《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
amount of discretionary money. ―They‘re willing to spend it on computers an big-screen TVs, travel and sports cars, things that other generations would consider frivolous,‖ says David Morrison, whose firm, Twenty-something Inc., probes adultolecsents for companies like Coca-Cola and Nokia.
13 Jimmy Finn, 24, a paralegal at the Manhattan-based law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, made the most of his $66,000 annual income by moving back to his childhood home in nearby Staten Island. While his other friends paid exorbitant rents, Finn bought a new car and plane tickets to Florida so he could see his girlfriend on the weekends. He had ample spending money for restaurants and cabs, and began paying down his student loans. ―New York is a great young person‘s city but you can‘t beat home for the meals,‖ says Finn.
14 With adultolecsents all but begging for years of support after college, many parents admit they‘re not sure when a safety net becomes a suffocating blanket. ―I‘ve seen parents willing to destroy themselves financially,‖ says financial planner Bill Mahoney of Oxford, Mass. ―They‘re giving their college graduates $20,000, $30,000, even $40,000—money they should be plowing into retirement.‖ And it might only buy them added years of frustration. Psychiatrists say it‘s tough to convince a parent that self-sufficiency is the one thing they can‘t give their children. 15 No matter how loving the parent-child bond, parents inevitably heave a sigh of relief when their adult kids finally start paying their own way. Seven months ago, when Finn‘s paralegal job moved to Washington, D.C., he left home and got an apartment there. The transition, he said, was hard on his mother, Margie. Mom, though, reports that she‘s doing just fine. She‘s stopped making plates of ziti and meatballs for her boy and has more time for her friends. ―The idea all along was that he should be self-sufficient,‖ she says. It just took a little while.
Background and Culture Notes
1. The Me generation in the United States is a term referring to the Baby Boomer generation. The Baby Boomers (Americans born during 1946 and 1964 Baby boom) were dubbed the Me generation by writer Tom Wolfeduring in the 1970s; another writer Christopher Lasch used the term to comment on the rise of a culture of narcissism among the younger generation. The term caught on with the general public, at a time when ―self-realization‖ and ?self-fulfillment‖ were becoming cultural aspirations among young people, who considered them far more important than social responsibility. It is usually associated with the self-involved qualities among young people. 2. Master of the Universe (commonly abbreviated MOTU and sometimes referred to as He-Man, after the lead hero) is a media franchise created by Mattel. Mattel is an American toy manufacturing company founded in 1945 with headquarters in California. In 2010, it ranked #387 on the Fortune 500.
3. Smith College is a private, independent women‘s liberal arts college located in Northampton,
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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
Massachusetts, United States. In 2013, U.S. News & World Report ranked it the 18th among Best Liberal Arts Colleges.
4. The Woodstock generation: a popular music festival in the town of Woodstock near NY in 1969 which attracted thousands of young people, which is often seen as presently Hippie movement of the 1960s and early 70s.
I. Choose the best answer for each of the following comprehension questions. 1. Which of the following expressions doesn‘t convey negative meaning? A. college senior overgrown kids not-so-little-ones
slackers
2. The tone of the author referring to American people in 20s and 30s is _____. A. positive
interesting negative
inappreciative
3. According to paragraph 2, parents are doing all the following except _____ for their children. A. pay their rent and health-insurance premium B. change the guest room back into bedroom
C. give career consultation provide tools needed in their career 4. What is the modern truth Geraci and other American youth face?
A. They are still using the old bed even though they have been university students. B. It is a bit embarrassing that they still depend on their old family as post-graduates. C. The life in university seems quite unbearable comparing to that at home.
D. They are not welcomed at home by parents who wished they could be independent. 5. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
A. Parents are happy to welcome their children back from college.
B. Young people take it for granted to live with their parents upon college graduation. C. Parents are unwilling to have their college graduated children live with them. D. Young people have no way but to live with their parents upon graduation. 6. From paragraph 4, we can tell _____.
A. Experts think that the only way for an infant to learn indecency is to let it cry to sleep B. Iris and Andrew Aronson never take experts‘ opinion into consideration before they are
doctors themselves.
C. Elena has to move out because her sister is moving in.
D. Mr. & Mrs. Aronson would like to make their daughters feel safe before they are fully
self-sufficient.
7. According to paragraphs 7 and 8, the following sayings are true except _____. A. The author disapproves of the co-dependence between parents and the children.
B. Janice Charlton forced her daughter to study for master degree, but reached an unexpected
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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
result.
C. The Me Generation and the Mini Me Generation shared the same good life.
D. Parents believe they know how to get good life for their kids in the increasing competitive
world.
8. U.S. Navy sent recruiting letters to both parents and their children because _____. A. young people have to get approval from their parents before joining the Navy B. young people genuinely like and respect their parents‘ opinions C. parents are willing to play the role as career consolers D. the Navy tries to recruit the whole family
