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北京师范大学通用学术英语

《学术英语读译》课程教材2015~2016学年春季学期

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期

Unit 1

Getting and Spending: A Cross-Cultural View of Economics

1 Every society produces, distributes, and uses goods and services. Therefore, every society has an economy, a system that manages the process of production, distribution, consumption, or use. The people of every culture learn specific economic behavior. They have certain motivations and make certain economic choices that their society has taught them.2 Formal economics states that people make rational economic choices that result in their well-being and profit. It studies the production and consumption of goods in an industrialize market economy. It assumes that the economy runs on rational choices such as those a businessperson makes: Should the firm cut down or expand its production in a certain situation? Should it purchase a new machine or hire more laborers? Where should it locate it plant? Will it manufacture shoes or gloves? How much will be spent on advertising its product? All these decisions are assumed to be rational, that is, based on the desire to make the greatest possible profit from limited resources.3 Formal economics also assumes that individuals as well as business act rationally in making decisions about how to spend their incomes. Individuals may have many desires, but they usually have only limited income to fulfill those desires. Therefore, decisions about how to spend that income—whether to buy a car, give the children a private school education, place a down payment on a house, or take a vacation—must be weighed rationally before they are made. Decisions about how to spend time are similarly weighed. Should one spend one’s leisure time with one’s family, in a second job, or back in school studying for an advanced degree to improve one’s future economic chances?4 Formal economics focuses on the Western industrial market economy. However, its key assumptions about rational decision making limited resources, and the importance of profit do not apply to all societies. For example, in some traditional societies economic choices are made as the result of a different value system from that common in the United States. For instance, in hunting and gathering societies such as that of the Kung of south-central Africa, people have not been trained to desire many material goods. Therefore, they do not have to work all day, every day to fulfill their needs; they can get enough food and other essentials and still have plenty of leisure time left over. From our point of view, people who do not use their leisure time to further their work and profit are “lazy”. But not everyone feels the need for more possessions and services—more “stuff”—than they already have.5 In our society, high social status or respect is closely tied to the possession or consumption of certain “brand name” goods and services. For example, all cars serve the same basic function of transportation; however, certain cars known to be expensive have more prestige than do other cars that may be just as useful. In addition, we are willing to pay extra for those services that our cars automatically perform for us: automatic windows, automatic trunk openers, automatic gear shifts. In other societies, such prestige may not be associated with the display of goods but rather with generosity in giving goods away to others. People who own and display much more than others may be thought stingy and may lose rather than gain prestige.

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期6 In the United States, we generally place economic priorities above social ones. In some societies, however, social relations have a higher priority than economic ones. For example, in many Asian countries, a businessperson will leave her or her work to show hospitality to a guest even if it means the loss of a day’s income. The more traditional a society is, the more it is expected that friends, relatives, and neighbors will help each other financially in time of need with a formal contract for paying back the loan. Furthermore, in many non-Western cultures, even those whose standard of living is quite low, people will go into debt of social or religious ceremonies such as a feast or a funeral.7 In non-industrial societies few aspects of behavior are purely economic. Most activity has a mixed social, ceremonial, or moral aspect to it, as well as having an economic one. For example, the Ponape people of the South Pacific often hold huge feasts at which the host serves the pig and beer and the guests bring such prestigious foods as yams and breadfruit. These feasts have an important economic purpose. They provide a way for extra food to be distributed around the village without shaming those farmers whose crops are inferior. They also permit food to be eaten that would otherwise be wasted, since the Ponape do not have refrigeration or other means for preserving food. But, these feasts also serve important social purposes. They bring people together and allow them to gain prestige by acting modestly about their contributions; at these Ponape feasts, one gains prestige not only by bringing extra food but by praising the contributions of others as better than one’s own. The social aspects of the Ponape feasts may be hidden from outsiders, but they are understood and respected by the members of the Ponape culture.8 Other aspects of the economy that may differ greatly from one culture to another are the basic unit of production, the sexual division of labor, and the degree of specialization of labor. In agricultural societies, the unit of production is most frequently the extended family that consists of several generations of relatives. The specialization of labor is usually by sec and age only. The men perform all tasks related to farming, whereas the women perform all the work related to house-keeping, gardening, and child care. Social and economic activities are usually integrated in such societies, and often decisions that appear to be economically “irrational” have a hidden meaning in terms of the culture’s beliefs or values.9 On the other hand, in industrial societies, the unit of production is usually a business firm outside the family structure that is motivated almost entirely by economic interests. Typically there is a high degree of specialization of labor: Workers may belong to different unions depending on the different type of job they perform within an industry, or a company may have a dozen vice-presidents, each with a narrow area of responsibility.

Exercises

I. Read the text and complete the following outline.

Summary OutlinesParagraph [1]: The economy is a system for managing the process of (1)_______________,

Learn about the text

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期____________, and ______________.

Paragraphs [2]&[3]: Formal economics is based on the idea that people make thoughtful economic choices.Example a: A businessman may decide to (2)_________________________Example b: An individual may decide to (3)___________________________

Paragraphs [4]&[5]: Western industrial societies and some traditional societies have different economic values.a. Western people work (4) _______________________________________b. In Western society, respect is (5)__________________________________.c. Traditional people may/may not desire/display (6)___________________

Paragraphs [6]&[7]: A central idea of these paragraphs is that (7)____________ ______________________________________________..Example a: Some people will go in debt for a marriage or a funeral.Example b: A person may close his business to (8)_____________________Example c: A couple may marry for love (9)___________________________In most traditional, economic activities also (10)_______________________..

Paragraphs [8]&[9]: Traditional and industrial economies differ from each other in several ways.Traditional a: (11) ________________________________________________

b: There is little (12)__________________ of work. c: (13) ________________________________________________

Industrial a: Production is mostly through business firms interested in (14)__.b:

(15)__________________________________________________ (Adopted from Joan Young Gregg. Communication and Culture: A Reading-writing Text. 北京：中国水利水电出版社，1999. )

Unit 2

College Pressuresby William Zinsser

Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean’s excuse for my chem midterm which will begin in about 1 hour. All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. I’ve fallen incredibly, inconceivably behind.Carlos: Help! I’m anxious to hear from you. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until I hear from you. Tomorrow is the last day for……Carlos: I left town because I started bugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-home make-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the 10 th. It was due on the 5th. P.S. I’m going to the dentist. Pain is pretty bad.

