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2005年11月英语二级《笔译实务》试题
Section 1: English-Chinese Translation（英译汉）
Part A Compulsory Translation（必译题）
Hans Christian Andersen was Denmark's most famous native son. Yet even after his fairy tales won him fame and fortune, he feared he would be forgotten. He need not have worried. This weekend, Denmark began eight months of celebrations to coincide with the bicentenary of his birth, and Denmark is eager that the world take note as it sets out to define the pigeon-holed writer in its own way.
The festivities began in Copenhagen on Saturday, Andersen's actual birthday, with a lively show of music, dance, lights and comedy inspired by his fairy tales before a crowd of 40,000 people -- including Queen Margrethe II and her family -- at the Parken National Stadium. The opening, called Once Upon a Time, will be followed by a slew of concerts, musicals, ballets, exhibitions, parades and education programs costing over US$40 million.
So more than in recent memory, Danes -- and, they hope, foreigners -- will be reliving the humor, pain and lessons to be found in evergreen stories like The Little Mermaid, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, The Little Match-Seller, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Shadow, The Princess and the Pea and others of Andersen's 150 or so fairy tales.
In organizing this extravaganza, of course, Denmark is also celebrating itself. After all, Andersen is still this country's most famous native son. Trumpeting his name and achievements not only draws attention to Denmark's contribution to world culture, but could also woo more foreign tourists to visit his birthplace in the town of Odense and to be photographed beside the famous bronze statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen's harbor.
And Denmark has even more in mind. Local guardians of the Andersen legacy evidently feel his stories have lost ground in recent years to the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Andersen's fairy tales may remain central to the Danish identity, serving as homespun guides to the vagaries of human behavior, but what about the rest of the world?
"What we really need is a rebirth of Andersen," noted Lars Seeberg, secretary general of the Hans Christian Andersen 2005 Foundation. "Two centuries after his birth, he still fails to be universally acknowledged as the world-class author he no doubt was.
Part B Optional Translation（二选一题）
Topic 1（选题一）
Independent Information and Analysis from the USA
The Gap Between Rich and Poor Widened in U.S. Capital Washington D.C. ranks first among the 40 cities with the widest gap between the poor and the rich, according to a recent report released by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute on July 22nd. The top 20 percent of households in D.C. have an average yearly income of $186,830, 31 times that of the bottom 20 percent, which earns only $6,126 per year. The income gap is also big in Atlanta and Miami, but the difference is not as pronounced.
The report also indicates that the widening gap occurred mainly during the 1990s. Over the last decade, the average income of the top 20 percent of households has grown 36 percent, while the average income of the bottom 20 percent has only risen 3 percent.
"I believe the concentration of the middle- to high-income families in the D.C. area will continue, therefore, the income gap between rich and poor will be hard to bridge," David Garrison told the Washington Observer. Garrison is a senior researcher with the Brookings Institution, specializing in the study of the social and economic policies in the greater Washington D.C. area.
The report attributed the persistent income gap in Washington to the area's special job opportunities, which attract high-income households. Especially since the federal government is based in Washington D.C., Government agencies and other government related businesses such as lobbying firms and government contractors constantly offer high-paying jobs, which contribute to the trend of increasing high-income households in the D.C. area. For example, a single young professional working in a law firm in D.C. can earn as much as $100,000 in his or her first year out of law school.
"In addition, high-quality housing available in Washington D.C. is one of the main reasons why high-income families choose to live here, while middle and low-income families, if they can afford it, choose to move out of Washington D.C. to the Virginia and Maryland suburbs so that their kids can go to better schools," stated Garrison.
"As rich families continue to move into D.C. and middle and low-income families are moving out, the poorest families are left with nowhere to move, or cannot afford to move. This creates the situation we face now: a huge income gap between the rich and poor."
The Washington D.C. area to which Garrison refers is the District of Columbia city itself, not including the greater Washington metro area. "The greater Washington metro area has a large population of about 5 million, but the low-income households are often concentrated in D.C. proper," Garrison explained.
Tony Blalock, the spokesperson for Mayor Anthony Williams, said resignedly, "No matter what we seem to do to bring investment into the District, a certain population is not able to access the unique employment opportunities there. The gap between the rich and poor is the product of complex forces, and won't be fixed overnight."
Garrison believes that the D.C. government should attract high-income families. By doing so, the District's tax base can grow, which in turn can help improve D.C.'s infrastructure. "But in the meantime, the District government should also take into consideration the rights of the poor, set up good schools for them, and provide sound social welfare. All these measures can alleviate the dire situation caused by income disparity. "
Garrison, however, is not optimistic about the possibility of closing the gap between the rich and poor. He is particularly doubtful that current economic progress will be able to help out the poor. "Bush's tax-cut plan did bring about this wave of economic recovery, and the working professionals and rich did benefit from it. It is unfair to say that the plan did not help the poor at all… it just didn't benefit them as much as it did the rich, " Garrison said. "The working class in America, those who do the simplest work, get paid the least, and dutifully pay their taxes, has not benefited from Bush's tax-cut plan much."
Garrison concludes, "A lot of cities in America did not enjoy the positive impact of the economic recovery. Washington D.C., on the other hand, has always been sheltered by the federal government. The wide gap between rich and poor in the District, therefore, deserves more in-depth study and exploration."
Topic 2（选题二）
Sometimes you can know too much. The aim of screening healthy people for cancer is to discover tumours when they are small and treatable. It sounds laudable and often it is. But it sometimes leads to unnecessary treatment. The body has a battery of mechanisms for stopping small tumours from becoming large ones. Treating those that would have been suppressed anyway does no good and can often be harmful.
Take lung cancer. A report in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, by Peter Bach of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York and his colleagues, suggests that, despite much fanfare around the use of computed tomography (CT) to detect tumours in the lungs well before they cause symptoms, the test may not reduce the risk of dying from the disease at all—indeed, it may make things worse.
The story begins last year, when Claudia Henschke of Cornell University and her colleagues made headlines with a report that patients whose lung cancer had been diagnosed early by CT screening had excellent long-term survival prospects. Her research suggested that 88% of patients could expect to be alive ten years after their diagnosis. Dr Bach found similar results in a separate study. In his case, 94% of patients diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer were alive four years later.
Survival data alone, though, fail to answer a basic question: “compared with what?” People are bound to live longer after their diagnosis if that diagnosis is made earlier. Early diagnosis is of little value unless it results in a better prognosis.
Dr Bach, therefore, interrogated his data more thoroughly.He used statistical models based on results from studies of lung cancer that did not involve CT screening, to try to predict what would have happened to the individuals in his own study if they had not been part of that study. The results were not encouraging.
Screening did, indeed, detect more tumours. Over the course of five years, 144 cases of lung cancer were picked up in a population of 3,200, compared with a predicted number of 44. Despite these early diagnoses, though, there was no reduction in the number of people who went on to develop advanced cancer, nor a significant drop in the number who died of the disease (38, compared with a prediction of 39). Considering that early diagnosis prompted a tenfold increase in surgery aimed at removing the cancer (the predicted number of surgical interventions was 11; the actual number was 109), and that such surgery is unsafe—5% of patients die and another 20-40% suffer serious complications—the whole process seems to make things worse.
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