2014年3月高级口译上半场阅读（四篇）解析

上半场阅读理解第一篇：

本文选择《经济学人》杂志2013年9月23日。译文来自网络。
原文链接：http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21586580-fakes-say-some-interesting-things-about-economics-art-emperors-new-pictures

WHAT makes an artist great? Brilliant composition, no doubt. Superb draughtsmanship, certainly. Originality of subject or of concept, sometimes. But surely true greatness means that the creator of a painting has brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the work as well.
是什么成就了一名伟大的画家？出色的构图？高超的画技？这两点毋庸置疑。有时也靠创作主题或理念的新颖性。但真正的伟大指的是画家为作品赋予一种难以描述的特质。

There is, however, a type of person who seems to sait perfectly well what that quoi is, and can turn it out on demand. In 1945, for example, a Dutchman named Han van Meegeren faced execution for selling a national art treasure, in the form of a painting by Vermeer, to Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy. His defence was that it was a forgery he had painted himself. When asked to prove it by copying a Vermeer he scorned the offer. Instead he turned out a completely new painting, “Jesus Among the Doctors”, in the style of the master, before the eyes of his incredulous inquisitors.
然而，有这样一种人，他们似乎能准确把握这个难以名状的东西，并且能够按要求把它复制出来。例如，1945年，一位名叫汉·凡·米格伦（HanvanMeegeren）的荷兰人因将一幅国家艺术珍品，也就是维米尔（Vermeer）的一幅画作，卖给希特勒的副手赫尔曼·戈林（HermannGöring）而面临死刑。他辩称这只是幅赝品，由他本人仿造。当被要求现场模仿一幅维米尔的画作来证明自己时，他表示十分不屑。在审判者怀疑的眼神下，他以维米尔的风格创作了一幅全新的作品《基督在博学者中间》。

此处例子功能题：作者为何提及荷兰画家？

Göring, who was facing a little local difficulty at the time, did not sue van Meegeren. But that has not been the experience of Glafira Rosales, an art dealer in New York who admitted this week that she has, over the past 15 years, fooled two local commercial art galleries into buying 63 forged works of art for more than $30m. She is being forced to give the money back, and is still awaiting sentence.
戈林当时在本国遇到了点麻烦，所以就没有起诉凡·米格伦。但格拉菲拉·罗萨莱斯（GlafiraRosales）可没那么好运了。作为纽约的一位艺术品商人，罗萨莱斯于本周承认了在过去的十五年里曾向两个当地的商业艺术画廊卖出了63幅假画，总收益达三千多万美元。她被强制要求退还所有收入，目前仍在等待法院的判决。

此处细节题，考有关Rosales 的例子内容。

Ms Rosales is guilty of passing goods off as something they are not, and should take the rap for the fraud. But although art forgers do a certain amount of economic damage, they also provide public entertainment by exposing the real values that lie at the heart of the art market.
罗萨莱斯女士因出售赝品获罪，应承担相应的刑事责任。但虽然这些艺术品伪造者给他人造成了一定的经济损失，但他们也通过揭露艺术品市场上核心艺术品的真实价值而娱乐了大众。

此处词汇理解题：解释take the rap。

That art market pretends that great artists are inimitable, and that this inimitability justifies the often absurd prices their work commands. Most famous artists are good: that is not in question. But as forgers like van Meegeren and Pei-Shen Qian, the painter who turned out Ms Rosales’s Rothkos and Pollocks, show, they are very imitable indeed. If they were not, the distinction between original and knock-off would always be obvious. As Ms Rosales’s customers have found, no doubt to their chagrin, it isn’t.
艺术品市场称伟大的艺术家都是独一无二的，而这种不可模仿性使得他们的作品都贵得离谱。大多数著名的艺术家都很优秀，这一点毋庸置疑。但像伪造者凡·米格伦和为罗萨莱斯女士伪造罗斯科和波洛克画作的钱培琛，他们的存在证明了这些艺术家是可以被模仿的。如果不是的话，那真品和赝品之间的差别就会十分明显。罗萨莱斯女士的顾客就没有发现其中的区别，难怪事后他们懊恼不已。

此处句子理解题，解释黑体字部分。chagrin: 懊悔，懊恼。

If the purchasers of great art were buying paintings only for their beauty, they would be content to display fine fakes on their walls. The fury and embarrassment caused by the exposure of a forger suggests this is not so.
如果购买者纯粹是因为欣赏画作的美而去购买它，那么即使是把假画挂在自家墙上也会心满意足。但伪造者的曝光所引起的愤怒和尴尬说明了情况并非如此。

