新标准大学英语综合教程2原文

UNIT1

College just isn't special any more

1 "If you can remember anything about the 1960s, you weren't really there," so the saying goes. It may be true for those who spent their college years in a haze of marijuana smoke. But there is one thing everyone remembers about the 1960s: Going to college was the most exciting and stimulating experience of your life.

有这么一种说法：“要是你能记得20 世纪60 年代的任何事情，你就没有真正经历过那段岁月。”对于在大麻烟雾中度过大学时光的那些人，这话可能是真的。但是，20 世纪60 年代有一件事人人都记得，那就是：上大学是你一生中最激动人心、最刺激的经历。

2 In the 1960s, California's colleges and universities had transformed the state into the world's seventh largest economy. However, Berkeley, the University of California's main campus, was also well-known for its student demonstrations and strikes, and its atmosphere of political radicalism. When Ronald Reagan ran for office as governor of California in 1966, he asked if Californians would allow "a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority". The liberals replied that it was the ability to tolerate noisy, dissident minorities which made universities great.

20 世纪60 年代，加州的高校把本州变成了世界第七大经济实体。然而，加州大学的主校园伯克利分校也以学生示威、罢课以及激进的政治氛围而著名。1966 年，罗纳德·里根竞选加州州长，他问加州是否允许“一所伟大的大学被喧闹的、持不一意见的少数人征服。”自由派人士回答说，大学之所以伟大正是因为它们有能力容忍喧闹的、持不同意见的少数人。

3 On university campuses in Europe, mass socialist or communist movements gave rise to increasingly violent clashes between the establishment and the college students, with their new and passionate commitment to freedom and justice. Much of the protest was about the Vietnam War. But in France, the students of the Sorbonne in Paris managed to form an alliance with the trade unions and to launch a general strike, which ultimately brought about the resignation of President de Gaulle.

在欧洲的大学校园里，大学生以新的姿态和激情地投入到自由和正义的事业中去，大规模的社会主义或共产主义运动引发了他们与当权者之间日益升级的暴力冲突。许多抗议是针对越南战争的。可是在法国，巴黎大学的学生与工会联盟，发动了一场大罢工，最终导致了戴高乐总统辞职。

4 It wasn't just the activism that characterized student life in the 1960s. Everywhere, going to college meant your first taste of real freedom, of late nights in the dorm or in the Junior Common Room, discussing the meaning of life. You used to have to go to college to read your first forbidden book, see your first indie film, or find someone who shared your passion for Jimi Hendrix or Lenny Bruce. It was a moment of unimaginable freedom, the most liberating in your life.

20 世纪60 年代大学生活的特点并不仅仅是激进的行动。不论在什么地方，上大学都意味着你初次品尝真正自由的滋味，初次品尝深更半夜在宿舍或学生活动室里讨论人生意义的滋味。你往往得上了大学才得以阅读你的第一本禁书，看你的第一部独立影人电影，或者找到和你一样痴迷吉米·亨德里克斯或伦尼·布鲁斯的志同道合者。那是一段难以想象的自由时光，你一生中最无拘无束的时光。

5 But where's the passion today? What's the matter with college? These days political, social and creative awakening seems to happen not because of college, but in spite of it. Of course, it's true that higher education is still important. For example, in the UK, Prime Minister Blair was close to achieving his aim of getting 50 per cent of all under thirties into college by 2010 (even though a cynic would say that this was to keep them off the unemployment statistics). Yet college education is no longer a topic of great national importance. Today, college is seen as a kind of small town from which people are keen to escape. Some people drop out, but the most apathetic stay the course because it's too much effort to leave.

可如今那份激情哪儿去了？大学怎么了？现在，政治、社会和创造意识的觉醒似乎不是凭借大学的助力，而是冲破其阻力才发生的。当然，一点不假，高等教育仍然重要。例如，在英国，布莱尔首相几乎实现了到2010 年让50％的30 岁以下的人上大学的目标，（即使愤世嫉俗的人会说，这是要把他们排除在失业统计数据之外）。不过，大学教育已不再是全民重视的话题了。如今，大学被视为人们急于逃离的一种小城镇。有些人辍学，但大多数已经有些麻木，还是坚持混到毕业，因为离开学校实在是太费事了。

6 Instead of the heady atmosphere of freedom which students in the 1960s discovered, students today are much more serious. The British Council has recently done research into the factors which help international students decide where to study. In descending order these are: quality of courses, employability prospects, affordability, personal security issues, lifestyle, and accessibility. College has become a means to an end, an opportunity to increase one's chances on the employment market, and not an end in itself, which gives you the chance to imagine, just for a short while, that you can change the world.