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期Carlos: Probably by Friday I’ll be able to get back to my studies. Right now I’m going to take a long walk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.Carlos: I’m really up the proverbial creek1. The problem is I really bombed the history final. Since I need that course for my major I……Carlos: Here follows a tale of woe2. I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever so didn’t have much time to study. My professor……Carlos: Aargh!! Trouble. Nothing original but everything’s piling up at once. To be brief, my job interview……Hey Carlos, good news! I’ve got mononucleosis.

1 Who are these wretched supplicants, scribbling notes so laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles of postponement and balm? They are men and women who belong to Branford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University3, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortas—often slipped under his door at 4 a.m.—last year.2 But students like the ones who wrote those notes can also be found on campuses from coast to coast—especially in New England4, and at many other private colleges across the country that have high academic standards and highly motivated students. Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their gallows humor they are authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.3 My own connection with the message writers is that I am master5 of Branford College. I live in its Gothic quadrangle and know the students well. (We have 485 of them.) I am privy to their hopes and fears—and also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night (“Does anybody ca-a-are?”). If they went to Carlos to ask how to get through tomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest of their lives.4 Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don't want to hear such liberating news. They want a map—right now—that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, social security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.5 What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.6 My wish, of course, is naive. One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail. Achievement is the national god, venerated in our media—the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive—and the glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.7 I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic

1 The expression “up the proverbial creek” is an altered version of the old saying “up the creek without a paddle,” meaning “to be in a difficult situation.” 2 “a tale of woe,” idiom, means a sad story; a list of personal problems; an excuse for failing to do something. 3 See “Background and Cultural Notes 1.”4 See “Background and Cultural Notes 2.”5 See “Background and Cultural Notes 1.”

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains, only victims. 8 “In the late 1960s,” one dean told me, “the typical question that I got from students was, ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world?’ or ‘How can I make a contribution?’ Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?’” Many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said, “They’re trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.” 9 Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale’s official system of grading, A means “excellent” and B means “very good.” Today, looking very good is no longer enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh, Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170 students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.10 It is all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it’s nice to think that admission officers are really reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with A’s that they regard a B as positively shameful.11 The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the “gentlemen’s C,” when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses—music, art, philosophy, classics6, anthropology, poetry, religion—that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would employ graduates who have this range and curiosity rather than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I don’t know if they are getting A’s or C’s, and I don’t care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can’t.12 Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60% of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs higher every year, of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up.

6 See “Background and Cultural Notes 3.”

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期Health premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in America the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents and students, joined by the common bond of debt.13 Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part-time at college and full-time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he,” incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn’t yet caught up with that fact.14 Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.15 I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

“Do you want to go to medical school?” I ask them.“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”“Then why are you going?”“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They’re paying all this money and ...”

16 Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean well; they are trying to steer their sons and daughters toward a secure future. But the sons and daughters want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do, indeed, pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession—courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or as I sometimes put it, “pre-rich.”17 But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obligated to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.18 I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-rounded person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artist is a “dumb” thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the “dumb” courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in itself—

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期she deserves to follow her muse.19 Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.20 “I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn’t tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”21 The story is almost funny—except that it’s not. It’s symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clack of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”22 Probably they won’t. They will get sick. They will get “blocked.” They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out. Hey Carlos, Help!23 Part of the problem is that they do more than they are expected to do. A professor will assign five-page papers. Several students will start writing ten-page papers, and a few will raise the ante7 to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.24 “Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,” one dean points out, “it’s just bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic works, psychologically.”25 Why can’t the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor's main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and doesn’t know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He didn’t sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought from home. That’s what deans, masters, chaplains8, and psychiatrists are for.26 To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism9 has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students don’t have as much time to spend. They also are overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their fingernails onto a shrinking profession. If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.27 Ultimately it will be the student’s own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their

7 Here “ante” refers to a forced bet in the game of poker.8 See “Background and Cultural Notes 4.”9 See “Background and Cultural Notes 5.”

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期classmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.28 “Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Horta. “College should be open-ended; at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along, it's almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist—that they’ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best-paying slot.”29 “They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”30 I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story: if they were so dreary I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are unusually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.31 Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extra-curricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.32 This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the 1960s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.33 They also can’t afford to be the willing slave for organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper whose past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that “newsies” routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today’s student will write one or two articles a week, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I’ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.

34 If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.35 I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期tell them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.36 I ask them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

Background and Culture Notes

Let me tell you

1. Yale’s residential college system, now more than 70 years old, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the College. Before freshman year, all incoming undergraduates are assigned to one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges. Students remain affiliated with their residential college for all 4 years (and beyond). Every residential college has its own master and dean, both of whom are Yale faculty members. The master is the chief administrative officer and the presiding faculty presence in each residential college. He or she is responsible for the physical well-being and safety of students in the residential college, as well as for fostering and shaping the social, cultural, and educational life and character of the college. The dean serves as the chief academic and personal adviser to students in his or her residential college. 2. New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United Statesconsisting of the six states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.3. Classics is the branch of the humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and culture of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially archaic Greece and republican Rome.4. Traditionally, a chaplain is a minister, such as a priest, pastor, rabbi, imam or lay representative of a religious tradition, attached to a secular institution such as a hospital, prison, military unit, school, police department, university, or private chapel.5. Pauperism (Latin pauper, “poor”) is a term meaning poverty or generally the state of being poor. It more generally refers to all those who are supported at public expense, and still more generally, to all whose existence is dependent for any considerable period upon charitable assistance, whether this assistance be public or

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期private. In this sense the word is to be distinguished from “poverty”.