Expensive pictures are primarily what economists call positional goods—things that are valuable largely because other people can’t have them. The painting on the wall, or the sculpture in the garden, is intended to say as much about its owner’s bank balance as about his taste. With most kit a higher price reduces demand. But art, sports cars and fine wine invert the laws of economics. When the good that is really being purchased is evidence that the buyer has forked out a bundle, price spikes cause demand to boom.
名贵的画作被经济学家称为地位性商品——这类商品昂贵的价值很大程度是因为其他人无法拥有。不管是墙上的名画，还是花园里的雕塑，都彰显着其主人的品位和财富。大多数情况下，价格越高，需求就会越少。但是艺术品，跑车和名酒却打破了这一经济学定律。当真正被买下的商品能证明买家的确是花了大手笔时，那么价格的上涨反而会使需求猛增。

All this makes the scarcity and authenticity that underpin lofty valuations vital. Artists forget this at their peril: Damien Hirst’s spot pictures, for instance, plummeted in value when it became clear that they had been produced in quantities so vast nobody knew quite how many were out there, and when the market lost faith in a mass-production process whose connection with the original artist was, to say the least, tenuous.
这个现象说明了商品稀缺性和真实性的重要性。正因为此，艺术品的价格才会持续居高不下。艺术家若忽视这一点，便会自尝苦果。例如，当达明安·赫斯特（DamienHirst）的现场画作被大批量生产时，其价格直跌。市场对批量生产过程失去了信心，至少可以说，这样生产出来的作品和原创者的联系不再紧密。

Ms Rosales’s career is thus a searing social commentary on a business which purports to celebrate humanity’s highest culture but in which names are more important than aesthetics and experts cannot tell the difference between an original and a fake. Unusual, authentic, full of meaning—her life itself is surely art, even if the paintings were not.
罗萨莱斯女士的一生无非是对艺术行业的嘲讽。这个行业声称颂扬人类最崇高的文化，但艺术家的名字却比美感更重要，而专家却连真品和赝品都无法区别开来。即使罗萨莱斯女士出售的画作不是真正的艺术品，但她的一生，不同寻常、万般真实且意义深刻，充满了艺术性。

In 1965, America’s big companies had a hell of a year. The stock market was booming. Sales were rising briskly, profit margins were fat, and corporate profits as a percentage of G.D.P. were at an all-time high. Almost half a century later, some things look much the same: big American companies have had a hell of a year, with the stock market soaring, margins strong, and profits hitting a new all-time high. But there’s one very noticeable difference. In 1965, C.E.O.s at big companies earned, on average, about twenty times as much as their typical employee. These days, C.E.O.s earn about two hundred and seventy times as much.

从第二段开头的the huge gap可以看出第一段讲的是两种经济状况之间的差距。这里也正好是第一题的定位：The author makes a comparison between today’s America with that of 1965______.既然第二段追究的是这种gap的原因，那么答案就在第一段结尾处：今天的CEO-雇员的收入差距比大大增加了。

That huge gap between the top and the middle is the result of a boom in executive compensation, which rose eight hundred and seventy-six per cent between 1978 and 2011, according to a study by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. In response, we’ve had a host of regulatory reforms designed to curb executive pay. The latest of these is a rule, unveiled by the S.E.C. last month, requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages.
Faith in disclosure has been crucial to the regulation of executive pay since the nineteen-thirties, when companies were first required to reveal those figures. More recently, rules have made companies detail the size and the structure of compensation packages and have enforced transparency about the kinds of comparisons they rely on to determine salaries. The business press, meanwhile, now rigorously tracks executive pay. The result is that shareholders today know far more about C.E.O. compensation than ever before. There’s only one problem: even as companies are disclosing more and more, executive pay keeps going up and up.

这一段开头黑体部分为我们提示了一个关键字：disclosure. 由此可以看出本文的话题是从收入差距说开去，转向CEO的收入披露机制。

This isn’t a coincidence: the drive for transparency has actually helped fuel the spiralling salaries. For one thing, it gives executives a good idea of how much they can get away with asking for. A more crucial reason, though, has to do with the way boards of directors set salaries. As the corporate-governance experts Charles Elson and Craig Ferrere write in a recent paper, boards at most companies use what’s called “peer benchmarking.” They look at the C.E.O. salaries at peer-group firms, and then peg their C.E.O.’s pay to the fiftieth, seventy-fifth, or ninetieth percentile of the peer group—never lower. This leads to the so-called Lake Wobegon effect: every C.E.O. gets treated as above average. With all the other companies following the same process, salaries ratchet inexorably higher. “Relying on peer-group comparisons, the way boards do, mathematically guarantees that pay is going to go up,” Elson told me.

