新概念系列教材历来被公认为是适合大多数中学生课外学习的资料之一。下面小编就和大家分享新概念英语第四册Lesson10~14原文及翻译,希望有了这些内容,可以为大家学习新概念英语提供帮助!
Silicon valley
硅谷
What does the computer industry thrive on apart from anarchy?
Technology trends may push Silicon Valley back to the future. Carver Mead, a pioneer in integrated circuits and a professor of computer science at the California Institute of Technology, notes there are now work-stations that enable engineers to design, test and produce chips right on their desks, much the way an editor creates a newsletter on a Macintosh. As the time and cost of making a chip drop to a few days and a few hundred dollars, engineers may soon be free to let their imaginations soar without being penalized by expensive failures. Mead predicts that inventors will be able to perfect powerful customized chips over a weekend at the office -- spawning a new generation of garage start-ups and giving the U.S. a jump on its foreign rivals in getting new products to market fast. 'We're got more garages with smart people,' Mead observes. 'We really thrive on anarchy.'
And on Asians. Already, orientals and Asian Americans constitute the majority of the engineering staffs at many Valley firms. And Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Indian engineers are graduating in droves from California's colleges. As the heads of next-generation start-ups, these Asian innovators can draw on customs and languages to forge righter links with crucial Pacific Rim markets. For instance, Alex Au, a Stanford Ph. D. from Hong Kong, has set up a Taiwan factory to challenge Japan's near lock on the memory-chip market. India-born N.Damodar Reddy's tiny California company reopened an AT & T chip plant in Kansas City last spring with financing from the state of Missouri. Before it becomes a retirement village, Silicon Valley may prove a classroom for building a global business.
US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, October 2, 1989
New words and expressions 生词和短语
silicon
n. 硅
integrated
adj. 综合的
circuit
California
n. 加利福尼亚(美国州名)
workstation
n. 工作站
chip
n. 芯片,集成电路片,集成块
newsletter
n. 时事通讯
Macintosh
penalize
v. 处罚,惩罚
customize
spawn
v. 引起,酿成
thrive
v. 兴旺,繁荣
anarchy
oriental
n. 东方人
constitute
v. 构成
drove
n. 群
innovator
n. 发明者
forge
v. 发展
memory-chip
n. 内存条
AT & T
美国电话电报公司 (American Telephone and Telegraph)
Kansas
n. 堪萨斯(美国州名)
Missouri
n. 密苏里(美国州名)
参考译文
技术的发展趋势有可能把硅谷重新推向未来。卡弗.米德 -- 集成电路的一位先驱,加州理工学院的计算机教授注意到,现在有些计算机工作站使工程技术人员可以在他们的办公桌上设计、试验和生产芯片,就像一位编辑在苹果机上编出一份时事通讯一样。由于制造一块芯片的时间已缩短至几天,费用也只有几百美元,因此,工程技术人员可能很块就可充分发挥他们的想像力,而不会因失败而造成经济上的损失。米德预言发明者可以在办公室用一个周末的时间生产了完美的、功能很强的、按客户需求设计的芯片 -- 造就新一代从汽车间起家的技术人员,在把产品推向市场方面使美国把它的外国对手们打个措手不及。 “我们有更多的汽车间,那里有许多聪明人,”米德说。“我们确实是靠这种无政府状态发展起来的。” 靠的是亚洲人。硅谷许多公司中工程技术人员的大多数是东方人和亚裔美国人。
中国、韩国、菲律宾和印度的工程师一批批地从加州的大学毕业。作为新掘起一代的带头人,亚裔发明家可以凭借他们在习惯和语言上的优势,与关键的太平洋沿岸市场建立起更加牢固的联系。比如说,亚历克斯.奥,一位来自香港的斯坦福大学博士,已经在台湾建厂,对日本在内存条市场上近似垄断的局面提出了挑战。印度出生的N.达莫达.雷迪经营的小小的加州公司在堪萨斯城重新启用了美国电话电报公司的一家芯片工厂,并从密苏里州获取了财政上的支持。在硅谷变成一个退休村之前,它很可能成为建立全球商业的一个教学场地。
How to grow old
如何安度晚年
First listen and then answer the following question.
What, according to the author, is the best way to overcome the fear of death as you get older?
Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -- so at least it seems to me -- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river -- small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
BERTRAND RUSSELL How to grow old from Portraits from Memory
New words and expressions 生词和短语
oppress
v. 忧郁,压抑
justification
n. 正当理由
justifiably
adv. 无可非议地
cheat
v. 欺骗
abject
adj. 可怜的
ignoble
adj. 不体面的,可耻的
impersonal
ego
n. 自我
receded
v. 退去
increasing
adv. 日益,不断
passionately
adv. 激昂地
painlessly
adv. 毫无痛苦地
vitality
n. 精力
weariness
n. 疲惫感
参考译文
有些老年人因为怕死而感到烦恼。青年人有这种感觉是情有可原的。有理由害怕自己会死在战场上的年轻人,想到自己被剥夺了生活所能给予的最美好的东西时,感到痛苦,这是可以理解的。可是老年人已经饱尝了人间的甘苦,一切能做的都做了,如果怕死,就有点儿可怜又可鄙。克服怕死的办法 -- 至少在我看来是这样 -- 就是逐渐使自己的兴趣更加广泛,逐渐摆脱个人狭小的圈子,直到自我的围墙一点一点地倒塌下来,自己的生活慢慢地和整个宇宙的生活融合在一起。个人的存在应该像一条河流,开始很小,被紧紧地夹在两岸中间,接着热情奔放地冲过巨石,飞下瀑布。然后河面渐渐地变宽,两岸后撤,河水流得平缓起来,最后连绵不断地汇入大海,毫无痛苦地失去了自我的存在。上了年纪的人这样看待生命,就不会有惧怕死亡的心情了,因为自己关心的一切事件都会继续下去。 再者,随着精力的衰退,老年人的疲惫会增长,有长眠的愿望未尝不是一件好事情,我希望工作到死为止,明白了有人会继续我的未竟事业,想到能做的事都做了,也就坦然了。
Banks and their customers
Why is there no risk to the customer when a bank prints the customer's name on his cheques?