Unit 3 An Education in Cynicism

Colleges’ early-admissions policies serve their interests

—but not those of students or societyby Robert J. Samuelson

1 College admissions process in America has become an overwrought and frenzied ritual, driven by the anxieties of striving students and middle-class parents who worry that if Stephen and Susie don’t get into the “right” college their lives will be ruined. This is a myth, but one hard to demolish and especially at this time of year, when most applications are being completed. Worse, all the pressures and absurdities of the process are now needlessly magnified by colleges that resort more and more to “early admissions”—a practice rightly characterized as a “racket” by writer James Fallows in a recent Atlantic Monthly.2 The most selective colleges and universities sin the most. In the fall of 2000, there were about 1.2 million entering freshmen at four-year schools. Of these, only 163,004 applied for early admissions, according to the College Board. But Harvard routinely admits 55 to 60 percent of its freshman class early; at the University of Pennsylvania the proportion is 40 to 50 percent. The College Board found 41 schools where the share exceeded 30 percent and 464 four-year schools—a fourth of the total—that offered some sort of early admissions. (Early admissions mean that students submit their applications before the standard January deadline and are typically admitted in December or January, rather than in the spring.)3 Let us now count early-admissions’ drawbacks: It’s unfair, because it discriminates against students who apply later. A study of

14 of the country’s most selective schools by researchers at Harvard found that applying early gave students a significant advantage, equal to about a 100-point jump in their SAT scores. (The researchers couldn’t reveal schools’ names, but they presumably included many Ivies and schools like Amherst and Stanford.)

It forces students to make premature choices about where to apply. They haven’t visited enough schools, talked to enough friends, thought about it enough. “There’s a tremendous growth that occurs in the 12th grade,” says Dean Strassburger, a college counselor at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “Early decision is rushing this along.”

It inflicts unnecessary cruelty. Getting rejected once is bad enough. Now students

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期can get rejected twice. The most selective schools still don’t accept most early-admissions candidates. Harvard admits about one in six (the acceptance rate for “regular” admissions is about one in 18.)

It worsens “senioritis”—the academic letdown after college acceptance letters are received.” “A lot of these kids, the second they get their decisions, are in your office saying, ‘I want to drop Modern European History”, says Scott White, a guidance counselor at Montclair High School in New Jersey.

4 Sure, students accepted under early admissions benefit. Their ordeal is over. But in general, the practice has “adverse effects on high-school students”, says Yale president Richard C. Levin. Although Yale now admits about 40 percent of its class through early admission, Levin has become an open (and rare) critic among college and university leaders. The problems and contradictions will multiply, because as more students and parents become aware of the advantages of applying early, more will do so. More early choices will be made with less conviction. Already, Yale’s early applications have doubled since 1996. If colleges accept more early candidates, discrimination and premature senioritis will increase. If the rejection rate rises, so will gratuitous cruelty.5 What motivates colleges and universities? Mainly self-interest that, at most, is only partially defensible. The University of Pennsylvania is one of the few schools can do enough to admit that it favors candidates who apply early. “The majority of students on campus at Penn are here because it’s their first choice—that changes the tone of the campus,” says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions. When he first came to Penn in 1978, only 35 to 40 percent of freshmen picked it as their first choice. “It’s a whole different attitude,” he says.6 But there are other, less commendable reasons for using early admissions, as Fallows shows. It improves colleges’ “yield” (the percentage of students accepted who actually attend). Because yield is one factor in U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings, which can boost a school’s position. Early admissions also improve “enrollment management”; they minimize the chances that too many or too few students will show up in the fall. Finally, early admissions may allow colleges to attract more upper-middle-class students who don’t need financial aid, though a recent College Board study disputes this. (The study found that freshmen, regardless of when admitted, got similar aid packages.)7 All this expediency comes at a growing moral cost. Many colleges—including Harvard—contend that students who apply later do not reduce their personal odds of admission. This is almost certainly false, and colleges that maintain the fiction are being misleading and even dishonest. Bad show.8 It is true that, compared with most social problems, the sins of early admissions are small potatoes. Most students will get over any disappointments, just as they will get over not being admitted to Dartmouth or Duke. But it is also true that, unlike most social problems, this one could actually be fixed. If a dozen or more top schools—Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Williams—denounced and dropped the practice, it would lose respectability and critical mass. If only one or two colleges do so, as Levin says, little would change.

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期9 What we have, for the moment, is the spectacle of some of America’s most prestigious education institutions engaged in behavior that can only be described as antisocial. They have subordinated students’ interests to their own. This is hypocritical and indifferent to any larger social good. The message they’re sending to students is, “Get used to it; this is the way the world works.” Colleges might argue that they’re providing something useful: an introductory course in cynicism. But no college has yet offered this defense, which would at least have the virtue of honesty.

Background and Culture Notes

Let me tell you

1. Robert J. Samuelson, a contributing editor of Newsweek, has written a column for the Washington Post since 1977. His column generally appears on Wednesdays.2. In the U. S., the SAT is an examination which is often taken by students who wish to enter a college or university as undergraduates. SAT is an abbreviation for “Scholastic Aptitude Test”. In the U. K., SATs are a set of tasks given to seven-year-old school children in order to test their ability. SAT is an abbreviation for “Standard Assessment Task”.3. Ivies refer to Ivy League institutions. The Ivy League is committed to seeking individuals who are remarkable both as students and as athletes. The Ivy Group includes many prestigious universities including Princeton, Yale, etc.

Unit 4

Infantile Amnesia

1 What do you remember about your life before you were three? Few people can remember anything that happened to them in their early years. Adults’ memories of the next few years also tend to be scanty. Most people remember only a few events—usually ones that were meaningful and distinctive, such as being hospitalized or a

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期sibling’s birth. 2 How might this inability to recall early experiences be explained? The sheer passage of time does not account for it; adults have excellent recognition of pictures of people who attended high school with them 35 years earlier. Another seemingly plausible explanation—that infants do not form enduring memories at this point in development—also is incorrect. Children two and a half month olds remember some events a year later. Nor does the hypothesis that infantile amnesia reflects repression—or holding back—of sexuality charged episodes explain the phenomenon. While such repression may occur, people cannot remember ordinary events from the infant and toddler periods, either. 3 Three other explanations seem more promising. One involves physiological changes relevant to memory. Maturation of the frontal lobes of the brain continues throughout early childhood, and this part of the brain may be critical for remembering particular episodes in ways that can be retrieved later. Demonstrations of infants’ and toddlers’ long-term memory have involved their repeating motor activities that they had seen or done earlier, such as reaching in the dark for objects, putting a bottle in a doll’s mouth, or pulling apart two pieces of a toy. The brain’s level of physiological maturation may support these types of memories, but not ones requiring explicit verbal descriptions. 4 A second explanation involves the influence of the social world on children’s language use. Hearing and telling stories about events may help children store information in ways that will endure into later childhood and adulthood. Through hearing stories with a clear beginning, middle, and ending, children may learn to extract the gist of events in ways that they will be able to describe many years later. Consistent with this view, parents and children increasingly engage in discussions of past events when children are about three years old. However, hearing such stories is not sufficient for younger children to form enduring memories. Telling such stories to two year olds does not seem to produce long-lasting verbalizable memories. 5 A third likely explanation for infantile amnesia involves incompatibilities between the ways in which infants encode information and the ways in which older children and adults retrieve it. Whether people can remember an event depends critically on the fit between the way in which they earlier encoded the information and the way in which they later attempt to retrieve it. The better able the person is to reconstruct the perspective from which the material was encoded, the more likely that recall will be successful. 6 This view is supported by a variety of factors that can create mismatches between very young children’s encoding and older children’s and adults’ retrieval efforts. The world looks very different to a person whose head is only two or three feet above the ground than to one whose head is five or six feet above it. Older children and adults often try to retrieve the names of things they saw, but infants would not have encoded the information verbally. General knowledge of categories of events such as a birthday party or a visit to the doctor’s office helps older individuals encode their experiences, but again, infants and toddlers are unlikely to encode many experiences within such knowledge structures. 7 These three explanations of infantile amnesia are not mutually exclusive; indeed,

