2020年12月四级第1套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) This is the land of opportunity. If that weren't already implied by the landscape—rolling green hills, palm trees, sun-kissed flowers—then it's evident in the many stories of people who grew up poor in these sleepy neighborhoods and rose to enormous success. People like Tri Tran, who fled Vietnam on a boat in 1986, showed up in San Jose with nothing, made it to MIT, and then founded the food-delivery start-up Munchery, which is valued at $300 million.

这里是机遇之地。即使绵延的青山、棕榈树和沐浴阳光的鲜花等景象尚未暗示这一点，那些在这片宁静社区中从贫困中长大却取得巨大成功的人们的故事也足以证明。比如崔·陈，他于1986年乘船逃离越南，身无分文来到圣何塞，考入麻省理工学院，随后创立了估值3亿美元的食品配送初创公司Munchery。

B) Indeed, data suggests that this is one of the best places to grow up poor in America. A child born in the early 1980s into a low-income family in San Jose had a 12.9 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult, according to a landmark study released in 2014 by the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues from Harvard and Berkeley. That number—12.9 percent—may not seem remarkable, but it was: Kids in San Jose whose families fell in the bottom quintile (五分位数) of income nationally had the best shot in the country at reaching the top quintile.

事实上，数据表明，这里堪称美国贫困儿童成长的最佳地点之一。2014年，哈佛大学和伯克利大学的经济学家拉杰·切蒂及其同事发布的一项里程碑式研究指出，20世纪80年代初出生在圣何塞低收入家庭的孩子，成年后成为高收入者的概率为12.9%。这一数字——12.9%——看似并不惊人，但实际上非同寻常：圣何塞那些家庭收入处于全国最低五分之一的孩子，跻身收入最高五分之一阶层的机会在全国范围内是最高的。

C) By contrast, just 4.4 percent of poor kids in Charlotte moved up to the top; in Detroit the figure was 5.5 percent. San Jose had social mobility comparable to Denmark's and Canada's and higher than other progressive cities such as Boston and Minneapolis.

相比之下，夏洛特的贫困儿童中仅有4.4%上升到最高层；底特律的这一比例为5.5%。圣何塞的社会流动性与丹麦和加拿大相当，并且高于波士顿和明尼阿波利斯等其他进步城市。

D) The reasons kids in San Jose performed so well might seem obvious. Some of the world's most innovative companies are located here, providing opportunities such as the one seized by a 12-year-old Mountain View resident named Steve Jobs when he called William Hewlett to ask for spare parts and subsequently received a summer job. This is a city of immigrants—38 percent of the city's population today is foreign-born—and immigrants and their children have historically experienced significant upward mobility in America. The city has long had a large foreign-born population (26.5 percent in 1990), leading to broader diversity, which, the Harvard and Berkeley economists say, is a good predictor of mobility.

圣何塞的孩子们表现如此优异的原因可能显而易见。世界上最富创新力的一些公司坐落于此，提供了种种机遇，正如12岁的山景城居民史蒂夫·乔布斯所把握的机会那样——他曾致电威廉·休利特索要零件，并因此获得了暑期工作的机会。这是一座移民之城——目前全市38%的人口是外国出生的——而移民及其子女在美国历史上一直享有显著的向上流动机会。该市长期以来拥有庞大的外国出生人口（1990年时为26.5%），带来了更广泛的多样性，而哈佛和伯克利的经济学家们表示，这种多样性是预测流动性的一个良好指标。

E) Indeed, the streets of San Jose seem, in some ways, to embody the best of America. It's possible to drive in a matter of minutes from sleek (光亮的) office towers near the airport where people pitch ideas to investors, to single-family homes with orange trees in their yards, or to a Vietnamese mall. The libraries here offer programs in 17 languages, and there are areas filled with small businesses owned by Vietnamese immigrants, Mexican immigrants, Korean immigrants, and Filipino immigrants, to name a few.

