人事部三级笔译(CATTI)2007.11英译汉真题

　　One of the biggest decisions Andy Blevins has ever made, and one of the few he now regrets, never seemed like much of a decision at all. It just felt like the natural thing to do.

　　In the summer of 1995, he was moving boxes of soup cans, paper towels and dog food across the floor of a supermarket warehouse, one of the biggest buildings here in southwest Virginia. The heat was brutal. The job had sounded impossible when he arrived fresh off his first year of college, looking to make some summer money, still a skinny teenager with sandy blond hair and a narrow, freckled face.

　　But hard work done well was something he understood, even if he was the first college boy in his family. Soon he was making bonuses on top of his $6.75 an hour, more money than either of his parents made. His girlfriend was around, and so were his hometown buddies. Andy acted more outgoing with them, more relaxed. People in Chilhowie noticed that.

　　It was just about the perfect summer. So the thought crossed his mind: maybe it did not have to end. Maybe he would take a break from college and keep working. He had been getting C's and D's, and college never felt like home, anyway.

　　"I enjoyed working hard, getting the job done, getting a paycheck," Mr. Blevins recalled. "I just knew I didn't want to quit."

　　So he quit college instead, and with that, Andy Blevins joined one of the largest and fastest-growing groups of young adults in America. He became a college , though nongraduate may be the more precise term.

　　Many people like him plan to return to get their degrees, even if few actually do. Almost one in three Americans in their mid-20's now fall into this group, up from one in five in the late 1960's, when the Census Bureau began keeping such data. Most come from poor and working-class families.

　　That gap had grown over recent years. "We need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor," Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said last year when announcing that Harvard would give full scholarships to all its lowest-income students. "And education is the most weapon we have to address that problem."

　　Andy Blevins says that he too knows the importance of a degree. Ten years after trading college for the warehouse, Mr. Blevins, 29, spends his days at the same supermarket company. He has worked his way up to produce buyer, earning $35,000 a year with health benefits and a 401(k) plan. He is on a path typical for someone who attended college without getting a four-year degree. Men in their early 40's in this category made an average of $42,000 in 2000. Those with a four-year degree made $65,000.

　　Mr. Blevins says he has many reasons to be happy. He lives with his wife, Karla, and their year-old son, Lucas, in a small blue-and-yellow house in the middle of a stunningly picturesque Appalachian valley.

　　"Looking back, I wish I had gotten that degree," Mr. Blevins said in his soft-spoken lilt. "Four years seemed like a thousand years then. But I wish I would have just put in my four years."

　　Why so many low-income students fall from the college ranks is a question without a simple answer. Many high schools do a poor job of preparing s for college. Tuition bills scare some students from even applying and leave others with years of debt. To Mr. Blevins, like many other students of limited means, every week of going to classes seemed like another week of losing money .

　　"The system makes a false promise to students," said John T. Casteen III, the president of the University of Virginia, himself the son of a Virginia shipyard worker.

　　2008年11月人事部三级笔译(CATTI)完形填空

　　One of Nature's most fascinating mysteries is how pigeons find their way home over vast distances.

　　No matter how far away they are taken, they almost always return to their lofts.

　　Now German scientists believe they have discovered how the birds do it. Research has revealed that tiny iron structures in their beaks allow them to analyse the earth's magnetic field - much like a compass.

　　Through the signals picked up, the birds can work out where they are and set out on the best course home. As well as pigeons, many migrating birds display a remarkable ability to fly thousands of miles to return to using them to send messages over enemy lines.

　　Thirty-two of the 250,000 pigeons used by UK forces in World War Two were even awarded medals for valour.

　　In 2005, the film Valiant recorded the exploits of a group of fictional wartime homing pigeons.

　　In the past, experts have suggested the birds use the sun and stars to navigate, although in 2004 researchers found that many follow roads rather than their internal compass to plan their route.

　　Italian scientists also recently found that the birds can create 'odour maps' of areas they fly over, which may help them find their way. However scientists have long believed that they can in some way use the natural magnetism of the earth to navigate. The recent study by German scientists has revealed how this may be possible.

　　The research, published in the latest edition of the journal Naturwissenschaften, used X-rays to examine the upper beaks of pigeons. They found that within the skin lining are tiny ironcontaining particles in nerve branches which are arranged in a 3D pattern.

　　The team, led by Gerta Fleissner, concluded that this allows the birds to react to the external magnetic field of the planet and work out their precise location.