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期they support each other. Physiological immaturity may be part of why infants and toddlers do not form extremely enduring memories, even when they hear stories that promote such remembering in preschoolers. Hearing the stories may lead preschoolers to encode aspects of events that allow them to form memories they can access as adults. Conversely, improved encoding of what they hear may help them better understand and remember stories and thus make the stories more useful for remembering future events. Thus, all three explanations—physiological maturation, hearing and producing stories about past events, and improved encoding of key aspects of events—seem likely to be involved in overcoming infantile amnesia.

Unit 5

Bringing Up AdultolescentsMillions of Americans in their 20s and 30s are still supported by their

parents. The Me Generation1 is raising the Mini-Me Generation.by Peg Tyre

1 When Silvia Geraci goes out to dinner with friends, she has a flash of anxiety when the check comes. She can pay her share—her parents give her enough money to cover all her expenses. It’s just that others in her circle make their own money now. “I know I haven’t earned what I have. It’s been given to me,” says Geraci, 22, who returned to her childhood home is suburban New York after graduating from college last year. “It’s like I’m stuck in an in-between spot. Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting left behind.” Poised on the brink of what should be a bright future, Geraci and millions like her face a thoroughly modern truth: it’s hard to feel like a Master of the Universe2 when you’re sleeping in your old twin bed.2 Whether it’s reconverting the guest room back into a bedroom, paying for graduate school, writing a blizzard of small checks to cover rent and health-insurance premiums or acting as career counselors, parents across the country are trying to provide their twenty-somethings with the tools they’ll need to be self-sufficient—someday. In the process, they have created a whole new breed of child—the adultolecsent.3 For their part, these overgrown kids seem content to enjoy the protection of their parents as they drift from adolescence to early adulthood. Relying on your folks to light the shadowy path to the future has become so accepted that even the ultimate loser move—returning home to live with your parents—has lost its stigma. According to the 2000 Census, nearly 4 million people between the ages of 25 and 34 live with

1 See “Background and Cultural Notes 1.”2 See “Background and Cultural Notes 2.”

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期their parents. And there are signs that even more moms and dads will be welcoming their not-so-little-ones back home. Last week, in an online survey by Monster-TRAK.com, a job-search firm, 60% of college students reported that they planned to live at home after graduation—and 21% said that they planned to remain there for more than a year.4 Unlike their counterparts in the early 1990s, adultolecsents aren’t demoralized slackers lining up for the bathroom with their longing-to-be-empty-nester parents. Iris and Andrew Aronson, two doctors in Chicago, were happy when their daughter, Elena, 24, a Smith3 graduate, got a modest-paying job and moved back home last year. It seemed a natural extension of their parenting philosophy—make the children feel secure enough and they’ll eventually strike out on their own. “When she was an infant, the so-called experts said letting babies cry themselves to sleep was the only way to teach them to sleep independent of their mother,” says Iris. “But I never did that either.” Come fall, Elena is heading off to graduate school. Her sister, who will graduate from Stanford University this spring, is moving in. Living at home works, Elena explains, because she’s knows she’s leaving. “Otherwise, it’ll feel too much like high school,” says Elena. “As it is, sometimes I look around and think, ‘OK, now it’s time to start my homework.’”5 Most adultolecsents no longer hope, or even desire, to hit the traditional benchmarks of independence—marriage, kids, owning a home, financial autonomy—in the years following college. The average age for a first marriage is now 26, four years later than it was in 1970, and child-bearing is often postponed for a decade or more after that. Jobs are scarce, and increasingly, high-paying careers require a graduate degree. The decades-long run-up in the housing market has made a starter home a pipe dream for most people under 30. “The conveyor belt that transported adultolecsents into adulthood has broken down,” says Dr. Frank Furstenberg, who heads up a $3.4 million project by the MacArthur Foundation studying the adultolecsent phenomenon.6 Beyond the economic realities, there are some complicated psychological bonds that keep able-bodied college graduates on their parents’ payroll. Unlike the Woodstock generation4, the current crop of twenty-somethings aren’t building their adult identity in reaction to their parents’ way of life. In the 1960’s, kids crowed about not trusting anyone over 30; these days, they can’t live without them. “We are seeing a closer relationship between generations than we have seen since World War II,” says University of Maryland psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett. “These young people genuinely like and respect their parents.”7 To some, all this support and protection—known as “scaffolding” among the experts—looks like an insidious form of co-dependence. Psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld says these are the same hyper-involved parents who got minivan fatigue from ferrying their kids to extracurricular activities and turned college admission into a competitive sport. “They’ve convinced themselves they know how to lead a good life, and they want to get that for their kids, no matter what,” says Rosenfeld.8 By the time those children reach their 20s, says market researcher Neil Howe, their desires for the future are often indistinguishable from the desires of their parents. 3 See “Background and Cultural Notes 3.”4 See “Background and Cultural Notes 4.”

