2020年07月四级第1套仔细阅读 Passage 1 原文翻译及答案解析

The wallet is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. The kind of shopping—where you hand over notes and count out change in return—now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters, like buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk, from a corner shop. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge retail stores—Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, for instance—you don't go and stand at any kind of cash register, when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with iPads to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.

钱包正走向灭绝。作为一种日常必需品，它将随着阅读纸质报纸的一代人消亡。那种你递出钞票并数零钱的购物方式，如今只在我们最微不足道的零售交易中出现，比如在街角小店买一块巧克力或一品脱牛奶。在那些你真正花钱的商店里，钱变得越来越抽象。而且，消费层级越高，这一点就越明显。在最前沿的零售店——例如多佛街的Victoria Beckham——当你决定付款时，无需走到任何收银台。员工配备有iPads，可以在你放松于沙发上时处理付款。

Which is nothing more or less than excellent service, if you have the money. But across society, the abstraction of the idea of cash makes me uneasy. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But earning money isn't quick or easy for most of us. Isn't it a bit weird that spending it should happen in half a blink (眨眼) of an eye ? Doesn't a wallet—that time-honoured Friday-night feeling of pleasing, promising fatness—represent something that matters ?

如果你有钱，这无疑是卓越的服务。但在整个社会中，现金观念的抽象化让我感到不安。也许我只是老派。但对我们大多数人来说，赚钱并不快也不容易。花钱应该发生在眨眼之间，这难道不有点奇怪吗？钱包——那种历史悠久的、周五夜晚令人愉悦、承诺充实的感觉——难道不代表着重要的东西吗？

But I'll leave the economics to the experts. What bothers me about the death of the wallet is the change it represents in our physical environment. Everything about the look and feel of a wallet—the way the fastenings and materials wear and tear and loosen with age, the plastic and paper and gold and silver, and handwritten phone numbers and printed cinema tickets—is the very opposite of what our world is becoming. The opposite of a wallet is a smart phone or an iPad. The rounded edges, cool glass, smooth and unknowable as a pebble (鹅卵石). Instead of digging through pieces of paper and peering into corners, we move our fingers left and right. No more counting out coins. Show your wallet, if you still have one. It may not be here much longer.

但我会把经济学问题留给专家。钱包的消亡让我困扰的是它所代表的我们物理环境的变化。钱包的外观和触感的一切——其扣件和材料随着岁月磨损和松动的方式、塑料、纸张、金银、以及手写的电话号码和印刷的电影票——恰恰与我们世界正在变成的样子相反。钱包的对立面是智能手机或iPad。圆润的边缘、冰冷的玻璃、光滑且像鹅卵石一样不可知。我们不再翻找纸张、窥视角落，而是左右滑动手指。不再数硬币。展示你的钱包，如果你还有。它可能不会存在太久了。