　　She pointed out that similar ironcontaining cells had been found in the beaks of robins, warblers and chickens so it may well turn out to be the way that other species also navigate.

　　"We expect that the pigeon-type receptor might turn out to be a universal feature of all birds," she said. Scientists are still discovering more about the incredible abilities of the pigeon.

　　Last year a French team found that they can memorise 1,200 pictures.

　　The researchers concluded that while birds and other animals are different in so many ways, our divergent evolutionary paths have had little impact on the basic processes of our memories.

　　However, despite such impressive memories, pigeons are not the most intelligent birds, according to researchers.

　　A team in 2005 judged the intelligence of a range of birds and concluded that crows, rooks, jays and ravens topped the IQ league, while the New World quail earned the dubious honour of being the most stupid. 人事部三级笔译(CATTI)2008.5英译汉真题 Europe Pushes to Get Fuel From Fields

　　ARDEA, Italy — The previous growing season, this lush field near Rome was filled with rows of delicate durum wheat, used to make high-quality pasta. Today it overflows with rapeseed, a tall, gnarled weedlike plant bursting with coarse yellow flowers that has become a new manna for European farmers: rapeseed can be turned into biofuel.

　　Motivated by generous subsidies to develop alternative energy sources — and a measure of concern about the future of the planet — Europe‟s farmers are beginning to grow crops that can be turned into fuels meant to produce fewer s than gas or oil. They are chasing their counterparts in the Americas who have been raising crops for biofuel for more than five years.

　　“This is a much-needed to our economy, our farms,” said Marcello Pini, 50, a farmer, standing in front of the rapeseed he planted for the first time. “Of course, we hope it helps the environment, too.”

　　In March, the European Commission, disappointed by the slow growth of the biofuels industry, approved a directive that included a “binding target” requiring member countries to use 10 percent biofuel for transport by 2020 — the most ambitious and specific goal in the world.

　　Most European countries are far from achieving the target, and are introducing incentives and subsidies to bolster production.

　　As a result, bioenergy crops have replaced food as the most profitable crop in several European countries. In this part of Italy, for example, the government guarantees the purchase of biofuel crops at 22 euros for 100 kilograms, or $13.42 for 100 pounds — nearly twice the 11 to 12 euros for 100 kilograms of wheat on the open market in 2006. Better still, farmers can plant biofuel crops on “set aside” fields, land that Europe‟s agriculture policy would otherwise require be left fallow.

　　But an expert panel convened by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization pointed out that the biofuels boom produces benefits as well as trade-offs and risks — including higher and wildly fluctuating food prices. In some markets, grain prices have nearly doubled.

　　“At a time when agricultural prices are low, in comes biofuel and improves the lot of farmers and injects life into rural areas,” said Gustavo Best, an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. “But as the grows and the demand for biofuel crops seems to be infinite, we‟re seeing some negative effects and we need to hold up a yellow light.”

　　Josette Sheeran, the new head of the United Nations World Food program, which fed nearly 90 million people in 2006, said that biofuels created new problems. “An increase in grain prices impacts us because we are a major of grain for food,” she said. “So biofuels are both a challenge and an opportunity.”

　　In Europe, the rapid conversion of fields that once grew wheat or barley to biofuel crops like rapeseed is already leading to shortages of the ingredients for making pasta and brewing beer, suppliers say. That could translate into higher prices in supermarkets.

　　“New and increasing demand for bioenergy production has put high pressure on the whole world grain market,” said Claudia Conti, a spokesman for Barilla, one of the largest Italian pasta makers. “Not only German beer producers, but Mexican tortilla makers have see the cost of their main raw material growing quickly to historical highs.”

　　Some experts are more worried about the potential impact to low-income consumers. In the developing world, the shift to more lucrative biofuel crops destined for richer countries could create serious hunger and damage the environment if wild land is converted to biofuel cultivation, the agriculture panel concluded.

　　But officials at the European Commission say they are pursuing a measured course that will prevent some of the price and supply problems seen in American markets.

　　In a recent speech, Mariann Fischer Boel, the European agriculture and rural development commissioner, said that the 10 percent target was “not a shot in the dark,” but was carefully chosen to encourage a level of growth for the biofuel industry that would not produce undue hardship for Europe‟s poor.

　　She calculated that this approach would push up would raw material prices for cereal by 3 percent to 6 percent by 2020, while prices for oilseed might rise 5 percent to 18 percent. But food prices on the shelves would barely change, she said.