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期“The Me Generation,” says Howe, “has simply turned into the Mini-Me Generation.”9 Trying to guarantee your children the Good Life, though, can sometimes backfire. A few years ago, Janice Charlton of Philadelphia pressured her daughter, Mary, then 26, to get a master’s degree, even agreeing to cosign two $17,000 school loans if she did. Mary dropped out, Janice says, and the loans went into default. “I’m sorry I ever suggested it,” says Janice. “We’re still close but it’s a sticky issue between us.”10 Many parents say they’re simply ensuring that their kids have an edge in an increasingly competitive world. When Tom D’Agne’s daughter, Heather, 26, told him she was thinking about graduate school, D’Agnes, 52, flew from their home in Hawaii to San Francisco to help her find one. He edited the essay section of her application and vetted her letters of recommendation, too. While Tom’s wife, Leona, worried about creating a “dependency mentality,” Tom was adamant about giving his daughter a leg up.11 Parents aren’t waiting to get involved. Campus career counselors report being flooded with calls from parents anxious to participate in their college senior’s job search. Last fall the U.S. Navy began sending letters describing their programs to potential recruits—and their parents, “Parents are becoming actively involved in the career decisions of their children,” says Cmdr. Steven Lowry, public-affairs officer for Navy recruiting. “We don’t recruit the individual anymore. We recruit the whole family.”12 The steady flow of cash from one generation of active consumers to another has marketers salivating. These twenty-somethings are adventuresome, will try new products and have a hefty 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

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期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

Let me tell you

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, 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 1970s.

Unit 6 Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?

AbstractScientists and physicists have long been in the search for a single unified theory that will describe all the processes in a universe by a single set of equations and the existence of such a theory would result in the Unification of Physics. But there have been many false alarms in the past forcing eminent scientists to claim that physics might be over in just a matter of six months. From the current developments on the scene of theoretical physics, the end of physics has not drawn any closer and it appears that it may be a long while before we can again claim that the “End is in Sight for Theoretical Physics”.

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期

Before we try to answer the above question it is important for us to understand what a theory is and the relevance of theoretical physics.

What is a Theory?A theory is a simple set of rules and principles expressed in a short message. The

scientist Stephen Wolfram describes it as a compressed package of information applicable to many cases. To be a part of science, a theory must make predictions that survive comparison with observation and experiment. Many theories might exist side by side both describing the same phenomenon. But theories which tend to be in serious disagreement with the outcome of careful and well conducted experiments tend to get replace by the theories which agree with experiment and observation in a better way. Sometimes a single contradictory result might be all that is needed to discredit a theory.

Function of Theoretical PhysicsTheoretical Physics is the branch of physics that essentially gives birth to new,

and not always revolutionary, ideas. It is the breeding ground of all the ideas and theories presented by scientists and theoreticians which is always open to scrutiny through experiment and observation, and hence many ideas die in their infancy due to their lack of consistency with observation. In the past, theory and experiment went hand in hand but due to the rapid advancements in our understanding of the nature, theoretical physics and experimental physics have become quite separate. These days having a supposedly correct theory does not mean that the theory has been verified experimentally because sometimes experiments are nearly impossible to carry out. Also, Theoretical physics is not an independent branch but it lies at the root level of all branches of physics and is cause of ingesting new ideas in that particular field.

A Brief History of Evolution of Theoretical PhysicsIn the 19th century only 2 theories existed which accounted for the behavior of the

then observed part of the universe: Newton’s Gravitational theory and Maxwell’s theory of Electromagnetic radiation. But these two theories had called for different speeds of light. Maxwell’s theory specified a fixed speed for electromagnetic radiation whereas Newtonian mechanics said that the speed of light would depend on the motion of the observer. In the early 1900s the two theories of relativity proposed by Einstein solved this problem by stating that no matter what the velocity of the observer, the speed of light shall appear fixed.

The Maxwellian theory and the general relativity theory are classical theories in the sense that they treat the universe as continuous. This continuity meant that matter and energy could be divided into as small units as possible.

Quantum revolution changed the way physicists’ view the world and it sets the ultimate limit on how small a unit of time, energy or distance can be. Discoveries about the nature of light led to the formation of the field called Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) which contains the best of Maxwell’s theory. In the 1960s and 1970s the Weak Nuclear Force was unified with QED by means of the theory called

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期the Electro Weak Theory. Later the Strong Nuclear Force was accounted for by the formulation of the Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD). Recently, the String Theories have come into play to possibly incorporate Gravity into the Grand Unified Theories (GUT’s). Nowadays the ultimate goal of physicists is to find a complete, consistent unified theory that describes all physical interactions by a single set of equations.

The End of physicsThe famous British physicist Stephen Hawking is fond of suggesting that the end

maybe in sight for theoretical physics. But is the end for physics really insight? Do we know so much of our own universe that we can safely say that soon one day there will be no more to do?

There have been previous occasions on which physicists have thought they were on the brink of finding all the answers. Most famously at the end of the 19th century there was a feeling that with Maxwell’s and Newton’s equations firmly established, everything else would be merely a matter of detail. Hardly was this feeling firmly established that physics was turned on its head by the twin revolutions of quantum theory and the relativity theory.

It happened again in the 1920’s when Paul Dirac formulated the quantum equations which determine the behavior of the electron. The only other known particle at that time was the proton and it was thought that a similar equation would account for it as well. Hence it was thought that all was known that there was to know. In 1928 this led physicist and Nobel Prize winner Max Born to say to a group of visitors to Göttingen University that “physics, as we know it, will be over in six months.” However the discovery of the neutron in 1930 and of nuclear forces knocked that one on the head too!

Quantum PhysicsThe main theory, which seeks to define the universe around us, is the Quantum

theory.The main aim of physicists to date has been to incorporate the quantum theory

along with the theory of relativity into a single grand theory. As noted earlier some work has been done towards this end resulting in the unification of electromagnetic and the weak force, which resulted in the formation of the Electro weak theory. Further work led to some unification of these with the Strong nuclear force. Unfortunately none of this progress takes Gravity into account, the most universal of all forces and the first one to be discovered but the most elusive to date in terms of understanding. This was what caused Hawking to remark that ‘Grand unified theories ain’t so grand after all’. Though Hawking has partially succeeded in unifying quantum theory and general relativity in investigating black holes and time beginning, gravity still best defined by the General Theory of Relativity, which is a classical continuum theory.

The hypothesized Quantum Theory of Gravity contains particles called gravitons, which are responsible for the gravitational force of attraction. Though the particles are well understood in theory they are still undetected.

