5 billion, or $17.2 billion relies on the oil industry, according to the Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce.Oil has pushed unemployment down in the Granite City, as Aberdeen is known for the hard rock from which most of its buildings are constructed, to less than half the British average, which is 7.9 percent.But with Brent crude at about $80 a barrel, little more than half of its peak last year, the harbor is quieter now, the port authority says.Dockworkers say some ship owners are so pessimistic about getting charters soon that they will not even pay to dock at the harbor. A dozen vessels are moored a few kilometers off Aberdeens sandy coast. Normally, one might see one or two, oil workers said.As big oil companies like BP and Royal Dutch Shell have cut spending, Aberdeen has seen hundreds of layoffs, and for the first time in years, engineering graduates from local universities have struggled to find jobs.The employment situation has resulted in vacant shops on Union Street, the main thoroughfare, while bars, restaurants and taxi drivers say business is slacker than a year ago.Tourism, life sciences and the export of oil services around the world are among Aberdeens preferred substitutes for North Sea oil and natural gas.But for many, the biggest prize would be to use its offshore oil expertise to build a renewable energy industry as big as oil.The city wants to use its experience to become a leader in offshore wind, tidal power and carbon dioxide capture and storage.It hopes those industries will receive a lift from global climate change talks in Copenhagen in December.“We have to harness that expertise and turn Aberdeen into the energy capital of Europe and not just the oil capital of Europe,” said Mike Rumbles, a member of the Scottish Parliament from West Aberdeenshire.It is a broad marketing shift for the city.Alex Salmond, head of the Scottish government, told a conference in Aberdeen last month that the market for wind power could be worth 130 billion, while Scotland could be the “Saudi Arabia of tidal power.”“Were seeing the emergence of an offshore energy market that is comparable in scale to the market weve seen in offshore oil and gas in the last 40 years,” he said.Tidal power remains at the testing stage, and the economic viability of new offshore wind projects has been questioned even by current investors like the German-owned utility E.ON.A carbon capture and storage industry could also be developed, filling depleted North Sea oil fields with carbon dioxide.People in the oil industry doubt that any Copenhagen treaty would provide sufficient incentives to make this activity profitable.Another area of focus, tourism, has previously been hindered by the presence of oil.“The hoteliers got lazy,” said a taxi driver, Jim Moir. “They were full Monday to Friday with oil workers, so they never bothered attracting tourists.”Eager to put Aberdeen on the international tourist map, businesses have strongly backed a plan by the U.S. real estate tycoon Donald Trump for a luxury housing and golf project 12 kilometers, or 8 miles, north of the city, even though it means building on a nature reserve.Mr. Trump is locked in a dispute with landowners who refuse to sell to him. He hopes the local authorities will, if necessary, invoke compulsory purchase powers to facilitate the development.The city also wants to reorient its vibrant oil services industry toward emerging offshore oil centers like Brazil.“Just because the production in the North Sea starts to decline doesnt mean that Aberdeen as a global center also declines,” said Robert Collier, the chamber of commerces chief executive. “That expertise can still stay here and be exported around the world.”Local companies plying their wares to international buyers at the Offshore Europe exhibition and conference last month said the shift in emphasis was under way.“Ninety percent of our production is exported,” said Ian McCormick, international managing director for Equalizer, standing beside a yellow mock-up pipeline to which were attached samples of his companys stainless steel clamps.When the oil finally does run out, the decommissioning of hundreds of offshore platforms and thousands of pipelines will be an opportunity in itself.The infrastructure will need to be disassembled and returned to shore for disposal, creating a market worth at least 23 billion, estimates Oil and Gas UK, an industry lobbying group.