没有了20 世纪60 年代大学生发现的令人头脑发热的自由气氛，如今的大学生要严肃得多。英国文化促进会最近做了一项调查，研究外国留学生在决定上哪所大学时考虑的因素。这些因素从高到低依次是：课程质量、就业前景、学费负担、人身安全问题、生活方式，以及各种便利。大学已变成实现目的的手段，是在就业市场上增加就业几率的一个机会，上大学本身不再是目的，它给你提供一个机会，让你暂时想象一下：你能够改变世界。

7 The gap between childhood and college has shrunk, and so has the gap between college and the real world. One of the reasons may be financial. In an uncertain world, many children rely on their parents' support much longer than they used to. Students leaving university in the 21st century simply cannot afford to set up their own home because it's too expensive. Another possible reason is the communications revolution. Gone are the days when a son or daughter rang home once or twice a term. Today students are umbilically linked to their parents by their cell phones. And as for finding like-minded friends to share a passion for obscure literature or music, well, we have the Internet and chat rooms to help us do that.

童年与大学之间的距离已缩小了，大学与现实世界之间的距离也缩小了。其中的一个原因可能是经济方面的。在一个没有保障的世界里，现在的许多孩子依赖父母资助的时间比以前的孩子更长。21世纪的学生大学毕业后根本无法自立门户，因为那太昂贵了。另一个可能的原因是通讯革命。儿子或女儿每学期往家里打一两回电话的日子一去不复返了。如今，大学生通过手机与父母保持着脐带式联系。至于寻找痴迷无名文学或音乐的同道好友嘛，没问题，我们有互联网和聊天室来帮助我们做到这一点。

8 "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

“在那黎明时分活着是至福，

9 But to be young was very heaven!"

但年轻就等于身在天堂！”

10 Wordsworth may have written these lines about the French Revolution, but they were also

true for the students of the 1960s. So why aren't they true for the students of today?

11 华兹华斯的诗句说的可能是法国大革命，但是对于20 世纪60 年代的

大学生而言，这样的诗句同样真实生动。可是为什么对于如今的大学生来说，它们怎么就不真实了呢？

UNIT2

How empathy unfolds

1 The moment Hope, just nine months old, saw another baby fall, tears welled up in her own eyes and she crawled off to be comforted by her mother, as though it were she who had been hurt. And 15-month-old Michael went to get his own teddy bear for his crying friend Paul; when Paul kept crying, Michael retrieved Paul's security blanket for him. Both these small acts of sympathy and caring were observed by mothers trained to record such incidents of empathy in action. The results of the study suggest that the roots of empathy can be traced to infancy.

Virtually from the day they are born infants are upset when they hear another infant crying—a response some see as the earliest precursor of empathy.

2 Developmental psychologists have found that infants feel sympathetic distress even before they fully realize that they exist apart from other people. Even a few months after birth, infants react to a disturbance in those around them as though it were their own, crying when they see another child's tears. By one year or so, they start to realize the misery is not their own but someone else's, though they still seem confused over what to do about it. In research by Martin L. Hoffman at New York University, for example, a one-year-old brought his own mother over to comfort a crying friend, ignoring the friend's mother, who was also in the room. This confusion is seen too when one-year-olds imitate the distress of someone else, possibly to better comprehend what they are feeling; for example, if another baby hurts her fingers, a one-year-old might put her own fingers in her mouth to see if she hurts, too. On seeing his mother cry, one baby wiped his own eyes, though they had no tears.

3 Such motor mimicry, as it is called, is the original technical sense of the word empathy as it was first used in the 1920s by E. B. Titchener, an American psychologist. Titchener's theory was that empathy stemmed from a sort of physical imitation of the distress of another, which then evokes the same feelings in oneself. He sought a word that would be distinct from sympathy, which can be felt for the general plight of another with no sharing whatever of what that other person is feeling.

