2002年 Text 1
If you intend using humor in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify shared experiences and problems. Your humor must be relevant to the audience and should help to show them that you are one of them or that you understand their situation and are in sympathy with their point of view. Depending on whom you are addressing, the problems will be different. If you are talking to a group of managers, you may refer to the disorganized methods of their secretaries; alternatively if you are addressing secretaries, you may want to comment on their disorganized bosses.
如果你想在谈话中用幽默来使人发笑，你就必须知道如何发现与听众享有的共同经历和共同问题。你的幽默一定要与听众有关，能够向他们显示你是他们的一员，或者你了解他们的情况且赞同他们的观点。根据与你谈话对象的不同，问题也应有所不同。如果你在和一群经理谈话，你就可以评论他们秘书的工作方法杂乱无章；相反，如果你在和一群秘书谈话，你就可以评论她们老板的工作方法如何杂乱。
Here is an example, which I heard at a nurses? convention, of a story, which works well because the audience all shared the same view of doctors. A man arrives in heaven and is being shown around by St. Peter. He sees wonderful accommodations, beautiful gardens, sunny weather, and so on. Everyone is very peaceful, polite and friendly until, waiting in a line for lunch, the new arrival is suddenly pushed aside by a man in a white coat, who rushes to the head of the line, grabs his food and stomps over to a table by himself. “Who is that?” the new arrival asked St. Peter. “Oh, that?s God,” came the reply, “but sometimes he thinks he?s a doctor.”
下面举一个例子，是我在一个护士大会上听到的故事。这个故事效果很好，因为所有的听众对医生都有同样的看法。一个人到了天堂，由圣彼得带领他四处参观。他看到了豪华的住宅、美丽的花园、晴朗的天气等等。大家在排队用午餐的时候，都很安静、礼貌和友善，直到这位新来天堂的人突然被一位穿白大褂的人推到一旁。只见这人挤到了队伍的前面，抓起他的食物，噔噔地旁若无人地走到一张餐桌旁吃起来。“这是谁啊？”新来的人问圣彼得。“哦，那是上帝，”他回答说，“但有时他也觉得自己是一名医生。”
If you are part of the group, which you are addressing, you will be in a position to know the experiences and problems which are common to all of you and it?ll be appropriate for you to make a passing remark about the inedible canteen food or the
chairman?s notorious bad taste in ties. With other audiences you mustn?t attempt to cut in with humor as they will resent an outsider making disparaging remarks about their canteen or their chairman. You will be on safer ground if you stick to scapegoats like the Post Office or the telephone system.
如果你与听众们来自同一个群体，你就能够了解你们所共有的经历和问题，你就可以顺带评论一下餐厅里令人难以下咽的伙食或者老总在选择领带方面众所周知的低级趣味。而对于其他听众，你就不能试图贸然地讲这种幽默，因为他们也许不喜欢外人对他们的餐厅或老总作如此微词。如果你只拿邮局或电话局这样的替罪羊去调侃的话，那你就会更稳妥些。
注：上下文中的说的是找稳妥的话题进行调侃以达到幽默的效果。stick to sth的意思是 not abandon or change sth; keep to sth 不放弃或不改变某事物; 坚持或维持某事物。故此处意译为“只拿”。
If you feel awkward being humorous, you must practice so that it becomes more natural. Include a few casual and apparently off-the-cuff remarks which you can deliver in a relaxed and unforced manner. Often it?s the delivery which causes the audience to smile, so speak slowly and remember that a raised eyebrow or an unbelieving look may help to show that you are making a light-hearted remark.
如果你在使用幽默时感到很别扭，你应该进行练习以变得更加自然。你可以用轻松的、不做作的方式说一些很随便的、看上去是即兴的话。使听众发笑的往往是你的说话方式，因此要说慢一些，并且记住扬扬眉毛或者做出一种不相信的表情，这些都会向人们显示你正在说笑话。
Look for the humor. It often comes from the unexpected. A twist on a familiar quote “If at first you don?t succeed, give up” or a play on words or on a situation. Search for exaggeration and understatements. Look at your talk and pick out a few words or sentences which you can turn about and inject with humor.
平时要留意幽默，它常常是在出其不意的时候出现。它可以是对一句常言的歪曲，比如“你要是一开始不成功，就放弃”，或者是戏谑语言和情景。留意夸大其词和轻描淡写的话。考虑一下你的谈话，选出一些词汇和句子来，将它们颠倒秩序反复揣摩，并注入一些幽默。 2002年 Text 2
Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics -- the science of conferring various human
capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close.