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期Strings

In the 1980s a theory called the “Supergravity N=8” was formulated to account for the graviton and the properties it is supposed to have. But this theory called for a huge number of other particles which are not known. Secondly the calculations involved were so complex that it was remarked that it would take 4 years to do the computation for the simplest case with the aid of computers, and that did not mean that the calculations would be flaw less. Hence the theory was abandoned in favor of another theory called the String theory which was actually invoked in the 1960s to account for the strong nuclear force. String theories in their best form incorporate the graviton i.e. some equation of the string theory have properties required to describe gravity. Hence they are called Super string theories. It was this road towards unification that Stephen Hawking was enthusiastically endorsing by 1988. String theories have been the best attempts at unification of physics and perhaps its end. But that does not mean the end of problems.

One odd thing about the Super string theory is that it works on a matter of only 26 dimensions! Currently this number has been reduced to 10 dimensions (depending on the particles that we want to define) inclusive of the 4 dimensions that we are aware of: 3 spatial and one time. According to Michael Green of Queen Mary College, one of the pioneers of Super String, Super string theory is a theory in which the details have come first and we are still groping for an insight into the logic of the theory.

Super string theory also requires a property called Super symmetry to be able to function. But given the current technological standards it is extremely difficult to test this. And the energies that are required to prove that the super string theory is the ultimate theory are way beyond those that can be produced on earth even in the distant future. So there is plenty of work left for the physicists to do!

What happens when it ends?Hearing Hawking tell you that physics may be coming to an end became

something of a cliché in the 1980s, as at the beginning of that decade he used his inaugural lecture as Lucasian Professor at the Cambridge University to pose that question. Years later the end doesn’t look any closer than it was then. But if theoretical physics did reach the “end” Hawking so eagerly predicts, there would still be plenty of work left for physicists to do. In an interview in Newsweek in 1988, Hawking said that after discovering the theory of everything there would still be lots to do, but then physics would be like “mountaineering after Everest”.

Cosmologist Martin Rees prefers a different analogy. He points out that learning the Rules of chess is only the first step on a fascinating and long path to becoming a Grandmaster. The long sought-after theory of everything is the equivalent of learning Chess rules and grand master status would still be far away. Our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us and of our own existence.

In his Inaugural lecture Hawking emphasized that the laws that Born was so proud of really are all we need in principle to describe the chemical reactions. Paul Dirac in the 1920’s had produced quantum equations that exactly describe how electrons behave and electrons being the essence of all chemistry. The snag is that this equation is too complex to be solved for any elements but the simple most hydrogen.

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期Biological processes in turn depend on chemistry of complex molecules. In

Hawkings words:……although in principle we now the equations that govern the whole of biology, we have not been able to reduce the study of human behavior to a branch of applied mathematics.

Even if we had a genuine unified theory for the universe it would be far more difficult to use this to work out the behavior of the universe than it is to work out your behavior using Dirac’s equation.

The unified theories are one of those prospects that have been receding into the future for the past 2 decades and by saying that the theories were just around the corner the physicists meant was the millennium. Yet today we are just days away from the millennium but where are the complete theories of the universe?

Conclusion

These days the physicists are a bit more skeptical and besides few who still claim the end to come around 2010 most refuse to be drawn into such speculations.

But suppose the theories were eventually found we can never be quite sure if it is they are correct since we cannot prove theories. But if this theory is mathematically consistent and gave good predictions that agreed with observation our faith in the theory will be increased. This would also bring an end to the long and glorious chapter in the history of humanity’s intellectual struggle to understand the universe.

Detailed study and evaluation of the theories is beyond the scope of this paper. But from what has been outlined above we can easily draw the conclusion that though we know what end we are looking for that end does not seem to be in sight for quite a long while to come.

Unit 7 The Mind of New England

By Vernon Louis Parrington

1 The New England renaissance was tardy in appearing and of brief duration, yet in the few years of its extraordinary vigor it imparted a stimulus to American life that its historians have not greatly exaggerated. We are now far enough from it to see that it was the last flowering of a tree that was dying at the roots, but in the tumultuous thirties it seemed to be a new birth of the native New England mind, opening on new worlds and great adventures. Though its prophecies might be little heeded at its own fireside, and unheard in the vast stretches of the West where men were clearing and building after quite different plans than the Concord architects were drawing. Its significance in the development of American idealism—the ethical imprint it stamped on American culture—

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期endured long after it had spent its force. It was the last and in certain aspects the most brilliant of the several attempts to domesticate in America the romantic thought of revolutionary Europe; and with its passing, civilization in this western world fell into the hands of another breed of men to fashion as they saw fit.2 The revolutions in thought that lie between the eighteenth century with its aristocratic rationalism that conceived of human nature as evil, and the nineteenth century with its middle-class economics that conceived of human nature as acquisitive, are more clearly defined in New England and more sharply differentiated, than elsewhere in America. The flood of romantic speculation with its humanitarian emphasis on the potential excellence of man and the equality of human rights, that in Europe had diffused itself widely, in Massachusetts flowed into narrow channels prepared by Puritan discipline, and swept away habits of thought that had dominated New England for two hundred years. The intensity of the Puritan nature, once it embraced the new conceptions, imparted to them an intellectual and emotional unity that serves to explain the creativeness of the New England renaissance, as it serves to explain its failure to spread widely beyond the confines of Massachusetts. Appearing a generation later than in Virginia, it drew its inspiration more largely from Germany than from France; it was intellectual and ethical rather than political and economic; and in consequence it held little in common with the Physiocratic agrarianism of Jefferson. The latter was sufficiently native to American Economics to appeal to the common man from Maine to Georgia; the former was native only to New England Puritanism. Its idealism appealed only to rare souls, disciplined by speculation and trained in ethical values, men of strong character and fine distinction who counted for much more than numbers.3 After all it is the ethical note that marks the Puritan. That New England has run so different a course from other parts of America has been due chiefly to its desire to serve God even though it might be serving self. Its material life has always been plentifully seasoned with the salt of religion. It sat under the teachings of an austere ethics, as it lived under the compulsions of a narrow economics; and the result was the development of a middle class distinct from that of the West where the desire to get on was less hampered by the desire to get to heaven. The outstanding social figures in early New England were the minister and the merchant; and these twin authorities —joined after the revolution by the rising profession of the law --- ruled in patriarchal fashion the inarticulate mass of the yeomanry. From these traditional leaders the policy of New England received a twofold bent: a bent to the ethical and a bent to the practical. The two have rarely fused in a harmonious and fruitful life, but for the most part have dwelt side by side under a covenant of noninterference, the character of current social ideals taking its impress from one or the other as it gained a temporary ascendancy. In the three hundred years of New England history the minister has enjoyed two periods of intellectual ascendancy: the first during the early days of the theocracy, then the commonwealth was ruled by the laws of God and John Calvin; and the second, between the years 1830 and 1850, when John Calvin was finally put aside and New England was in the way of being remodeled in accordance with the plans of God alone. Between these brief periods of ethical enthusiasm lies the main history of New England, a history that counts for little in our intellectual and aesthetic development, but that meant much and ill to the cramped minds of her sons.4 This long stretch, arid and unlovely, was dominated wholly by the merchant. Its parsimonious thrift, relieved by few generous impulses, was hostile to all change and to the romance that is bred of change. There was no rapid inflow of settlers to bring fresh energy and expansion. The