4 Motor mimicry fades from toddlers' repertoire at around two and a half years, at which point they realize that someone else's pain is different from their own, and are better able to comfort them. A typical incident, from a mother's diary:

5 A neighbor's baby cries and Jenny approaches and tries to give him some cookies. She follows him around and begins to whimper to herself. She then tries to stroke his hair, but he pulls away. He calms down, but Jenny still looks worried. She continues to bring him toys and to pat his head and shoulders.

6 At this point in their development toddlers begin to diverge from one another in their overall sensitivity to other people's emotional upsets, with some, like Jenny, keenly aware and others tuning out. A series of studies by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. Children, they found, were more empathic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: "Look how sad you've made her feel" instead of "That was naughty". They found too that children's empathy is also shaped by seeing how others react when someone else is distressed; by imitating what they see, children develop a repertoire of empathic response, especially in helping other people who are distressed.

UNIT3

Stolen identity

1 "Frank never went to pilot school, medical school, law school, ... because he's still in high school."

2 That was the strapline of the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, which tells the story of Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), a brilliant young master of deception who at different times impersonated a doctor, a lawyer, and an airplane pilot, forging checks worth more than six million dollars in 26 countries. He became the youngest man to ever make the FBI's

most-wanted list for forgery. Hunted and caught in the film by fictional FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), Abagnale later escaped. He eventually became a consultant for the FBI where he focused on white-collar crime.

3 It's a great film, but could it happen in real life? In fact, Catch Me If You Can is based on the true story of Frank Abagnale, whose career as a fraudster lasted about six years before he was caught, who escaped from custody three times (once through an airplane toilet), and who spent a total of six years in prison in France, Sweden and the US. He now runs a consultancy advising the world of business how to avoid fraud. He has raised enough money to pay back all his victims, and is now a multi-millionaire.

4 Since 2003, identity theft has become increasingly common. Few people could imagine how important things like taking mail to the post office and not leaving it in the mailbox for pickup, shredding documents instead of throwing them out with the trash, even using a pen costing a couple of bucks, have become to avoid life-changing crimes.

5 More and more people are becoming anonymous victims of identity theft. We spend many hours and dollars trying to recover our name, our credit, our money and our lives. We need to look for different ways to protect ourselves. We can improve our chances of avoiding this crime, but it will never go away.

6 It's not just a list of do's and don'ts, we need to change our mindset. Although online banking is now commonplace, there's a significant group of people in the country—the baby boomers, 15 per cent of the population—who still prefer to use paper. What's more, 30 per cent of cases of fraud occur within this group. A check has all the information about you that an identity thief needs. If you use a ballpoint pen, the ink can be removed with the help of a regular household chemical and the sum of money can be changed. More than 1.2 million bad checks are issued every day, more than 13 per second.

7 Check fraud is big business ... and growing by 25 per cent every year. Criminals count on our mistakes to make their jobs easier. So how can we prevent identity theft before it happens to us?

8 Take a few precautions. Don't leave your mail in your mailbox overnight or over the weekend. Thieves wait for the red flag to go up, so they can look through your outgoing mail for useful personal information or checks. Use a gel pen for checks and important forms, the ink is trapped in the fibre of the paper, and it can't be removed with chemicals. Also, shred or tear up all documents which contain personal information before you put them in the trash.

9 Remember that there are plenty of online opportunities for thieves to create a false identity based on your own. We're all aware of the risks to personal information on computer databases by

hacking and Trojan horses. But choosing someone and doing a Google search can also yield large amounts of personal information, and so can online social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. And just as we take our pocketbook with us when we leave the office to go to the bathroom, it's also worth logging off your computer to avoid opportunistic theft.

10 Finally, if you get robbed in a more traditional way—in the street—canceling your credit cards is obviously the first thing to do. But don't forget that even after they're reported lost, they can be used as identification to acquire store cards ... and you get the criminal record.

11 Identity fraud can go on for years without the victim's knowledge. There is no escaping the fact that right now fraudsters are finding identity crime all too easy. If you haven't had your identity stolen, it's only because they haven't got to you yet. Your turn will come.

UNIT4

Making the headlines

1 It isn't very often that the media lead with the same story everywhere in the world. Such an event would have to be of enormous international significance. But this is exactly what occurred in September 2001 with the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. It is probably not exaggerated to say that from that moment the world was a different place.