When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor -- who is which depending on whether the customer's account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give in to problems and complications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that the law is loaded against him.
The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example, a customer first opens an account, he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques draw by himself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheques on which its customer's signature has been forged. It makes no difference that the forgery may have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognize its customer's signature. For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the practice, adopted by banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates forgery, it is the bank which will lose, not the customer.
GORDON BARRIE and AUBREY L. DLAMOND The Consumer Society and the Law
New words and expressions 生词和短语
current
account
n. 账户
cash
n. 现金
debtor
n. 支票
debtor
n. 借方
creditor
n. 贷方
obligation
n. 义务
complication
n. 纠纷
debit
v. 把...记入借方
specimen
n. 样本
forge
v. 伪造
forgery
n. 伪造(文件,签名等)
adopt
v. 采用
facilitate
v. 使便利
参考译文
任何人在银行开一个活期账户,就等于把钱借给了银行。这笔钱他可以随时提取,提取的方式可以是取现金,也可以是开一张以他人为收款人的支票。银行与储户的关系主要是债务人和债权人的关系。究竟谁是债务人谁是债权人,要看储户是有结余还是透支。除了这一基本的简单的概念外,银行和储户彼此还需承担大量义务。其中许多义务往往引起问题和纠纷。但是储户不能像货物的买主那样来抱怨法律对自己不利。
银行必须遵照储户的嘱托办事,不能听从其他人的指令。比如,储户首次在银行开户时,嘱咐银行他的存款只能凭本世人签字的支票来提取。他把自己签名的样本交给银行,对此有一条非常严格的规定:银行没有任何权利或理由把储户的钱让伪造储户的支票取走。即使伪造得很巧妙,也不能付款,因为银行有责任辨认出其储户的签名。因此,某些银行已采用把储户印在支票上的作法。这种做法对储户毫无风险。如果因这种作法出现了伪造的话,受损失的将不是储户,而是银行。
The Butterfly Effect
蝴蝶效应
Why do small errors make it impossible to predict the weather system with a high degree of accuracy?
Beyond two or three days, the world's best weather forecasts are speculative, and beyond six or seven they are worthless.
The Butterfly Effect is the reason. For small pieces of weather -- and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards -- any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.
The modern weather models work with a grid of points of the order of sixty miles apart, and even so, some starting data has to guessed, since ground stations and satellites cannot see everywhere. But suppose the earth could be covered with sensors spaced one foot apart, rising at one-foot intervals all the way to the top of the atmosphere. Suppose every sensor gives perfectly accurate readings of temperature, pressure, humidity, and any other quantity a meteorologist would want. Precisely at noon an infinitely powerful computer takes all the data and calculates what will happen at each point at 12.01, then 1202, then 12.03...
The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12.01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.
JAMES GLEICK, Chaos
New words and expressions 生词和短语
forecast
n. 预报
speculative
adj. 推测的
blizzard
n. 暴风雪
deteriorate
v. 变坏
multiply
v. 增加
cascade
v. 瀑布似地落下
turbulent
adj. 狂暴的
dust devil
小尘暴,尘旋风
squall
n. 暴风
eddy
n. 旋涡
grid
n. 坐标方格
sensor
n. 传感器
humidity
n. 温度
meteorologist
n. 气象学家
Princeton
New Jersey
n. 新泽西(美国州名)
fluctuation
n. 起伏,波动
deviation
n. 偏差
参考译文
世界上的两三天以上的天气预报具有很强的猜测性,如果超过六七天,天气预报就没有了任何价值。
原因是蝴蝶效应。对于小片的恶劣天气 -- 对一个全球性的气象预报员来说,“小”可以意味着雷暴雨和暴风雪 -- 任何预测的质量会很快下降。错误和不可靠性上升,接踵而来的是一系列湍流的徵状,从小尘暴和暴风发展到只有卫星上可以看到的席卷整块大陆的旋涡。
现代气象模型以一个坐标图来显示,图中每个点大约是间隔60英里。既使是这样,有些开始时的资料也不得不依靠推测,因为地面工作站和卫星不可能看到地球上的每一个地方。假设地球上可以布满传感器,每个相隔1英尺,并按1英尺的间隔从地面一直排列到大气层的顶端。再假定每个传感器都极极端准确地读出了温度、气压、温度和气象学家需要的任何其他数据。在正午时分,一个功能巨大的计算机搜集了所有的资料,并算出在每一个点上12:01、12:02、12:03时可能出现的情况。
计算机无法推断出1个月以后的某一天,新泽西州的普林斯顿究竟是晴天还是雨天。正午时分,传感器之间的距离会掩盖计算机无法知道的波动、任何偏平均值的变化。到12:01时,那些波动就已经会在1英尺远的地方造成偏差。很快这种偏差会增加到尺10英的范围,如此等等,一直到全球的范围。
★ 新概念英语第四册第46课:Hobbies
★ 新概念英语第四册第29课:The hovercraft
★ 新概念英语第一册第39-40课:Don't drop it!
★ 新概念英语第三册第57课:Back in the old country
★ 新概念英语第二册第42课:Not very musical
★ 新概念英语第三册第55课:From the earth Greetings
★ 新概念英语第一册第105-106课:Full of mistakes
★ 新概念英语第三册
★ 新概念英语第一册