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期exuberant growth of other parts of America was never shared by rural New England, and in consequence the harvest of unearned increment was rarely reaped from her sterile acres. Except in the shipping towns there was little economic development. On its secluded little farms New England was living a narrow parochial life, scooping up its mind in a rigid theological system and disciplining its character by a self-denying ordinance. Public affairs were managed by the squire, for the minister was too busy defending John Calvin against the Armenians to have a care for much except morality and dogma. The renaissance became of necessity, therefore, a movement of liberalism—a vehement protest against the torpor of the dogmatist whose mind was shut up in a dead system. It was a sudden reawakening of the ethical passion of Puritanism that had slept for two centuries; a vision of a new heaven and a new earth that it proposed to take by storm. It proposed to rid the mind of New England of its decadent loyalties—the nightmare dreams of Calvinism that debased human nature, and the counting-house dreams of Federalism that conceived of man as an exploitative animal. It had discovered anew the beauty of righteousness, and in the name of righteousness it proposed to throw off the old tyrannies and create a society wherein the mind should be free and the soul enjoy its religion. The battle against Calvinism was only preliminary to greater battles which constituted the intellectual revolution that marked the renaissance.5 It was the New England minister, and the spiritual heirs of the minister—a group of intellectuals and reformers more notable than New England had before bred—that gave to the movement its pronounced ethical quality. It was freedom for individual righteousness that they sought; not freedom for intellectual Epicureanism, for romance, for aesthetic or pagan beauty. The transcendentalists and reformers had little time to amuse themselves with such things. They were too eager for the coming of the kingdom to dawdle over fiction or patronize the playhouse. They had been bred from their youth up on printer’s ink; they came of a race that had long respected the printed page. Literary men by inheritance, they esteemed themselves stewards of a great cause. In rejecting their fathers’ hell they became the more zealous to make a heaven of this world; and although the more practical Yankee was skeptical of their plans and would not suffer them to turn Boston into a transcendental Utopia, they succeeded in making such a stir as New England had never before known. For a brief time, at least, liberal ideas found a welcome in homes where they had hitherto been strangers; for a brief time the intellectual and not the merchant dominated New England.

(From Main Currents in American Thought)

Background and Culture Notes

Let me tell you

1. Vernon Louis Parrington was a literary historian and teacher who greatly influenced U. S. historical and literary thought. Parrington reappraised U. S. literary history in Main Currents in American Thought (1927), The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (1930). Being a Jeffersonian liberal, he objected to aestheticism and pedantry, emphasized economic influences,

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期and defined literature as any writing successfully presenting important ideas and experiments. 2. John Calvin was a theologian, ecclesiastical statesman and one of the most important Protestant Reformers of the 16th century. The theological, ecclesiastical and political ideas that he advanced in many publications, a model church that he created and directed in the city of Geneva, and the assistance he provided to the political and intellectual leaders of several countries profoundly influenced the development of Protestantism in many parts of Europe and in North America. 3. Federalism is the mode of political organization that unites separate states or other policies within an overarching political system in such a way as to allow each to maintain its own fundamental political integrity. Federal systems do this by requiring that basic policies be made and implemented through negotiation in some form, so that all the members can share in making and executing decisions. The political principles that animate federal systems emphasize the primacy of bargaining and negotiated coordination among several power centers; they stress the virtues of dispersed power centers as a means for safeguarding individual and local liberties.4. Renaissance refers to a period of intense cultural excitement dawned in Italy in the 1300s, ushering Europe out of the darkness of the Middle Ages. During this rebirth, scholars revived an interest in classical manuscripts from ancient Greece and Rome. Under the influence of these ancient manuscripts, Europeans began to reject their former view that the world was merely a place to prepare for life after death. The word “renaissance” also refers to any similar revival.5. New England is a region in northeastern United States, including the States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The region was named by Capt. John Smith, who explored its shores in 1614 for some London merchants. New England was soon settled by English Puritans. During the 17th century the high esteem for an educated clergy and enlightened leadership encourage the development of public schools as well as such institutions of higher learning as Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701).

Unit 8 My Father Leslie Stephen

by Virginia Woolf

1. By the time that his children were growing up, the great days of my father’s life were over. ( a ). Relics of them were to be found lying about the house—the silver cup on the study mantelpiece; the rusty alpenstocks that leaned against the bookcase in the corner; and to the end of his days he would speak of great climbers and explorers with a peculiar mixture of admiration and envy. But his own years of activity were over, and my father had to content himself with pottering about the Swiss valleys or taking a stroll across the Cornish moors.2. That to potter and to stroll meant more on his lips than on other people’s is becoming obvious now that some of his friends have given their own version of those expeditions. He would start off after breakfast alone, or with one companion. Shortly after dinner he would return. ( b ). And he was quite capable, it appears, of striding all