本段讲到越是披露高管们的收入，他们就越能要求更高的收入。

On top of this, peer-group comparisons aren’t always honest: boards can be too cozy with C.E.O.s and may tweak the comparisons to justify overpaying. A recent study by the labor economist Ron Laschever shows that boards tend to include as peers companies that are bigger than they are and that pay their C.E.O.s more. The system is also skewed by so-called “leapfroggers,” the few C.E.O.s in a given year who, whether by innate brilliance or by dumb luck, end up earning astronomical salaries. Those big paydays reset the baseline expectations for everyone else.

段首句是主题句：高管们可能还会想方设法隐瞒自己高增长的收入。

This isn’t just an American problem. Elson notes that, when Canada toughened its disclosure requirements, executive salaries there rose sharply, and German studies have found something similar. Nor is it primarily a case of boards being helplessly in thrall to a company’s executives. Boards are far more independent of management than they used to be, and it’s notable that a C.E.O. hired from outside a company—who therefore has no influence over the board—typically gets twenty to twenty-five per cent more than an inside candidate. The real issues are subtler, though no less insidious. Some boards, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, remain convinced of what Elson calls “superstar theory”: they think that C.E.O.s can work their magic anywhere, and must be overpaid to stay. In addition, Elson said, “if you pay below average, it makes it look as if you’d hired a below-average C.E.O., and what board wants that?”

这个问题并不局限于美国，而是国际化的。

Transparent pricing has perverse effects in other fields. In a host of recent cases, public disclosure of the prices that hospitals charge for various procedures has ended up driving prices up rather than down. And the psychological causes in both situations seem similar. We tend to be uneasy about bargaining in situations where the stakes are very high: do you want the guy doing your neurosurgery, or running your company, to be offering discounts? Better, in the event that something goes wrong, to be able to tell yourself that you spent all you could. And overspending is always easier when you’re spending someone else’s money. Corporate board members are disbursing shareholder funds; most patients have insurance to foot the bill.

收入披露在其他领域中也会引起一系列不良反应。

Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’s something naïve about the new S.E.C. rule, which presumes that full disclosure will embarrass companies enough to restrain executive pay. As Elson told me, “People who can ask to be paid a hundred million dollars are beyond embarrassment.” More important, as long as the system for setting pay is broken, more disclosure makes things worse instead of better. We don’t need more information. We need boards of directors to step up and set pay themselves, instead of outsourcing the job to their peers. The rest of us don’t get to live in Lake Wobegon. C.E.O.s shouldn’t, either.

本文得出的结论是，SEC的规则的潜台词是，完全披露收入将会是各大公司不愿提高高管的薪水。

本文讲述全球人口增长问题。文章第一段提出了Sir David Attenborough 的悲观看法：100年后的世界会出现各种问题，所以我们今天的人类一定要做好准备，尽力逆转。第二段用数字列举了人口增长的趋势。第三、四两段讨论了解决人口增长问题的conventioanal wisdom. 第五段提出非洲的新生儿死亡率大幅增加。第六段中，作者根据以上内容提出，世界人口停止增长的日期应该早于2070年。而且无论如何，读者无需为人口增长过快担忧。第七段分析了耕地和动物分布状况，同样得出了无需杞人忧天的结论。最后一段赞扬了非洲的进步会为人类生存环境的改善加分。
题目解析：

第一题问作者为什么要提出Sir David Attenborough 的悲观看法。

第二题围绕birth control 的种种细节。

第三题要求考生解释词汇：as night follows day的意思。

第四题是新问法：四个说法中哪一个与另外三个不同?相当于NOT TRUE 体型。

第五题主旨题

本文开头便指出Help to buy 政策等同于help to vote，由此可知，该篇文章属于政治类。本文主人公George Osborne 提出一项help to buy 政策，而本段接下来便说IMF和其他经济观察组织指出这项政策十分疯狂。第二、三段中，作者为Osborne进行辩护，这项政策开始时的确发挥了积极的作用。而且他们的团队的确积极推行。第四段说英国财政部也积极配合，使得这个项目与房地美和房利美有本质不同。第五段话锋一转，说这个项目很好的证明了英国金融房地产政策的鲁莽政策。并从几个角度进行了具体分析。第六段说英国二三十岁的年轻人就开始希望拥有房产，而其他几个国家则普遍到四十岁以后考虑买房子，并用数据支持。第七段引用经济学家的观点说，国家补贴购房的政策不仅为通货膨胀的虚高的房价推波助澜，而且还会影响到真正需要住房的人。第八段说，新增住房的增加只会对目前awesome 的房地产存量雪上加霜。

题目解析：

第一题请考生解释help to vote 的意思。

第二题是词汇理解，问第二段的talisman 的意思。

第三题通过第五段的一句话考察对整段的理解。

第四题问为什么作者比较了英国和其他几个国家，用意何在。

第五题问最后一段的段意。