II. Translate the following Chinese passage into English.
我去年如愿以偿地考上了北师大的研究生。我很满意现在的生活。但也会时常感到焦虑不安，不知道所谓光明的前途在哪里。两年以后我将拿到硕士学位，但同时也得作出一个抉择——是回老家跟父母生活在一起，还是在北京扎根。一想到这个问题，我心里就不禁一阵紧张。一方面，不想再让父母做“空巢老人”，回家乡的话可以多些时间陪他们。小时候享受父母的保护，现在长大了该承担起照顾父母的责任了。另一方面，选择留在北京的话，会有更多的就业机会，实现理想的可能性也大一些。父母对我寄予厚望，我也想能够实现理想，让他们过上更好的生活。 Unit 6
The Nature of Scientific Reasoning
by Jacob Bronowski
1
What is the insight in which the scientist tries to see into nature? Can it indeed be called
either imaginative or creative? To the literary man the question may seem merely silly. He has been taught that science is a large collection of facts; and if this is true, then the only seeing which scientists need to do is, he supposes, seeing the facts. He pictures them, the colorless professionals of science, going off to work in the morning into the universe in a neutral, unexposed state. They then expose themselves like a photographic plate. And then in the darkroom or laboratory they develop the image, so that suddenly and startlingly it appears, printed in capital letters, as a new formula for atomic energy. 2
Men who have read Balzac and Zola1 are not deceived by the claims of these writers that
1
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and émile Zola (1840-1902), nineteenth-century French novelists.
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they do no more than record the facts. The readers of Christopher Isherwood1 do not take him literally when he writes ―I am a camera.‖ Yet the same readers solemnly carry with them from their school-days this foolish picture of the scientist fixing by some mechanical process the facts of nature. I have had of all people a historian tell me that science is a collection of facts, and his voice had not even the ironic rasp of one filing cabinet reproving another. 3
It seems impossible that this historian had ever studied the beginnings of a scientific
discovery. The Scientific Revolution can be held to begin in the year 1543 when there was brought to Copernicus, perhaps on his deathbed, the first printed copy of the book he had finished about a dozen years earlier. The thesis of this book is that the earth moves around the sun. When did Copernicus go out and record this fact with his camera? What appearance in nature prompted his outrageous guess? And in what odd sense is this guess to be called a neutral record of fact? 4
Less than a hundred years after Copernicus, Kepler published (between 1609 and 1619) the
three laws which describe the paths of the planets. The work of Newton and with it most of our mechanics spring from these laws.2 They have a solid, matter-of-fact sound. For example, Kepler says that if one squares they year of a planet, one gets a number which is proportional to the cuble of its average distance from the sun. Does anyone think that such a law is found by taking enough readings and then squaring and cubing everything in sight? If he does, then, as a scientist, he is doomed to a wasted life; he has as little prospect of making a scientific discovery as an electronic brain has. 5
It was not this way that Copernicus and Kepler thought, or that scientists think today.
Copernicus found that the orbits of the planets would look simpler if they were looked at from the sun and not from the earth. But he did not in the first place find this by routine calculation. His first step was a leap of imagination—to lift himself from the earth, and put himself wildly, speculatively into the sun. ―The earth conceives from the sun,‖ he wrote; and ―the sun rules the family of stars.‖ We catch in his mind an image, the gesture of the virile man standing in the sun, with arms outstretched, overlooking the planets. Perhaps Copernicus took the picture from the drawings of the youth with outstretched arms which the Renaissance teachers put into their books
12
English novelist and playwright (1904-1986) whose writing was the basis for the musical Cabret.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), Polish astronomer; Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), German astronomer; Isaac Newton (1642-1727), English physicist and mathematician.
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on the proportions of the body. Perhaps he had seen Leonardo‘s1 drawings of his loved pupil Salai. I do not know. To me, the gesture of Copernicus, the shining youth looking outward from the sun, is still vivid in a drawing which William Blake2 in 1780 based on all these: the drawing which is usually called Glad Day. 6
Kepler‘s mind, we know, was filled with just such fanciful analogies; and we know what they
were. Kepler wanted to relate the speeds of the planets to the musical intervals. He tried to fit the five regular solids into their orbits. None of these likenesses worked, and they have been forgotten; yet they have been and they remain the stepping stones of every creative mind. Kepler felt for his laws by way of metaphors, he searched mystically for likenesses with what he knew in every strange corner of nature. And when among these guesses he hit upon his laws, he did not think of their numbers as the balancing of a cosmic bank account, but as a revelation of the unity in all nature. To us, the analogies by which Kepler listened for the movement of the planets in the music of the spheres are farfetched. Yet are they more so than the wild leap by which Rutherford and Bohr3 in our own century found a model for the atom in, of all places, the planetary system? 7
No scientific theory is a collection of facts. It will not even do to call a theory true or false in
the simple sense in which every fact is either so or not so. The Epicureans held that matter is made of atoms two thousand years ago and we are now tempted to say that their theory was true. But if we do so we confuse their notion of matter with our own. John Dalton4 in 1808 first saw the structure of matter as we do today, and what he took from the ancients was not their theory but something richer, their image: the atom. Much of what was in Dalton‘s mind was as vague as the Greek notion, and quite as mistaken. But he suddenly gave life to the new facts of chemistry and the ancient theory together, by fusing them to give what neither had: a coherent picture of how matter is linked and built up from different kinds of atoms. The act of fusion is the creative act. 8
All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. The search may be on a grand scale,
as in the modern theories which try to link the fields of gravitation and electromagnetism. But we do not need to be browbeaten by the scale of science. There are discoveries to be made by snatching a small likeness from the air too, if it is bold enough. In 1935 the Japanese physicist 12
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian artist, inventor, and designer. English poet, artist, and engraver (1757-1827). 3
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), British physicist; Niels Bohr (1885-1962), Danish physicist. 4
British chemist and physicist (1766-1844) who developed the atomic theory of matter and thus is considered a father of modern physical science.
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