2 But it is not just the historical and international dimension that made 9/11 memorable and (to use a word the media like) newsworthy. It was the shock and horror, too. So striking, so sensational, was the news that, years after the event, many people can still remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard it. They can remember their own reactions: For many people across the globe their first instinct was to go and tell someone else about it, thus providing confirmation of the old saying that bad news travels fast.

3 And so it is with all major news stories. I remember when I was at primary school the teacher announcing pale-faced to a startled class of seven year olds President Kennedy is dead. I didn't know who President Kennedy was, but I was so upset at hearing the news that I went rushing home afterwards to tell my parents (who already knew, of course). In fact, this is one of my earliest memories.

4 So what exactly is news? The objective importance of an event is obviously not enough —there are plenty of enormous global issues out there, with dramatic consequences, from poverty to global warming—but since they are ongoing, they don't all make the just international, but odd, unexpected, and (in the sense that it was possible to identify with the plight of people caught up in the drama) very human.

5 Odd doesn't mean huge. Take the story in today's China Daily about a mouse holding up a flight from Vietnam to Japan. The mouse was spotted running down the aisle of a plane in Hanoi airport. It was eventually caught by a group of 12 technicians worried that the mouse could chew through wires and cause a short circuit. By the time it took off the plane was more than four hours late.

6 Not an event with momentous international consequences, you might say, (apart from a few passengers arriving late for their appointments in another country), but there are echoes of the story across the globe, in online editions of papers from Asia to America, via Scotland (Mouse chase holds up flight, in the Edinburgh Evening News).

7 Another element of newsworthiness is immediacy. This refers to the nearness of the event in time. An event which happened a week ago is not generally news—unless you've just read about it. "When" is one of the five "wh" questions trainee journalists are regularly told that they have to use to frame a news story (the others are "who", "what", "where" and "why"); "today", "this morning", and "yesterday" are probably at the top of the list of time adverbs in a news report. Similarly, an event which is about to happen ("today", "this evening" or "tonight") may also be newsworthy, although, by definition, it is not unexpected and so less sensational.

8 When it comes to immediacy, those media which can present news in real time, such as TV, radio, and the Internet, have an enormous advantage over the press. To see an event unfolding in front of your eyes is rather different from reading about it at breakfast the next morning. But TV news is not necessarily more objective or reliable than a newspaper report, since the images you are looking at on your screen have been chosen by journalists or editors with specific objectives, or at least following set guidelines, and they are shown from a unique viewpoint. By placing the camera somewhere else you would get a different picture. This is why it is usual to talk of the "power of the media"—the power to influence the public, more or less covertly.

9 But perhaps in the third millennium this power is being eroded, or at least devolved to ordinary people. The proliferation of personal blogs, the possibility of self-broadcasting through

sites such as YouTube, and the growth of open-access web pages (wikis) means that anyone with anything to say—or show—can now reach a worldwide audience

instantly.

10 This doesn't mean that the press and TV are going to disappear overnight, of course. But in their never-ending search for interesting news items—odd, unexpected, and human—they are going to turn increasingly to these sites for their sources, providing the global information network with a curiously local dimension.

UNIT5

Catch-22

Catch-22 is one of the most famous novels of the last century. It is set in an American military base on a small island in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. Although the story reveals some of the horrors of war through episodes of bloodshed and destruction, it is not a traditional war novel. There are no heroes or heroic acts, and the enemy is not really the Germans (who do not appear in the story), but anyone who can get you killed—and that includes your own commander. Catch-22 is primarily a comic novel, whose main character, an airman called Yossarian, has only one aim—to survive the war and go back home. He thinks he can do this by pretending to be insane.

1 It was a horrible joke, but Doc Daneeka didn't laugh until Yossarian came to him one mission later and pleaded again, without any real expectation of success, to be grounded. Doc Daneeka snickered once and was soon immersed in problems of his own, which included Chief

White Halfoat, who had been challenging him all that morning to Indian wrestle, and Yossarian, who decided right then and there to go crazy.

2 "You're wasting your time," Doc Daneeka was forced to tell him.

3 "Can't you ground someone who's crazy?"

4 "Oh, sure. I have to. There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy."

5 "Then why don't you ground me? I'm crazy. Ask Clevinger."

6 "Clevinger? Where is Clevinger? You find Clevinger and I'll ask him."

7 "Then ask any of the others. They'll tell you how crazy I am."

8 "They're crazy."

9 "Then why don't you ground them?"

10 "Why don't they ask me to ground them?"