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期days across the moors without speaking more than a word or two to his companion. By that time, too, he had written the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, which is said by some to be his masterpiece; and the Science of Ethics—the book which interested him most; and The Playground of Europe, in which is to be found “The Sunset on Mont Blanc”—in his opinion the best thing he ever wrote. He still wrote daily and methodically, though never for long at a time.3. In London he wrote in the large room with three long windows at the top of the house. He wrote lying almost recumbent in a low rocking chair which he tipped to and fro as he wrote, like a cradle, and as he wrote he smoked a short clay pipe, and he scattered books round him in a circle. ( c ). And often as he mounted the stairs to his study with his firm, regular tread he would burst, not into song, for he was entirely unmusical, but into a strange rhythmical chant, for verse of all kinds, both “utter trash,” as he called it, and the most sublime words of Milton and Wordsworth, stuck in his memory, and the act of walking of climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited his mood.4. But it was his dexterity with his fingers that delighted his children before they could potter along the lanes at his heels or read his books. He would twist a sheet of paper beneath a pair of scissors and out would drop an elephant, a stag, or a monkey, with trunks, horns, and tails delicately and exactly formed. Or taking a pencil, he would draw beast after beast—an art that he practiced almost unconsciously as he read, so that the fly-leaves of his books swarm with owls and donkeys as if to illustrate the “Oh, you ass!” or “Conceited dunce” that he was wont to scribble impatiently in the margin. Such brief comments, in which one may find the germ of the more temperate statements of his essays, recall some of the characteristics of his talk. ( d ). But his remarks, made suddenly in a low voice between the puffs of his pipe, were extremely effective. Sometimes with one word—but his one word was accompanied by a gesture of the hand—he would dispose of the tissue of exaggerations which his own sobriety seemed to provoke.[…]5. Too much, perhaps, has been said of his silence; too much stress has been laid upon his reserve. He loved clear thinking; he hated sentimentality and gush; but this by no means meant that he was cold and unemotional, perpetually critical and condemnatory in daily life. ( e ). A lady, for instance, complained of the wet summer that was spoiling her tour in Cornwall. But to my father, though he never called himself a democrat, the rain meant that the corn was being laid; some poor man was being ruined; and the energy with which he expressed his sympathy—not with the lady—left her discomfited. He had something of the same respect for farmers and fishermen that he had for climbers and explorers. So, too, he talked little of patriotism, but during the South African War—and all wars were hateful to him—he lay awake thinking that he heard the guns on the battlefield. Again, neither his reason nor his cold common sense helped to convince him that a child could be late for dinner without having been maimed or killed in an accident. And not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme could persuade him, when it came to signing a check, that the whole family was not “shooting Niagara to ruin,” as he put it. The pictures that he would draw of old age and the bankruptcy court, of ruined men of letters who have to support large families

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期in small houses at Wimbledon (he owned a very small house at Wimbledon), might have convinced those who complain of his understatements that hyperbole was well within his reach had he chosen.[…]6. He himself was the most abstemious of men. He smoked a pipe perpetually, but never a cigar. He wore his clothes until they were too shabby to be tolerable; and he held old-fashioned and rather puritanical views as to the vice of luxury and the sin of idleness. The relations between parents and children today have a freedom that would have been impossible with my father. ( f ). Yet if freedom means the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s own pursuits, then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did. His sons, with the exception of the Army and Navy, should follow whatever professions that they chose; his daughters, though he cared little enough for the higher education of women, should have the same liberty. If at one moment he rebuked a daughter sharply for smoking a cigarette—smoking was not in his opinion a nice habit in the other sex — she had only to ask him if she might become a painter, and he assured her that so long as she took her work seriously he would give her all the help he could. He had no special love for painting; but he kept his word. Freedom of that sort was worth thousands of cigarettes. […]7. In those last years, grown solitary and very deaf, he would sometimes call himself a failure as a writer; he had been “jack of all trades, and master of none.” But whether he failed or succeeded as a writer, it is permissible to believe that he left a distinct impression of himself on the minds of his friends. Meredith saw him as “Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” in his earlier days; Thomas Hardy, years later, looked at the “spare and desolate figure” of the Schreckhorn and thought of him,

Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe

Of semblance to his personalityIn its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

8. But the praise he would have valued most, for though he was an agnostic nobody believed more profoundly in the worth of human relationships, was Meredith’s tribute after his death: “He was the one man to my knowledge worthy to have married your mother.” And Lowell, when he called him “L. S, the most lovable of men,” has best described the quality that makes him, after all these years, unforgettable.

Background and Culture Notes

Let me tell you

1. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a British author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel - also distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. With To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931)

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. Virginia Woolf's concerns with feminist thematic are dominant in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Other works include Three Guineas (1938) and Orlando (1928).2. Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) was a 19th century British philosopher, man of letters, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He devoted much of his time to his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) in which he explained the arguments of the old English deists and the skepticism of Hume. He places the philosophers and moralists in their due position in the whole literary activity of the period. He devoted the remainder of his life to other literary projects and died in 1903 of cancer. Other works are: Science of Ethics (1882), The English Utilitarians (1900).3. The Playground of Europe is a nickname for Switzerland.4. Shooting Niagara to ruin: 直译为“溅落尼加拉瓜”，这里形容一种绝境，这种绝境像乘坐小船漂流尼加拉瓜大瀑布一样危险。5. George Meredith (1828-1909) was an English Victorian poet and novelist. He wrote mannered, satirical novels of the upper classes, with complex psychological studies. 6. Thomas Hardy (1840—1928) was an English novelist and poet. His major novels show with elaborate irony a universe ruled by a pitiless fate, and the indifference of man to the suffering and misery of his fellow creatures. 9. Lowell (1819—1891) was an American poet, essayist and playwright.10. John Milton (1608—1674) British poet and writer. His exquisite minor poetry had an influence which grew throughout the 18th century and which was at its greatest in 19th century.11. William Wordsworth (1770—1850) was a defining member of the English Romantic Movement. Like other Romantics, Wordsworth’s personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity. Masterpieces include Lyrical Ballads (1798) and Complete Poetical Works (1888).

Exercises

I. In the text, the letters in brackets refer to some missing sentences. Read the context through and decide where the sentences below should go and then mark the sentences with the corresponding letters given in brackets.

1. On the contrary, it was his power of feeling strongly and of expressing his feeling with vigor that made him sometimes so alarming as a companion.2. The thud of a book dropped on the floor could be heard in the room beneath.3. His feats on the river and on the mountains had been won before they were born.4. If the walk had been successful, he would have out his great map and commemorate a new short cut in red ink.

Learn about the text

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《学术英语读译》2015~2016学年春季学期5. He expected a certain standard of behavior, even of ceremony, in family life.6. He could be very silent, as his friends have testified.