自从人类有了创造力开始，人们就发明了各种日益精巧的工具来处理那些危险、枯燥、繁重或者是十分令人讨厌的工作。这种冲动导致了机器人学科的产生——一门将人类的能力赋予机器的科学。即使科学家们目前尚未研制出科幻小说中的机械人版本，但他们也已经接近这个目标了。
注：have yet to是固定短语，意思是“否定，还没有，尚未”
As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robot-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy -- far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone.
因此，现代世界日益充斥着各种智能装置，虽然我们几乎都注意不到它们，但它们的普遍存在已使人们摆脱了很多劳动。工厂里轰鸣着机器手臂生产线的节奏；自动柜员机处理银行业务，并且用机器语言有礼貌地感谢你的惠顾；地铁由不知疲倦的机器人来驾驶。由于电子器件和微观机械的结构不断小型化，现在已有一些机器人系统能够进行精确到亚毫米的脑部和骨髓手术，其精确性远远超过技术娴熟的医生仅仅用双手所能达到的水平。
But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves -- goals that pose a real challenge. “While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error,” says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, “we can?t yet give a robot enough ?common sense? to reliably interact with a dynamic world.”
但是如果机器人要进入帮助人们节省劳力的下一个阶段，它们的运行就应该在更大程度上无需受人监控，并且至少能够独立地做一些决定。这些目标给我们提出了真正的挑战。“虽然我们知道如何让机器人去处理一个特定的错误，”美国宇航局（NASA）的机器人项目经理Dave Lavery里说，“我们仍然不能赋予机器人以足够的?常识?，使它们能够与不断变化的动态世界进行可靠的交流。”
Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries.
实际上对真正的人工智能的探索已经产生了诸多不同的效果。虽然在20世纪60年代和70年代人们有过一段乐观的时期——那时候人们认为晶体管电路和微处理器的发展似乎将使他们在2010年能够模仿人类大脑的活动——但是最近研究人员已经把这个预测延后数十年，甚至数百年。
What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain?s roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented -- and human perception far more complicated -- than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can?t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don?t know quite how we do it.
在试图模拟人类思维模型的过程中，研究人员发现，人类大脑中的近1000亿个神经细胞远比以前想像的更聪明，人类的认知能力也比以前想像的更复杂。他们制造的机器人在严格控制的工厂环境里，能够在仪表盘上识别毫米以下的误差。但是人的大脑能够扫描一个快速变化的场景，迅速排除98％的不相干部分，立即聚焦于森林中蜿蜒道路旁的一只猴子、或者人群中的一张可疑的脸。地球上最先进的计算机系统也达不到这种能力，而且神经学科学家至今仍然不知道我们是怎样做到这一点的。
2002年 Text 3
Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. This near tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979-80, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time?
过去经济衰落的日子会不会重来？自从石油输出国组织在3月决定减少原油供应，原油的价格便从去年12月的不到10美元一桶上升到约26美元一桶。这次近3倍的涨价令人想起了1973年和1979～1980年两次可怕的石油恐慌，当时的油价分别涨了4倍和近3倍。前两次的油价暴涨都导致了两位数的通货膨胀和全球性的经济衰退。那么这次警告人们厄运来临的头版新闻都到哪里去了呢？
The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term.
本周伊拉克暂停石油出口，这使油价又一次上扬。强劲的经济增长势头，随着北半球冬季的到来，有可能在短期内使石油价格涨得更高。
Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past.
然而，我们有充分的理由预期这次油价暴涨给经济带来的影响不会像20世纪70年代那么严重。与70年代相比，现在多数国家的原油价格占汽油价格的份额要小很多。在欧洲，税金在汽油零售价的比例高达4/5，因此，即使原油价格发生很大的波动，汽油价格所受的影响也不会像过去那么显著。
Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP (in constant prices) rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25-0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies -- to which heavy industry has shifted -- have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed.
发达国家对石油的依赖性也不如从前，因此对油价的波动也就不会那么敏感。能源储备、燃料替代以及能源密集型重工业的重要性的降低，都减少了石油消耗量。软件、咨询及移动通讯消耗的石油，比钢铁、汽车行业少得多。发达国家国民生产总值中每一个美元所消耗的石油量比1973年少了近一半。国际经合
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