去年英译汉范围.doc

Text1: From Competence to CommitmentErnest Boyer1. Todays students have ambiguous feelings about their role in the world. They are devoting their energies to what seems most real to them: the pursuit of security, the accumulation of material goods. They are struggling to establish themselves, but the young people also admitted to confusion: Where should they put their faith in this uncertain age? Undergraduates are searching for identity and meaning and, like the rest of us, they are torn by idealism of service on the one hand, and on the other hand, the temptation to retreat into a world that never rises above self-interests. 2. In the end, the quality of the undergraduate experience is to be measured by the willingness of graduates to be socially and civically engaged. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, Man cannot behold except he be committed . He cannot find himself without finding a center beyond himself. The idealism of the undergraduate experience must reflect itself in loyalties that transcend self. Is it too much to expect that, even in this hard-edged, competitive age, a college graduate will live with integrity, civility - even compassion? Is it appropriate to hope that the lessons learned in a liberal education will reveal themselves in the humaneness of the graduates relationship with others? 3. Clearly, the college graduate has civic obligations to fulfill. There is urgent need in American teaching to help close the dangerous and growing gap between public policy and public understanding. The information required to think constructively about the agendas of government seems increasingly beyond our grasp. It is no longer possible, many argue, to resolve complex public issues through citizen participation. How, they ask, can non-specialists debate policy choices of consequence when they do not even know the language? 4. Should the use of nuclear energy be expanded or cut back? Can an adequate supply of water be assured? How can the arms race be brought under control? What is a safe level of atmospheric pollution? Even the semi-metaphysical questions of when a human life begins and ends have items on the political agenda. 5. Citizens have tried with similar bafflement to follow the debate over Star Wars with its highly technical jargon of deterrence and counter-deterrence. Even what once seemed to be reasonably local matterszoning regulations, school desegregation, drainage problems, public transportation issues, licensing requests from competing cable television companiescall for specialists who debate technicalities and frequently confuse rather than clarify the issues. And yet the very complexity of public life requires more，not less, information; more, not less, participation. 6. For those who care about government “by the people”，the decline in public understanding cannot go unchallenged. In a world where human survival is at stake , ignorance is not an acceptable alternative. The full control of policy by specialists with limited perspective is not tolerable. Unless we find better ways to educate ourselves as citizens, unless hard questions are asked and satisfactory answers are offered, we run risk of making critical decisions, not on the basis of what we know, but on the basis of blind faith in one or another set of professed experts. 7. What we need today are groups of well-informed, caring individuals who band together in the spirit of community to learn from one another, to participate, as citizens, in the democratic process. 8. We need concerned people who are participants in inquiry, who know how to ask the right questions, who understand the process by which public policy is shaped, and are prepared to make informed, discriminating judgments on questions that affect the future. Obviously, no one institution in society can single-handedly provides the leadership we require. But we are convinced that the undergraduate college, perhaps more than any other institutions, is obliged to provide the enlightened leadership our nation urgently requires if government by the people is to endure. 9. To fulfill this urgent obligation, the perspective needed is not only national, but also global. Todays students must be informed about people and cultures other than their own. Since man has orbited into space, it has become dramatically apparent that we are all custodians of a single planet. In the past half century, our planet has become vastly more crowded, more interdependent, and more unstable. If students do not see beyond themselves and better understand their place in our complex world, their capacity to live responsibly will be dangerously diminished.10. The world may not yet be a village, but surely our sense of neighborhood must expand. When drought ravages the Sahara, when war in Indo-China creates refugees, neither our compassion nor our analytic intelligence can be bounded by a dotted line on a political map. We are beginning to understand that hunger and human rights affect alliances as decisively as weapons and treaties. Dwarfing all other concerns, the mushroom cloud hangs ominously over our world consciousness. These realities and the obligations they impose must be understood by every student. 11. But during our study we found on campus a disturbing lack of knowledge and even at times a climate of indifference about our world. Refugees flow from one country to another, but too few students can point to these great migrations on a map or talk about the famines, wars, or poverty that caused them. Philosophers, statesmen, inventors and artists from around the world enrich our lives, but such individuals and their contributions are largely unknown or unremembered. 12. While some students have a global perspective, the vast majority, although vaguely concerned, are inadequately informed about the interdependent world in which they live. 13. University of Notre Dame campus minister William Toohey wrote recently, The trouble with many colleagues is that they indulge the nesting instinct by building protected little communities inside their great walls. 