Ⅲ 翻译练习
（I）技巧练习
将下列句子翻译成中文。
1.A gas distributes itself uniformly throughout a container.
2.When the crystallinity gets high,the melt point becomes high.
3.Insulators in reality conduct electricity but,nevertheless,their resistance is very high.4.Machining is not an economical method of producing a shape,because it has good raw materials converted into hundreds of thousands of scrap chips.
5.A maglev train would be quick,quiet,nonpolluting; the ride,smooth and comfortable.
6.These cells are young and small,but they get nourishment and they grow into adult cells and so carry on the function of the organ.
7.Distillation involves heating the solution until water evaporates,and then condensing the vapor.
8.Allow the water to cool for ten minutes and then make the temperature.
9.When two bodies oscillate at the same frequency,they are said to be in resonance.
10.The damage caused by acid rain can be alleviated by adding lime to lakes,rivers and streams and/or their catchments’ areas.
（II）篇章翻译练习
1.Like a lot of humans,monkeys might not be able to do calculus.But a new study shows that they can learn and rapidly apply abstract mathematical principles.
Previous work has shown that monkeys and birds can count,but flexible applications of higher mathematic rules,the study authors asserted,“require the highest degree of internal structuring”—one thought largely to be the domain of only humans.
So researchers based at the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tubingen in Germany set out to see whether rhesus monkeys could learn and flexibly apply the greater-than and less-than rule.They tested the monkeys with groups of both ordered and random dots,many of which were novel combinations to ensure that the subjects couldn’t have simply memorized them.The monkeys were cued into applying either the greater-than or less-than rule by the amount of time that elapsed between being shown the first and second group of dots.
“The monkeys immediately generalized the greater-than rule and less-than rule to numerosities that had not been presented previously,” the two researchers,Sylvia Bongard and Andreas Nieder,wrote.“This indicates that they understood this basic mathematical principle irrespective of the absolute numerical value of the sample displays.” In other words: “They had learned an abstract mathematical principle.”
But the researchers were after more than simple ape arithmetic.“If and how mathematical rules can be represented by single neurons,” they wrote,“has remained elusive.” So during the experiment,they recorded the activity of randomly selected neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortexes of the rhesus monkeys.They chose that region of the brain because functional imaging (FMRI) studies have shown that rule-based arithmetic activates that part of the brain in humans,too.
The data revealed that in the observed part of the brain,the majority of the neurons selected were involved in applying the mathematical rules (with equal portions activating for the greater-than and less-than applications) rather than obtaining and retaining the sensory details.The researchers concluded that this begs for a processing model that has “specific ‘rulecoding’ units that control the flow of information between segregated input,memory and output.”
What does this mean for us,the only calculator-punching primates? The researchers noted that it likely points to a much older evolutionary root to abstract math: “These neuronal circuits…could readily be adopted in the course of primate evolution for syntactic processing of numbers in formalized mathematical systems.” (401 words)
2.The dog has so many fine qualities it is hard to know which it was prized and bred for by the early people who first domesticated its noble ancestor,the wolf.Was it the dog’s valor in the hunt,perhaps,or its role as night watchman,or its strength in pulling a sled,or its companionable warmth on cold nights?
A new study of dogs worldwide,the largest of its kind,suggests a different answer,one that any dog owner is bound to find repulsive: wolves may have first been domesticated for their meat.That is the proposal of a team of geneticists led by Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Sampling the mitochondrial DNA of dogs worldwide,the team found that in every region of the world all dogs seem to belong to one lineage.That indicates a single domestication event.If wolves had been domesticated in many places,there would be more than one lineage,each leading back to a local population of wolves.
The single domestication event seems to have occurred in southern China,where the dogs have greater genetic diversity than those elsewhere.The region of highest diversity is usually the place of origin because a species tends to lose diversity as it spreads.
Dr.Savolainen sampled a part of the dog genome,the mitochondrial DNA,and was able to estimate the time of the domestication—probably around the period that hunter-gatherers first settled down in fixed communities in China,about 11,000 to 14,000 years ago.Those people would have had an organized culture that enabled them to make muzzles,and possibly cages,that would have been needed to handle wolves.
There is a long tradition of eating dogs in southern China,where dog bones with cut marks on them have been found at archaeological sites.
Dr.Savolainen said wolves probably domesticated themselves when they began scavenging around the garbage dumps at the first human settlements,a theory advocated by Ray Coppinger,a dog biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.As the wolves became tamer,they would have been captured and bred.Given local traditions,Dr.Savolainen suggests,the wolves may have been bred for the table.
Thus,dogs may have thus insinuated themselves into human life by means of garbage and dog meat,but they quickly assumed less demeaning roles.Once domesticated,they rapidly spread west from the eastern end of the Eurasian continent.
Most people do not eat dogs,so they must have spread so quickly for other reasons,perhaps because of their use as guard dogs or in pulling sleds,Dr.Savolainen said.(516 words)