英語專八英翻漢練習(xí)

1、TEM8英譯漢練習(xí)（1）Four months before the election day, five men gathered in a small conference room at the Reagan-Bush headquarters and reviewed an oversize calendar that marked the remaining days of the 1984 presidential campaign. It was the last Saturday in June and at ten o'clock in the morning the

2、 rest of the office was practically deserted. Even so, the men kept the door shut and the drapes carefully drawn. The three principals and their two deputies had come from around the country for a critical meeting. Their aim was to devise a strategy that would guarantee Ronald Reagan's resoundin

3、g reelection to a second term in the White House.It should have been easy. These were battle-tested veterans with long ties to Reagan and even longer ones to the Republican party, men who understood presidential politics as well as any in the country. The backdrop of the campaign was hospitable, wit

4、h lots of good news to work with: America was at peace, and the nation's economy, a key factor in any election, was rebounding vigorously after recession. Furthermore, the campaign itself was lavishly financed, with plenty of money for a topflight staff, travel, and television commercials. And,

5、most important, their candidate was Ronald Reagan, a president of tremendous personal popularity and dazzling communication skills. Reagan has succeeded more than any president since John. F. Kennedy in projecting a broad vision of America -a nation of renewed military strength, individual initiativ

6、e, and smaller federal government.（2）Opera is expensive: that much is inevitable. But expensive things are not inevitably the province of the rich unless we abdicate society's power of choice. We can choose to make opera, and other expensive forms of culture, accessible to those who cannot indiv

7、idually pay for it. The question is: why should we? Nobody denies the imperatives of food, shelter, defense, health and education. But even in a prehistoric cave, mankind stretched out a hand not just to eat, drink or fight, but also to draw. The impulse towards culture, the desire to express and ex

8、plore the world through imagination and representation is fundamental. In Europe, this desire has found fulfillment in the masterpieces of our music, art, literature and theatre. These masterpieces are the touchstones for all our efforts; they are the touchstones for the possibilities to which human

9、 thought and imagination may aspire; they carry the most profound messages that can be sent from one human to another.（3）I agree to some extent with my imaginary English reader. American literary historians are perhaps prone to view their own national scene too narrowly, mistaking prominence for uni

10、queness. They do over-phrase their own literature, or certainly its minor figures. And Americans do swing from aggressive overphrase of their literature to an equally unfortunate, imitative deference. But then, the English themselves are somewhat insular in their literary appraisals. Moreover, in fi

11、elds where they are not pre-eminent - e. g. in painting and music -they too alternate between boasting of native products and copying those of the Continent. How many English paintings try to look as though they were done in Paris; how many times have we read in articles that they really represent a

12、n "English tradition" after all.To speak of American literature, then, is not to assert that it is completely unlike that of Europe. Broadly speaking, America and Europe have kept step. At any given moment the traveler could find examples in both of the same architecture, the same styles i

13、n dress, the same books on the shelves. Ideas have crossed the Atlantic as freely as men and merchandise, though sometimes more slowly. When I refer to American habit, thoughts, etc., I intend some sort of qualification to precede the word, for frequently the difference between America and Europe (e

14、specially England) will be one of degree, sometimes only of a small degree. The amount of divergence is a subtle affair, liable to perplex the Englishman when he looks at America. He is looking at a country which in important senses grew out of his own, which in several ways still resembles his own

15、- and which is yet a foreign country. There are odd overlappings and abrupt unfamiliarities; kinship yields to a sudden alienation, as when we hail a person across the street, only to discover from his blank response that we have mistaken a stranger for a friend.（4）In some societies people want chil

16、dren for what might be called familial reasons: to extend the family line or the family name, to propitiate the ancestors; to enable the proper functioning of religious rituals involving the family. Such reasons may seem thin in the modern, secularized society but they have been and are powerful ind

17、eed in other places.In addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category, namely, having children in order to maintain or improve a marriage: to hold the husband or occupy the wife; to repair or rejuvenate the marriage; to increase the number of children on the assump

18、tion that family happiness lies that way. The point is underlined by its converse: in some societies the failure to bear children (or males) is a threat to the marriage and a ready cause for divorce.Beyond all that is the profound significance of children to the very institution of the family itself

19、. To many people, husband and wife alone do not seem a proper family -they need children to enrich the circle, to validate its family character, to gather the redemptive influence of offspring. Children need the family, but the family seems also to need children, as the social institution uniquely a

20、vailable, at least in principle, for security, comfort, assurance, and direction in a changing, often hostile, world. To most people, such a home base, in the literal sense, needs more than one person for sustenance and in generational extension. （5）The thirty-second day out of Bombay began inauspic

21、iously. In the morning a sea smashed one of the galley doors. We dashed in through lots of steam and found the cook very wet and indignant with the ship: "She's getting worse every day. She's trying to drown me in front of my own stove!" He was very angry. We pacified him, and the