14. One point emerges with stark clarity from all we have said: Our world has undergone immense transformations. It has become a more crowded, more interconnected, more unstable place. A new generation of Americans must be educated for life in this increasingly complex world. If the undergraduate college cannot help students see beyond themselves and better understand the interdependent nature of our world, each new generation will remain ignorant, and its capacity to live confidently and responsibly will be dangerously diminished. 15. Throughout our study we were impressed that what todays college is teaching most successfully is competence - competence in meeting schedules, in gathering information, in responding well on tests, in mastering the details of a special field. Today the capacity to deal successfully with discrete problems is highly prized. And when we asked students about their education, they, almost without exception, spoke about the credits they had earned or the courses they still needed to complete. 16. But technical skill, of whatever kind, leaves open essential questions: Education for what purpose? Competence to what end? At a time in life when values should be shaped and personal priorities sharply probed, what a tragedy it would be if the most deeply felt issues, the most haunting questions, the most creative moments were pushed to the fringes of our institutional life. What a monumental mistake it would be if students, during the undergraduate years, remained trapped within the organizational grooves and narrow routines to which the academic world sometimes seems excessively devoted. 17. Students come to campus at a time of high expectancy. And yet, all too often they become enmeshed in routines that are deadening and distracting. As we talked with teachers and students, we often had the uncomfortable feeling that the most vital issues of life - the nature of society, the roots of social injustice indeed the very prospects for human survival - are the ones with which the undergraduate college is least equipped to deal. 18. The outcomes of collegiate education should be measured by the students performance in the classroom as he or she becomes proficient in the use of knowledge, acquires a solid basic education, and becomes competent in a specific filed. Further, the impact of the undergraduate experience is to be assessed by the performance of the graduate in the workplace and further education. 19. But in the end, students must be inspired by a larger vision, using the knowledge they have acquired to discover patterns, form values, and advance the common good. The undergraduate experience at its best will move the student from competence to commitment. 20. A recent college graduate wrote about the commitments of young people and their future, She asks: What kind of nation will we be if we cannot even commit ourselves to other people, much less to a set of abstract values? What kinds of politicians will we elect if self-interest is our highest value, humanity an inoperative commodity? 21. When all is said and done, the college should encourage each student to develop the capacity to judge wisely in matters of life and conduct. Time must be taken for exploring ambiguities and reflecting on the imponderables of life - in classrooms, in the rathskellers, and in bull sessions late at night. The goal is not to indoctrinate students, but to set them free in the world of ideas and provide a climate in which ethical and moral choices can be thoughtfully examined, and convictions formed. 22. This imperative does not replace the need for rigorous study in the disciplines, but neither must specialization become an excuse to suspend judgment or diminish the search for purposeful life objectives. 23. We are keenly aware of the limited impact (that) people and their institutions seem to make these days on the events of our time. But our abiding hope is that, with determination and effort, the undergraduate college can make a difference in the intellectual and personal lives of its graduates, in the social and civic responsibilities they are willing to assume, and ultimately in their world perspective. These intangibles, which reveal themselves in ways that are very real, are the characteristics by which, ultimately, the quality of the undergraduate experience much be measured. Unit 3 An American Love AffairII. Translation from English to Chinese. 1. Prior to the Great Depression he had been a Stutz man. But like thousands of other upward and mobile citizens, he faced a severe adjustment in his automotive tastes because of that tragic shift in the economy.2. This is a love affair that annoys environmentalists, safety advocates and social engineers who believe that the path to paradise is overlaid with the shining rails of mass transit.3. The mobility represented first by the railroad, then the automobile, has traditionally unsettled the privileged classes.4. While the automobile is surely guilty of many sins, its critics choose to ignore that it has been the great liberator, permitting monumental population shifts, city to suburb, east to west, south to north and, more recently, north back to south, as millions of citizens sought improved economic opportunities.5. But the fact remains that drivers by the millions are unwilling to forgo the freedom of movement (although sometimes slow) for the podlike constriction of mass transit.6. It offers such freedom that, short of a total redesign of the nations cities and the completely banning of autos from vast areas of the nation, the automobile will remain integral to modern life. It might be that even if every last mile of pavement were torn up, every last parking garage leveled, every last service station closed, the automobile would change into a more adaptable form and continue as the essential provider of individual transport.7. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, the challenge is to housebreak it as much as possible, to integrate it into a population that grows by the year, spreading across the landscape.8. How best to integrate it into a global ecosystem with finite resources is a question that may not be easy to solve, but the first step might be to acknowledge that like it or hate it, the automobile is here to stay.Unit 4 The No-child Family: Going Against 100,000 Years of BiologyIII. Translation from English to Chinese:1. A recent survey showed that in the last five years the percentage of wives aged 25 to 29 who did not want children had almost doubled and among those 18 to 24 it had almost tripled.2. The Pecks insist neither they nor the organization is against parenthood, just against the social pressures that push people into parenthood whether it is what they really want and need or not.3. There are men who complain about being caught in a traffic jam for hours on their home to their five kids but cant make the association between the children and the traffic jam.4. A family therapist described the decision not to have children as “a basic instinctual response to the world situation today,” implying that something like the herd instinct in animals was operating as a response to the dangers of over-population, crowding, pollution and nuclear war, causing women to feel a reluctance to reproduce and leading them to seek new ways of realizing themselves outside of family life.5. More than one psychiatrist suggested that those who want to remain childless are narcissistic making a virtue out of necessity by rationalizing their inner conflict about giving care vs. being taken care of. 6. There seem to be so many other opportunities for women to express themselves creatively and family life requires them to give up so many things that the emphasis on family of the world, doesnt really ring a bell with many young people.” 7. The more people continue to ask themselves such questions as whether or not they really want to raise a family before they begin to do so, the fewer unhappy parents and troubled children there will be.Unit Seven: The Virtues of AmbitionJoseph Epstein1. Ambition is one of those Rorschach words: define it (ambition)and you instantly reveal a great deal about yourself. Even that most neutral of works, Websters, in its seventh New Collegiate Edition, gives itself away, defining ambition first and foremost as “an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power. Ardent immediately assumes a heat incommensurate with good sense and stability, and rank, fame, and power have come under fairly heavy attack for at least a century. One can, after all, be ambitious for the public good, for the alleviation of suffering, for the enlightenment of mankind, though there are some who say that these are precisely the ambitious people most to be distrusted.2. Surely ambition is behind dreams of glory, of wealth, of love, of distinction, of accomplishment, of pleasure, of goodness. What life does with our dreams and expectations cannot, of course, be predicted. Some dreams, begun in selflessness, end in rancor; other dreams, begun in selfishness, end in large-heartedness. The unpredictability of the outcome of dreams is no reason to cease dreaming.3. To be sure, ambition, the sheer thing unalloyed by some larger purpose than merely clambering up, is never a pretty prospect to ponder. As drunks have done to alcohol, the single-minded have done to ambition-given it a bad name. Like a taste for alcohol, too, ambition does not always allow for easy satiation. Some people cannot handle it; it has brought grief to others, and not merely the ambitious alone. Still, none of this seems a sufficient cause for driving ambition under the counter.4. What is the worst that can be said-that has been said-about ambition? Here is a (surely) partial list: To begin with, it, ambition, is often antisocial, and indeed is now outmoded, belonging to an age when individualism was more valued and useful than it is today. The person strongly imbued with ambition ignores the collectivity; socially detached, he is on his own and out for his own. Individuality and ambition are firmly linked. The ambitious individual, far from identifying himself and his fortunes with the group, wishes to rise above it. The ambitious man or woman sees the world as a battle; rivalrousness is his or her principal emotion: the world has limited prizes to offer, and he or she is determined to get his or hers. Ambition is, moreover, jesuitical; it can argue those possessed by it into believing that what they want for themselves is good for everyone -that the satisfaction of their own desires is best for the commonweal. The truly ambitious believe that it is a dog-eat-dog world, and they are distinguished by wanting to be the dogs that do the eating.5. From here it is but a short hop to believe that those who have achieved the common goals of ambition-money, fame, power-have achieved them through corruption of a greater or lesser degree, mostly a greater. Thus all politicians in high places, thought to be ambitious, are understood to be, ipso facto, without moral scruples. How could they have such scruples-a weighty burden in a high climb-and still have risen as they have?6. If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition-wealth, distinction, control over ones destiny-must be considered worthy of the sacrifices made on ambitions behalf. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared; and it especially must be esteemed by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least among them. The educated not least because, nowadays more than ever before, it is they who have usurped the platforms of public discussion and wield the power of the spoken and written word in newspapers, in magazine