11 "Because they're crazy, that's why."

12 "Of course they're crazy," Doc Daneeka replied. "I just told you they're crazy, didn't I? And you can't let crazy people decide whether you're crazy or not, can you?"

13 Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"

14 "He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.

15 "Can you ground him?"

16 "I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."

17 "Then why doesn't he ask you to?"

18 "Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."

19 "That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

20 "That's all. Let him ask me."

21 "And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

22 "No. Then I can't ground him."

23 "You mean there's a catch?"

24 "Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

25 There was only one catch and that was catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

26 "That's some catch, that catch-22," he observed.

27 "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

UNIT6

My dream comes true

1 The rain had started to fall gently through the evening air as darkness descended over Sydney. Hundreds of lights illuminated Stadium Australia, and the noise was deafening. As I walked towards the track I glanced around me at the sea of faces in the stands, but my mind was focused. The Olympic gold medal was just minutes away, hanging tantalisingly in the distance.

2 My heart was beating loudly, my mouth was dry and the adrenaline was pumping. I was so close to the realisation of my childhood dream and the feeling was fantastic; it was completely exhilarating, but also terrifying. I knew I would have to push myself beyond my known limits to ensure that my dream came true.

3 I tried to keep composed, telling myself not to panic, to stick to the plan and run my own race. I knew the Russian girls would set off quickly — and I had to finish this race fewer than ten seconds behind the Russian athlete Yelena Prokhorova. If I could do that, the title would be mine.

4 I looked out along the first stretch of the 400m track and caught my breath. The 800m race had punished me so much over the years — in the World, Commonwealth and European Championships— and now it stood between me and the Olympic title.

5 The British supporters were cheering so loudly it seemed as if they were the only fans there.

I could hear my name being called. I could hear the shouts of encouragement and the cries of hope. Union Jacks fluttered all around the vast, beautiful stadium. I felt unified with the crowd — we all had the same vision and the same dream.

6 My ankle was bandaged against an injury I had incurred in the long jump just a couple of hours earlier, but I shut out all thoughts of pain. I tried to concentrate on the crowd. They were so vocal. My spirits lifted and I felt composed.

7 I knew I would do my best, that I would run my heart out and finish the race. I felt the performer in me move in and take over. I had just two laps to run, that was all. Just two laps until the emotional and physical strain of the past two days and the last 28 years would be eclipsed by victory or failure. This race was all about survival. It's only two minutes, I kept telling myself, anyone can run for two minutes.

8 The starting gun was fired, and the race began. The first lap was good, I managed to keep up with the group, but I was feeling much more tired than I usually did, and much more than I'd anticipated. Both the long, hard weeks of training that had led up to this championship, and the exhaustion from two days of gruelling competition were showing in my performance. Mental and physical fatigue were starting to crush me, and I had to fight back.

9 Prokhorova had set the pace from the start. It was important that I didn't let her get too far in front. I had to stay with her. At the bell I was 2.3 seconds behind her. Just one lap to go. One lap. I could do it. I had to keep going. In the final 150 metres I could hear the roar of the crowd, giving me a boost at exactly the moment I needed it the most—just when my legs were burning and I could see the gap opening between me and the Russian. Thankfully, my foot was holding out, so now it was all down to mental stamina.

10 Prokhorova was pulling away. I couldn't let her get too far; I had to stay with her. I began counting down the metres I had left to run: 60m, 50m, 40m, 20m. I could see the clock. I could do it, but it would be close. Then finally the line appeared. I crossed it, exhausted. I had finished.

11 As I crossed the line my initial thought was how much harder the race had been than expected, bearing in mind how, only eight weeks before, I had set a new personal best of two minutes 12.2 seconds. Then my mind turned to the result. Had I done it? I thought I had. I was aware of where the other athletes were, and was sure that I'd just made it. But, until I saw it on the scoreboard, I wouldn't let myself believe it. As I stood there, staring up and waiting for confirmation, I tried hard to keep negative thoughts from my mind—but I couldn't help thinking, what if I have just missed out? What if I've been through all this, and missed out?

12 In the distance I could hear the commentary team talking about two days of tough competition, then I could almost hear someone say, "I think she's done enough." The next thing I knew, Sabine Braun of Germany came over and told me I'd won. They had heard before me, and she asked what it felt like to be the Olympic champion. I smiled, still not sure.