北外翻译真题.docx

1、北外翻译真题北外基础英语，同声传译试卷转载自:1998年基础英语试卷Read the following passage:ARCHIBALD MACLEISH: Bicentennial of What?An address at the Bicentennial commemoration of the American Philosophical Society in PhiladelphiaIt is a common human practice to answer questions without truly asking them and the American bicente

2、nnial is merely the latest instance. Everyone knows what the Bicentennial celebrates: the 200th anniversary of the adoption, by the Continental Congress, of the Declaration of Independence. But no one asks what the Bicentennial is because no one asks what the Declaration was. The instrument of annou

3、ncing American independence from Great Britain? Clearly that: but is that all it was? Is it only American independence from Great Britain we are celebrating on July 4, 1976only the instrument which declared our independence? There have been other declarations of unilateral independence from Great Br

4、itain which no one is likely to remember for 200 years, much less to celebrate.“All men” are said in that document to be created equal and to have been endowed with certain unalienable rights. All governments are alleged to have been instituted among men to secure those rights to protect them. Are t

5、hese, then, American rights? Doubtlessbut only American? Is it the British Government which is declared to have violated them? Unquestionablybut the British Government alone? And the revolution against tyranny and arrogance which is here implied is it a revolution which American independence from th

6、e mediocre majesty of George III will win or is there something more intended? something for all mankind? for all the world?In the old days when college undergraduates still read history, any undergraduate could have told you that these are not rhetorical questions: that they were, from the beginnin

7、g, two opinions about the Declaration and that they were held by (among others) the two great men who had most to do with its composition and its adoption by the Congress.John Adams, who supported the Declaration with all his formidable powers, inclined to the view that it was just what is called it

8、self: a declaration of American independence. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it, held the opposite opinion: it was a revolutionary proclamation applicable to all mankind. “May it be the world”, he wrote to the citizens of Washington a few days before he died, “what I believe it will be: to some parts s

9、ooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains” And he went on in reverberating words: “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs for a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them by the grace of God.” Moreover, these two gr

10、eat and famous men were not the only Presidents of the Republic to choose between the alternatives: A third, as great as either, speaking in Philadelphia at the darkest moment in our history bearing indeed the whole weight of that history on his shoulders as he spoke turned to the Declaration for gu

11、idance for himself and for his country and made his choice between the meanings. Mr. Lincoln had been making his way slowly eastward in February 1861 from Springfield to Washington to take the oath of office as President of a divided people on the verge of Civil War. He had reached Philadelphia on t

12、he 21st of February where he had been told of the conspiracy to murder him in Baltimore as he passed through that city. He had gone to Independence Hall before daylight on the 22nd. He had found a crowd waiting. He had spoken to them.He had often asked himself. Mr. Lincoln said, what great principle

13、 or idea it was which had held the Union so long together. “It was not,” he said, as though replying directly to John Adams, “the mere matter of the separation from the mother country.”It was something more. “Something in the Declaration,” they heard him say. “Something giving liberty not alone to t

14、he people of this country but hope to the world.” “It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.” Anyone else, any modern President certainly, would have said, as most of them regularly do, that his hope for the country was fixed in huge

15、expenditures for arms, in the possession of overwhelming power. Not Mr. Lincoln. Not Mr. Lincoln even at that desperate moment. His hope was fixed in a great affirmation of belief made almost a century before. It was fixed in the commitment of the American people, at the beginning of their history a

16、s a people, to “ a great principle or idea”: the principle or idea of human liberty of human liberty not for themselves alone but for mankind.It was a daring gamble of Mr. Lincolns but so too was Mr. Jeffersons Declaration so was the cause which Mr. Jeffersons Declaration had defined. Could a nation

17、 be founded on the belief in liberty? Could belief in liberty preserve it? Two American generations argued that issue but not ours not the generation of the celebrants of the 200th anniversary of that great event. We assume, I suppose, that Mr. Jeffersons policy was right for him and right for Mr. L

18、incoln, because it was successful. But whatever we think about Mr. Lincoln view of the Declaration, whatever we believe about the Declaration in the past, in other mens lives, in other mens wars, we do not ask ourselves, as we celebrate its Bicentennial, what it is today, what it is to us.Our presen

19、t President has never intimated by so much as a word that such a question might be relevant that it even exists. The Congress has not debated it. The state and Federal commissions charged with Bicentennial responsibility express no opinions. Only the generation of the young, so far as I am informed,

20、 has even mentioned it, and the present generation of the young has certain understanble prejudices, inherited from the disillusionments of recent years, which color their commentsExpress your view that the nation brought into being by hat great document was, and had no choice but be, a revolutionar

21、y nation, and you will be reminded that, but for the accidental discovery of a piece of tape on a door latch, the President of the United States in the Bicentennial year would have been Richard Nixon. And so it will go until you are told at last that the American Revolution is a figure of obsolescen

22、t speech; that the Declaration has become a museum exhibit in the National Archives; and that, as for the Bicentennial, it is a year-long commercial which ought to be turned off.Well, the indignation of the young is always admirable regardless of its verbal excesses far more admirable, certainly, th

23、an the indifference of the elders. But, unfortunately, it is the indifference of the elders we have to consider. And not only because it is a puzzling, a paradoxical, indifference but because it is as disturbing as it is paradoxical.Does our indifference to the explicitly revolutionary purpose of th

24、e Declaration our silence about Mr. Jeffersons interpretation of that purpose mean that we no longer believe in that purpose no longer believe in human liberty? Hardly?.But if this is so, if we still believe in the cause of human liberty, why do we celebrate the anniversary of the document which def

25、ined it for us without a thought for the meaning of the definition, then or now? Why have we not heard from our representatives and our officials on his great theme?Is it because, although the Republic continues to believe in human liberty for itself, it no longer hopes for it in the world? Because

26、it no longer thinks such a hope “realistic”?.So far, indeed, is Mr. Jeffersons revolution from being obsolete that it is now the only truly revolutionary force in the age we live in. And not despite the police states but because of them. In 1945, when e had driven the Nazis out of Europe and the Jap

27、anese out of the Pacific in the name of human freedom and human decency, we stood at the peak, not only of our power as a nation but of our greatness as a people. We were more nearly ourselves, our true selves as the inheritors of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, than we had ever been before. A

28、nd yet within a few years of that tremendous triumph, of the unexampled generosity of our nuclear offer to the world, of the magnificence of the marshall Plan, we were lost in the hysterical fears and ignoble deceits of Joe McCarthy and his followers and had adopted, as our foreign policy, the notio

29、n that if we “contained” the Russian initiative, we would some how or other be better off ourselves than if we pursued our historic purpose as Jefferson conceived it.The result, as we now know, was disaster. And not only in Southeast Asia and Portugal and Africa but throughout the world, Containment

30、 put us in bed with every anti-Communist we could find including some of the most offensive despots then in business. It produced flagrantly subversive and shameful plots by American agencies against the duly elected governments of other countries. And it ended by persuading the new countries of the

31、 postwar world, the emerging nations, that he United States was to them and to their hopes what the Holy Alliance had been to us and ours 200 years before.I. Explain the following in your own words:1. All governments are alleged to have been instituted among men to secure those rights to protect the

32、m. 2. In the old days when college undergraduates still read history (1) What is the implication of this statement? (2) How do you know? 3. who had most to do with its composition and its adoption by the Congress. 4. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be: to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains 5. The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles by the grace of God. 6. It was that which gave promise from the shoulders of all men. 7. It was