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2006年5月英语二级《笔译实务》试题
Section 1: English-Chinese Translation（英译汉）
Part A Compulsory Translation（必译题）
For all the natural and man-made disasters of the past year, travelers seem more determined than ever to leave home.
Never mind the tsunami devastation in Asia last December, the recent earthquake in Kashmir or the suicide bombings this year in London and Bali, among other places on or off the tourist trail. The number of leisure travelers visiting tourist destinations hit by trouble has in some cases bounced back to a level higher than before disaster struck.
"This new fast recovery of tourism we are observing is kind of strange," said John Koldowski, director for the Strategic Intelligence Center of the Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association. "It makes you think about the adage that any publicity is good publicity."
It is still too soon to compile year-on-year statistics for the disasters of the past 12 months, but travel industry experts say that the broad trends are already clear. Leisure travel is expected to increase by nearly 5 percent this year, according to the World Tourism and Travel Council.
Tourism and travel now seem to bounce back faster and higher each time there is an event of this sort," said Ufi Ibrahim, vice president of the London-based World Tourism and Travel Council. For London, where suicide bombers killed 56 and wounded 700 on July 8, she said, "It was almost as if people who stayed away after the bomb attack then decided to come back twice."
Early indicators show that the same holds true for other disaster-struck destinations. Statistics compiled by the Pacific Asia Travel Association, for example, show that monthly visitor arrivals in Sri Lanka, where the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami left more than 30,000 people dead or missing, were higher than one year earlier for every month from March through August of this year.
A case commonly cited by travel professionals as an early example of the trend is Bali, where 202 people were killed in bombings targeting Western tourists in October 2002. Visitor arrivals plunged to 993,000 for the year after the bombing, but bounced back to 1.46 million in 2004, a level higher than the two years before the bomb, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association.
Even among Australians, who suffered the worst casualties in the Bali bombings, the number of Bali-bound visitors bounced back within two years to the highest level since 1998, according the Pacific Asia Travel Association.
Bali was hit again this year by suicide bombers who killed 19 people in explosions at three restaurants.
Visits are also on the upswing to post-tsunami Thailand, where the giant waves killed 5,400 and left more than 5,000 missing.
Although the tsunami killed more than 500 Swedes on the Thai resort island of Phuket, the largest number of any foreign nationality to die, Swedes are returning to the island in larger numbers than last year, according to My Travel Sweden, a Stockholm-based group that sends 600,000 tourists overseas annually and claims a 28 percent market share for Sweden.
"We were confident that Thailand would eventually bounce back as a destination, but we didn"t think that this year it would come back even stronger than last year," said Joakim Eriksson, director of communication for My Travel Sweden. "We were very surprised because we really expected a significant decline."
Eriksson said My Travel now expects a 5 percent increase in visitors to both Thailand and Sri Lanka this season compared with the same season last year. This behavior is a sharp change from the patterns of the 1990s, Eriksson said.
"During the first Gulf war we saw a sharp drop in travel as a whole, and the same after Sept. 11," Eriksson said. "Now the main impact of terrorism or disasters is a change in destination."
Part B Optional Translation（二选一题）
Topic 1（选题一）
Freed by warming, waters once locked beneath ice are gnawing at coastal settlements around the Arctic Circle.
In Bykovsky, a village of 457 on Russia's northeast coast, the shoreline is collapsing, creeping closer and closer to houses and tanks of heating oil, at a rate of 15 to 18 feet a year."It is practically all ice - permafrost - and it is thawing." For the four million people who live north of the Arctic Circle,a changing climate presents new opportunities. But it also threatens their environment, their homes and, for those whose traditions rely on the ice-bound wilderness, the preservation of their culture.A push to develop the North, quickened by the melting of the Arctic seas, carries its own rewards and dangers for people in the region. The discovery of vast petroleum fields in the Barents and Kara Seas has raised fears of catastrophic accidents as ships loaded with oil and, soon, liquefied gas churn through the fisheries off Scandinavia, headed to markets in Europe and North America. Land that was untouched could be tainted by pollution as generators, smokestacks and large vehicles sprout to support the growing energy industry.
