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This is the reason you are here in a university.
这就是你上大学的原因。
You are here to be educated.
你是来这里接受教育的。
You are here to understand thinking better and to think better yourself.
你是来这里更好地认识思考并更好地进行独立思考的。
It's not a chance you are going to have throughout your lifetime.
你一生中拥有这样的机会并不多。
For the next few years, you have a chance to focus on thinking.
在接下来的几年里，你有机会专注于思考。
I think about some of the students who took advantage of their opportunities in a university.
我想到了一些在大学里利用了这个机会的学生。
One of the stories I always like to tell is about a freshman seminar that I had a chance to teach at Harvard when I was President of the university.
我总喜欢告诉别人一个关于大一新生研讨班的故事，当我是哈佛大学校长的时候我有机会在那授课。
I taught a seminar on globalization and I assigned a reading that I had written about global capital flows.
这个班是关于全球化的，我让学生阅读我写的关于国际资本流动的文章。
And as I did each week, I asked one of the students to introduce the reading.
并且每周我都会要求一个学生介绍这篇阅读。
And this younger man in October of his freshman year said something like the following.
然后十月份的时候，有个大一新生说了类似下面的话。
"The reading by President Simons on the flow of capital across countries, it was kind of interesting, but the data did not come close to supporting the conclusions."
“虽然西蒙斯校长写的关于国家间资本流动的文章挺耐人寻味，但是那里面的数据并不能支持其结论。”
And I thought to myself, "What a fantastic thing this was!"
然后我心想，“这是多么匪夷所思的事情啊”！
How could somebody who had been there for five weeks tell the person who had the title President that he didn't really know what he was talking about?
一个才来大学五个星期的人居然对一个大学校长说他根本不知道自己在说什么！
And it was a special moment.
那是一个特别的时刻。
Now, I don't want to be misunderstood.
喂，我不想被人误解。
I explained to my student that I actually thought he was rather more confused than I was, and I argued back.
我向学生解释说，我认为他实际上比我更困惑，所以我反驳了他。
But what was really important about that was the universities stand out as places that really are about the authority of ideas.
但是那件事的真正重要之处在于，大学其实是个独一无二的思想权威之处。
You see it in faculty members who are pleased when their students make a discovery that undermines a cherished theory that they had put forward.
当大学老师的学生作出的发现损害了他们提出的、受珍视的理论的时候，你会发现他们会很高兴。
I think of another students I had who came to me one morning, one evening actually, walked into my office and said that I had written a pretty good paper, but that it had five important mistakes and that he wanted a job.
我想起了我的另一个学生，他有一天晚上来我的办公室找我，夸我写了一篇非常不错的论文，但是里面有五处重大的错误，他还说他想得到一份工作。
You could debate whether they actually were mistakes, but you couldn't debate that young man's hunger to learn.
至于那是不是错误还有待商榷，但这个年轻的人渴望学习的态度却是不容置疑的。
You could not debate that that young man was someone who wanted to make a difference in economics and he is today a professor of economics and his works are more cited as an economist than any other economist in the world.
不可否认他是一个想在经济学中有所作为的年轻人，如今他是一名经济学教授，人们对他著作的引用比世界上任何经济学家的都要多。
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.
问题16至18是基于你刚才所听到的那篇录音。
Question 16: What does the speaker say about a university?
问题16：关于大学，讲话者说了什么？
Question 17: What do we learn from the speaker's stories about universities?
问题17：我们从讲话者讲的关于大学的故事中学到了什么？
Question 18: What does the speaker see in the young man who challenged his paper?
问题18：说话者在那个质疑他论文的年轻人身上看到了什么？
译文属可可原创，仅供学习和交流使用，未经允许不得转载
