2021广东财经大学考研真题：804-英语写作与翻译

　　广东财经大学硕士研究生入学考试试卷

　　考试年度：2021年 　　 考试科目代码及名称：804-英语写作与翻译(自命题)

　　适用专业：050201 英语语言文学

　　[友情提醒：请在考点提供的专用答题纸上答题，答在本卷或草稿纸上无效!]

　　一、Writing (100分)

　　1、Summary Writing (1题，共40分)

　　Directions: Read the following passage, and write a summary of about 300 words for it in your own words. Directly copying sentences from the passage will result in deduction of grades. Write down your summary on the Answer Sheet.

　　Does Language Influence Culture?

　　Lera Boroditsky

　　Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures of languages shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

　　Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a ...” as an example. Even this snippet(片段) of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat” rather than "sit". In Indonesian you need not change the verb to mark tense.

　　In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

　　Do English, Indonesian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

　　These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

　　The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries. Charlemagne proclaimed that “to have a second language is to have a second soul”. But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages — essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages don't differ from one another, it makes no sense to ask whether linguistic differences lead to differences in thinking.

　　The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

　　Just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

　　For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use terms like “left” and “right”. Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west), which means you say things like “There's an ant on your southwest leg.” To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, “Where are you going?”, and an appropriate response might be, “A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?” If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

　　About a third of the world's languages rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

　　Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

　　To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

　　Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

　　In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.” Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

　　In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well.

　　In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous “wardrobe malfunction” (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase “ripped the costume” while the other said “the costume ripped.” Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read “ripped the costume” blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.

　　Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazonin Brazil, whose language eschews(避免使用) number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.

　　Patterns in language offer a window on a culture’s dispositions and priorities. For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we’ve found the transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to justice). So does the language shape cultural values, or does the influence go the other way, or both?

　　Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it is language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what is needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.

　　One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too. And if you take away people's ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task— like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did verbal task when shown the dots repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.)

　　All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.

　　2、Essay Writing (1题，60分)

　　Directions:

　　Throughout the history people have dreamed of living in an ideal society. Although there are many philosophical and literary works centering on this topic, no unified standard about an ideal society has been agreed upon.

　　What philosophical or literary works on ideal society do you know? What, in your opinion, are the most important elements for building an ideal society? How can such a lofty goal be achieved?

　　Give reasons for your response and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

　　Write no less than 800 words on the Answer Sheet.

　　二、Translation(50分)

　　1、English-Chinese Translation (25分)

　　Directions: Translate the following passage from English to Chinese. Write down your translation on the Answer Sheet.

　　Surgeons retrieving organs for transplant just after a donor’s heart stops beating would no longer have to wait at least two minutes to be sure the heart doesn't spontaneously start beating again under new rules being considered by the group that coordinates organ allocation in the United States.

　　The organization is also poised to eliminate what many consider a central bulwark(防护，壁垒) protecting patients in such already controversial cases: an explicit ban on even considering anyone for those donations before doctors and family members have independently decided to stop trying to save them.

　　The proposed changes by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the Richmond nonprofit organization that coordinates organ donation under a contract with the federal government, are part of the first major overhaul of the 2007 guidelines governing “donation after cardiac death,” or DCD, which accounts for small but growing percentage of donations each year.

　　Proponents say the changes strengthen the transplant system by aligning the rules with other regulatory bodies and better ensure that the wishes of donors and their loved ones are honored without sacrificing necessary protections.

　　Critics, however, say the move heightens the risk that potential donors will be treated more like tissue banks than like sick people deserving every chance to live, or to die peacefully.

　　DCD involves surgeons taking organs within minutes of respirators and other forms of life support have being cut off from hospitalized patients who still have at least some brain activity. DCD had been the norm for organ donors before neurological criteria-- "brain death"-- became the standard in the early 1970s. Since then, most donors have been brain-dead.

　　But as the number of people transplants rose, doctors in the 1990s began reviving what was then called “non-beating heart” donation. DCD has become a growing source of organs as the gap between the number of patients waiting for transplants and the number of available organs has widened. About 6,000 Americans succumb each year while waiting for donated organs.

　　2、Chinese-English Translation (25分)

　　Directions: Translate the following passage from Chinese to English. Write down your translation on the Answer Sheet.

　　一只小鸟

　　——偶记前天在庭树下看见的一件事

　　冰心

　　有一只小鸟,它的巢搭在最高的枝子上，它毛羽还未曾丰满,不能远飞;每日只在巢里啁

　　着，和两只老鸟说着话儿，它们都觉得非常的快乐。

　　这一天早晨，它醒了。那两只老鸟都觅食去了。它探出头来一望，看见那灿烂的阳光，葱绿的树木，大地上一片的好景致;它的小脑子里忽然充满了新意，抖刷抖刷翎毛，飞到枝子上，放出那赞美“自然”的歌声来。它的声音里满含清一轻一和一美，唱的时候，好像“自然”也含笑着倾听一般。

　　树下有许多的小孩子，听见了那歌声，都抬头来望着——

　　这小鸟天天出来歌唱，小孩子们也天天来听它，最后他们便想捉住它。

　　它又出来了!它正要发声，忽然嗤的一声，一个弹子从下面射来，它一翻身从树上跌下去。

　　斜刺里两只老鸟箭也似的飞来，接住了它，衔上巢去。它的血从树隙里一滴一滴的落到地上来。

　　从此那歌声便消歇了。

　　那些孩子想要仰望着它，听它的歌声，却不能了。