22、carpenter, though washed away twice from there, managed to repair the door. Through that accident our dinner was not ready till late, but it didn't matter in the end because Knowles, who went to fetch it, got knocked down by a sea and the dinner went over the side. The ship's captain, lookin

23、g more hard and thin-lipped than ever, would not notice that the ship, asked to do too much, appeared to lose heart altogether for the first time since we knew her.（6） Michael Jordan, a basketball player in whom commentators have discerned aristocratic qualities and supernatural powers, has retired

24、from the game that made him one of the worlds' best known and best paid sportsmen.Last week's announcement was premature by most people's measurement - Jordan is 30 and at the height of his playing and earning power - but it was not, by his own account, taken hastily, or rashly. "Th

25、is is, " he said, with a rare stumble, " the perfect timing for me to walk away."After three championships with the Chicago Bulls, a second gold medal with the US team at the 1992 Olympics, Jordan felt his motivation slipping away. "I'm at the pinnacle, " he told a thron

26、ged press conference. "I just feel I don't have anything else to prove."But this explanation may appear too simple to satisfy the skeptics, who have recently discovered that Jordan does not lead an untroubled private life. First came the allegations that he gambled - in a country where

27、 gambling is mostly illegal - and that his gambling was out of control. Then his father was shot dead on July 23.（7）Though fond of many acquaintances, I desire an intimacy only with a few. The Man in Black, whom I have often mentioned, is one whose friendship I could wish to acquire, because he poss

28、esses my esteem. His manners, it is true, are tinctured with some strange inconsistencies, and he may be justly termed a humorist in a nation of humorists. Though he is generous even to profusion, he affects to be thought a prodigy of parsimony and prudence; though his conversation be replete with t

29、he most sordid and selfish maxims, his heart is dilated with the most unbounded love. I have known him profess himself a man-hater, while his cheek was glowing with compassion; and, while his looks were softened into pity, I have heard him use the language of the most unbounded ill-nature. Some affe

30、ct humanity and tenderness, others boast of having such dispositions from Nature; but he is the only man I ever knew who seemed ashamed of his natural benevolence. He takes as much pains to hide his feelings, as any hypocrite would to conceal his indifference; but on every unguarded moment the mask

31、drops off, and reveals him to the most superficial observer.（8） The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called

32、good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all. They do not think or speak by r

33、ule; and they have in general more eloquence and wit as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense, and eloquence together, they generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when they write to their friends, is better than that of most authors. - Uneducated people have most exu

34、berance of invention.（9）The Reagan administration's most serious foreign policy problem surfaced near the end of the president's second term. In 1987 Americans learned that the administration had secretly sold arms to Iran in an attempt to win freedom for American hostages held in Lebanon by

35、 radical organizations controlled by Iran's Khomeini government. Investigation also revealed that funds from the arms sales had been diverted to the Nicaraguan contras during a period when Congress had prohibited such military aid.The ensuing Iran-contra hearings before a joint House-Senate comm

36、ittee examined issues of possible illegality as well as the broader question of defining American foreign policy interests in the Middle East and Central America. In a larger sense, the Iran-contra hearings, like the celebrated Senate Watergate hearings 14 years earlier, addressed fundamental questi

37、ons about the government's accountability to the public, and the proper balance between the executive and legislative branches of government.（10） Although the American economy has transformed itself over the years, certain issues have persisted since the early days of the republic. One is the co

38、ntinuing debate over the proper role for government in what is basically a marketplace economy. An economy based on free enterprise is generally characterized by private ownership and initiative, with a relative absence of government involvement. However, government intervention has been found neces

39、sary from time to time to ensure that economic opportunities are fair and accessible to the people, to prevent flagrant abuses, to dampen inflation and to stimulate growth.Ever since colonial times, the government has been involved, to some extent, in economic decision-making. The federal government

40、, for example, has made huge investments in infrastructure, and it has provided social welfare programs that the private sector was unable or unwilling to provide. In a myriad of ways and over many decades, the government has supported and promoted the development of agriculture.（11）If people mean a

41、nything at all by the expression "untimely death", they must believe that some deaths run on a better schedule than others. Death in old age is rarely called untimely-a long life is thought to be a full one. But with the passing of a young person, one assumes that the best years lay ahead

42、and the measure of that life was still to be taken.History denies this, of course. Among prominent summer deaths, one recalls those of Marilyn Monroe and James Deans, whose lives seemed equally brief and complete. Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully

43、judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year. The idea that the life cut short is unfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they leave on the world and by their intensity and virtue.（12）Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighbo

44、rhood would have been Thoreau's idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening one's perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starva

45、tion, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime

46、depends on how high we choose our difficulties. Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of "The pleasure of taking pains". The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to be effortless.We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game