“It could be the beginning of a whole new industry,” said Lewis MacDonald, a member of the Scottish Parliament representing Aberdeen Central.Passage TwoThe real quest is not for knowledge, but for understanding GORDON JOHNSONWe mark the passing of 800 years, and that is indeed a remarkable span for any institution. But history is never an even-flowing stream, and the most remarkable thing about modern Cambridge has been its enormous growth over the past halfcentury. Since I came up as an undergraduate in 1961 the student population has more than doubled(from just under 9,000 to just over 18,000), graduate students now constitute about a third of the whole; just as notable, around half of all students are now women. More students have meant more teachers, and, even more significantly, more scholars devoted solely to research: every category has more than doubled in numbers. This huge increase has been partly absorbed by an expansion of the colleges: they all have more students and more Fellows than they did 50 years ago; and, since 1954, no fewer than 11 of the 31 colleges are either brand new foundations, such as New Hall, Churchill, Darwin, Wolfson, Clare Hall, Lucy Cavendish and Robinson, or have been conjured up as new creations from existing but quite different bodies, like Homerton, Hughes Hall, Fitzwilliam and St Edmunds.From being a university primarily driven by undergraduate education, Cambridges reputation is now overwhelmingly tied to its research achievements, which can be simply represented by the fact that more than three-quarters of its current annual income is devoted to research. This has brought not just new laboratories but new buildings to house whole faculties and departments: in the mid-20th century few faculties (and those mainly in the sciences) had a physical manifestation beyond, perhaps, a library and a couple of administrative offices. As lateas the 1960s, the History Faculty existed as the Seeley Library (then in the Cockerell Building beside the Senate House, now the Caius College Library) and a tiny bolt-hole in Green Street presided over by the formidable Miss Box. Now it has a remarkable (if controversial) building on the Sidgwick Site, surrounded by buildings for Law, Music, Divinity, English, Philosophy, Criminology, Classics, Modern and Medieval Languages, and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.Physically, the University has burst out of the old town centre: the University Library, Selwyn and Newnham no longer form outposts on the western frontier, since beyond and between them lie new colleges and scientific departments relocated to West Cambridge from old placesin the city centre; Peterhouse, Engineering and Chemistry no longer stand sentinel to the south, since distant on the road to Colchester lies Addenbrookes Hospital (itself moved from Trumpington Street) with the Clinical School and a vast array of bio-scientific research laboratories and institutes.Growth on this scale, in so few decades, is unprecedented in the long history of the University. It has not been without its discomforts; we should not underestimate the ferocity of battles fought to get to where we are. It is simply not true, though it is often alleged, thatUniversity politics are vicious because little is at stake. It is a highly controversial thing to decide what (and who) to teach, and which frontier of knowledge to advance upon next and where to make the investments that might support these decisions; it is hard also to defineour role in the affairs of the state and its many agencies, or our relationto business and industry, to alumni and other well-meaning friends; and it is difficult to determine just where to strike the bargains that bring in the resources needed for the Universitys work. It is because the University is so relevant and important to our societys well-being that it is the focus of so much attention, and a place of real struggle for power and influence.However, Cambridge has prospered and stands amongst the foremost universities of the world. Despite the change of scale, Cambridge has retained the quality of a great university: a place where enquiry is encouraged and tested and where critical thought is the order of the day. The University brings together a wide range of disciplines and, loosely, pursues them all. There has been no plan to catch them up in some great common, coherent and directed search project that would solve the problems of the age, though some of what is learnt here is directly relevant to work beyond the University, and some of what is discovered has immediate practical application. For all of its size, Cambridge is still a collection of colleges and departments, separate and overlapping disciplines. The parish government is often criticized for being a bit anarchic, and this at times frustrates some within and annoys authorities without. But it remains fundamentally a place of individual scholarly creativity and clear educational purpose.Cambridge attracts the best students and academics because they find the University and the colleges stimulating and enjoyable places in which to live and work. The students are thrown in with similarly able minds, learning as much from each other as from their teachers; the good senior academics know better than to be too hierarchical or to cut themselves off from intellectual criticism and debate. We so easily believe that what we spend our waking hours thinking about must somehow be an advance on what is known or understood already.Earlier generations have thought the same. They were sure that they were right as well. In the sciences there is often agreed progress, but even here there will be conflicting ideas and uncertainties. One generation dismisses another: not even Erasmus or Newton, Darwin or Keynes stand unscathed by the passage of time; nor can we be but humbled, especially in our day when so much information is so easily accessible, by the vast store of knowledge which we can approach bu