泽熙美文英译汉
1. Old age is neither inherently miserable nor inherently sublime—like every stage of life it has problems, joys, fears and potentials. The process of aging and eventual death must ultimately be accepted as the natural progression of the life circle, the old completing their prescribed life spans and making way for the young.
正确答案：
老年既不是固然悲惨，也不是固然崇高。就像生命的其它阶段一样，老年有自己的问题、欢乐、恐惧与种种不测。人们必须接受衰老及最终的辞世是人生周期的一个自然进程——老人走完自己固有的寿命，从而为年轻人让位。
2. The women’s magazines are about one third dedicated to clothes, one third to mild comments on sex, and the other third to recipes and pictures of handsome salads, desserts and main courses.
正确答案：
妇女杂志有三分之一是介绍衣服款式的；三分之一是委婉地说明性问题的；还有三分之一是介绍菜谱的，上面附有色拉、甜点和主菜的彩图。
3. Undoubtedly the desire for food has been, and still is, one of the main causes of great political events. But man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in paradise.
正确答案：
毫无疑问，对食物的欲望一直是——现在依然是——伟大政治事件的主要原因之一。但是，人类不同于其它动物的一个重要方面在于他有无限的欲望，这欲望永远无法满足，即使生活在天堂里，也会令其心神不宁。
4. American individualism, on the face of it an admirable philosophy, wished to manifest itself in independence of the community. You don’t share things in common; you have your own things.
正确答案：
美国的个人主义是一种表面看来让人仰慕的哲理，总是希望展示其独立于社会的一面：你不同于他人，你有自己的独到之处。
5. Of course, America was built on a rejection of the past. Even the basic Christianity which was brought to the continent in 1620 was of a novel and bizarre kind. And now America, filling in the vacuum left by the liquefied British Empire, has the task of showing the best thing to the rest of the world.
正确答案：
当然，美国是建立在对过去的摒弃之上的。就连1620年带到新大陆的基督教也显得稀奇古怪。现在美国要填补已土崩瓦解的不列颠帝国留下的真空，就必须向全世界展示其最美好的一面。
6. At the same time, my generation was discovering that reforming the world is a little like fighting a military campaign in the Apennines, as soon as you capture one mountain range, another one looms just ahead.
正确答案：
同时，我们那一代人发现，改革社会有点像在亚平宁进行一场战争，你刚攻占了一个山头，另一个又会浮现在眼前。
7. The revolutionary state, under whatever political label, has to be run—not by violent romantics- but by experts in marketing, sanitary engineering, and the management of bureaucracies.
正确答案：
新成立的革命政府，无论打着什么政治旗号，都必须由商业专家、卫生专家及行政管理专家进行管理——而不是由狂热的浪漫主义者们管理。
8. The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything. But television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification. It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.
正确答案：
电视的负面影响是它鼓励人们不去集中注意力。生活中，几乎所有有趣的、有意义的事情都需要我们付出积极的、持之以恒的努力。哪怕是那些最迟钝、最缺乏天资的人也会取得对那些不专心的人来说似乎是奇迹的成就。但是，电视却鼓励我们不付出任何努力。它向我们兜售瞬间的愉悦。它使我们只想娱乐，让时间在无痛苦中消磨掉。
9. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my “story” ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw.
正确答案：
作为一个孩子，我常把自己想像成为罗宾汉式的绿林好汉，把自己想像成具有激动人心冒险经历的英雄。但很快我的故事不再简陋地停留在自我欣赏上，变得越来越能描述我正在做的事和我所看到的事。
10. A newspaper has the right—the duty even—to assume an attitude, to take a position. But it has an equally sacred right to explain that position in the light of the opposing one, to document that position, and to bolster it, not with emotion but with fact.
正确答案：
一份报纸有权——甚至也有义务——表明某种态度，坚持某一立场。但它也拥有一种同样神圣的权利——从对立者的角度去阐明自己的观点，以真凭实据证明自己的立场，用事实而不是用感情去佐证自己的立场。
11.
Obesity, a Growing Problem in the US
When it comes to food, America is not just the fattest country on earth but probably the most schizophrenic as well—home to the Big Mac1 and Weight Watchers2, the super model and the couch potato3.
The love-hate relationship with food was examined in the aired documentary “Fat”, and if there is any comfort for the more than 90 million overweight Americans it’s that the rest of the world is also getting fatter.
“There is an enormous pressure on people to be thin and to be physically fit but at the same time there is a tremendous pressure and inducement to eat,” Dr. Kelly Brownell, professor of psychology at Yale University and a participant in the programme, said in an interview.
“You’ll see a Baskin Robbins4 next to Weight Watchers. You’ll see a Family Circle magazine with a delicious chocolate on the cover beside a diet article5,” said Brownell. “At the same time as we have record levels of obesity, we have record levels of eating disorders6 too,” he said.
The desire to eat fatty food came from a primitive survival instinct to store enough energy in good times to ensure survival when food was scarce. But in a modem urban society, where fast food chains appear on almost every block, the instinct to eat fat has begun to work against us.
The documentary claims that nowhere is the exposure to junk food more prevalent than in the United States, where the problem has been compounded by the increasingly sedentary modem lifestyle.
It also says that members of Arizona’s Pima Indian tribe are the fattest people in the fattest country on earth. Until recently the tribe lived a simple life, but in 1984, when the tribe won a gaming license it joined the American mainstream. Today the tribe is plagued by obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
Just 800kms south in Mexico, another branch of the Pima tribe continues to live a traditional life and eats a traditional diet. These Pimas have none of the problems of their American counterparts, who are on average 27kgs heavier.
Part of the problem, according to Brownell, is the intense advertising of junk food in the United States. The average American child sees thousands of TV commercials each year, most of which advertise fast food, candy and soda.
The food environment has become so “toxic” according to the documentary, that some US schools even offer fast food such as McDonald’s and Burger King in school cafeterias.
But junk food is also proliferating overseas, resulting in increasing rates of obesity in such countries as China, where fast food restaurants have recently taken hold.
Compounding7 the new-found availability of junk food is the changing opinion on what is the ideal body. These days thin is king. Many actors such as Calista Flockhart, the star of the TV show “Ally Mcbeal”, and super models, such as Kate Moss, look anorexic when placed next to someone like Marilyn Monroe who was the world’s biggest sex symbol in the late 1950s.
That unrealistic waif-like ideal has devastating effects on some. Among the more disturbing scenes in the documentary were interviews in an eating disorder clinic in England where many of the patients were skinny girls of 10 or less who felt fat.
For many the lust to lose weight leads to a see-saw of dieting and bingeing that inevitably ends in tears.