Coastal erosion is a problem in Alaska as well, forcing the United States to prepare to relocate several Inuit villages at a projected cost of $100 million or more for each one.
Across the Arctic, indigenous tribes with traditions shaped by centuries of living in extremes of cold and ice are noticing changes in weather and wildlife. They are trying to adapt, but it can be confounding.
In Finnmark, Norway's northernmost province, the Arctic landscape unfolds in late winter as an endless snowy plateau, silent but for the cries of the reindeer and the occasional whine of a snowmobile herding them.A changing Arctic is felt there, too. "The reindeer are becoming unhappy," said Issat Eira, a 31-year-old reindeer herder. Few countries rival Norway when it comes to protecting the environment and preserving indigenous customs. The state has lavished its oil wealth on the region, and Sami culture has enjoyed something of a renaissance.
And yet no amount of government support can convince Mr. Eira that his livelihood, intractably entwined with the reindeer, is not about to change. Like a Texas cattleman, he keeps the size of his herd secret. But he said warmer temperatures in fall and spring were melting the top layers of snow, which then refreeze as ice, making it harder for his reindeer to dig through to the lichen they eat. "The people who are making the decisions, they are living in the south and they are living in towns," said Mr. Eira, sitting inside his home made of reindeer hides. "They don't mark the change of weather. It is only people who live in nature and get resources from nature who mark it."
A push to develop the North, quickened by the melting of the Arctic seas, carries its own rewards and dangers for people in the region. The discovery of vast petroleum fields in the Barents and Kara Seas has raised fears of catastrophic accidents as ships loaded with oil and, soon, liquefied gas churn through the fisheries off Scandinavia, headed to markets in Europe and North America. Land that was untouched could be tainted by pollution as generators, smokestacks and large vehicles sprout to support the growing energy industry.
Topic 2（选题二）
Some people call him “Guidone”—big Guido. Large in both physical stature and reputation, Guido Rossi, who took over as Telecom Italia's chairman on September 15th following the surprise resignation of Marco Tronchetti Provera, has stood out from the Italian business crowd for more than three decades. Mr. Rossi, who attended Harvard law school in the 1950s and wrote a book on American bankruptcy law, made his name as a corporate lawyer keen on market rules and their enforcement. He has since worked in both private and public sectors, including stints in the Italian Senate and as one of the European Commission's group of company-law experts. As well as running a busy legal practice, he also has a reputation as a corporate troubleshooter and all-round Mr Fix-It, and is often called upon to clean up organisations in crisis.
His role at Telecom Italia marks a return to the company he headed for ten months in 1997, during its politically tricky and legally complex privatisation. Before that, Mr Rossi had been sent in to sort out Ferruzzi-Montedison, an agri-business and chemicals group, which had collapsed after magistrates uncovered tangentopoli (“bribesville”). Last year his legal scheming was crucial in ABN Amro's victorious bid for Banca Antonveneta. Most recently, he acted as special commissioner at Italy's football association, where he was drafted in to sort out the mess after a massive match-rigging scandal exploded earlier this year.
Alas, his efforts to bleach football's dark stains produced the same meagre[4] results as his other efforts to get Italian business and finance to change its ways. “Like Italians when tangentopoli burst, fans wanted justice when the scandal broke; but enthusiasm for legality quickly waned,” sighs Francesco Saverio Borrelli, Milan's former chief prosecutor, who headed the city's assault on corruption during the 1990s and was appointed by Mr Rossi to dig out football's dirt.The political muscle of the clubs prevented tough measures being taken against them, reflecting Italy's two-tier justice system in which the rich and powerful can do what they like. “Economic interests in football far outweigh sporting interests,” remarks Mr Borrelli. The rottenness in football shocked even the unshakeable Mr Rossi. “Football did not want rules, it just wanted me to solve its problems,” he says. Despairing of being able to change much, he resigned in September and turned his attention to Telecom Italia.
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