英语笔译3习题集.docVIP

英语笔译（3） E-C 1. I, by comparison, living in my overpriced city apartment, walking to work past putrid sacks of street garbage, paying usurious taxes to local and state governments I generally abhor, I am rated middle class. This causes me to wonder, do the measurements make sense? Are we measuring only that which is easily measured – the numbers on the money chart – and ignoring values more central to the good life? For my sons there is of course the rural bounty of fresh-grown vegetables, line-caught fish and the shared riches of neighbors’ orchards and gardens. There is unpaid babysitter for whose children my daughter-in-law baby-sits in return, and neighbors who barter their skills and labor. But more than that, how do you measure serenity? Sense of self? I don’t want to idealize life in small places. There are times when the outside world intrudes brutally, as when the cost of gasoline goes up or developers cast their eyes on untouched farmland. There are cruelties, there is intolerance, there are all the many vices and meannesses in small places that exist in large cities. Furthermore, it is harder to ignore them when they cannot be banished psychologically to another part of town or excused as the whims of alien groups – when they have to be acknowledged as “part of us.” （148 words） Nor do I want to belittle the opportunities for small decencies in cities – the eruptions of one-stranger-to-another caring that always surprise and delight. But these are, sadly, more exceptions than rules and are often overwhelmed by the awful corruptions and dangers that surround us. 2. Opera is expensive: that much is inevitable. But expensive things are not inevitably the province of the rich unless we abdicate society’s power of choice. We can choose to make opera, and other expensive forms of culture, accessible to those who cannot individually pay for it. The question is: why should we? Nobody denies the imperatives of food, shelter, defence, health and education. But even