确实，圣何塞的街道在某些方面似乎体现了美国的精华。你可以在几分钟内驱车从机场附近光鲜亮丽的办公楼（人们在那里向投资者推介创意）前往带橙树庭院的独栋住宅，或是一个越南购物中心。这里的图书馆提供17种语言的课程项目，并且分布着众多由越南移民、墨西哥移民、韩国移民和菲律宾移民等经营的小企业聚集区。

F) But researchers aren't sure exactly why poor kids in San Jose did so well. The city has a low prevalence of children growing up in single-parent families, and a low level of concentrated poverty, both factors that usually mean a city allows for good intergenerational mobility. But San Jose also performs poorly on some of the measures correlated with good mobility. It is one of the most unequal places out of the 741 that the researchers measured, and it has high degrees of racial and economic segregation (隔离). Its schools under perform based on how much money there is in the area, said Ben Scuderi, a predoctoral fellow at the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard, which uses big data to study how to improve economic opportunities for low-income children. "There's a lot going on here which we don't totally understand," he said. "It's interesting, because it kind of defies our expectations."

但研究人员并不完全确定圣何塞的贫困儿童为何表现如此出色。这座城市中单亲家庭长大的孩子比例较低，集中的贫困程度也较低，这两个因素通常意味着一座城市能够促进良好的代际流动。然而，圣何塞在一些与良好流动性相关的指标上表现不佳。在研究人员测量的741个地区中，它是不平等程度最高的地区之一，并且种族和经济隔离程度很高。哈佛大学机会平等项目（利用大数据研究如何改善低收入儿童的经济机会）的博士前研究员本·斯库代里表示，就该地区的资金水平而言，该市的学校表现不尽如人意。"这里有很多情况我们并未完全理解，"他说。"这很有趣，因为它似乎违背了我们的预期。"

G) The Chetty data shows that neighborhoods and places mattered for children born in the San Jose area of the 1980s. Whether the city still allows for upward mobility of poor kids today, though, is up for debate. Some of the indicators such as income inequality, measured by the Equality of Opportunity Project for the year 2000, have only worsened in the past 16 years.

切蒂的数据显示，社区和地点对20世纪80年代出生在圣何塞地区的儿童至关重要。然而，该市如今是否仍然允许贫困儿童向上流动，尚存争议。例如，机会平等项目测量的2000年收入不平等等指标在过去的16年里只增不减。

H) Some San Jose residents say that as inequality has grown in recent years, upward mobility has become much more difficult to achieve. As Silicon Valley has become home to more successful companies, the flood of people to the area has caused housing prices to skyrocket. By most measures, San Jose is no longer a place where low-income, or even middle-income families, can afford to live. Rents in San Jose grew 42. 6 percent between 2006 and 2014, which was the largest increase in the country during that time period. The city has a growing homelessness problem, which it tried to address by shutting down "The Jungle," one of the largest homeless encampments (临时住地) in the nation, in 2014. Inequality is extreme. The Human Development Index—a measure of life expectancy, education and per capita (人均的) income—gives East San Jose a score of 4. 85 out of 10, while nearby Cupertino, where Apple's headquarters sits, receives a 9.26. San Jose used to have a happy mix of factors—cheap housing, closeness to a rapidly developing industry, tightly-knit immigrant communities—that together opened up the possibility of prosperity for even its poorest residents. But in recent years, housing prices have skyrocketed, the region's rich and poor have segregated, and middle-class jobs have disappeared. Given this, the future for the region's poor doesn't look nearly as bright as it once did.

一些圣何塞居民表示，随着近年来不平等加剧，向上流动变得困难得多。随着硅谷吸引更多成功的公司，涌入该地区的人潮导致房价飙升。以大多数标准衡量，圣何塞已不再是低收入甚至中等收入家庭能够负担得起的居住地。2006年至2014年间，圣何塞的租金上涨了42.6%，是当时全国最大的涨幅。该市日益严重的无家可归问题试图通过在2014年关闭该国最大的无家可归者营地之一"丛林"来解决。不平等现象极其严重。人类发展指数——衡量预期寿命、教育水平和人均收入的指标——给东圣何塞的评分为4.85分（满分10分），而附近的库比蒂诺（苹果公司总部所在地）则获得了9.26分。圣何塞曾经拥有令人愉快的综合因素——廉价的住房、毗邻快速发展的行业、紧密联系的移民社区——这些共同为即使是最贫困的居民也创造了繁荣的可能性。但近年来，房价飞涨，该地区的富人和穷人相互隔离，中产阶级的工作岗位消失。鉴于此，该地区贫困人口的未来看起来远不如往昔光明。

I) Leaders in San Jose are determined to make sure that the city regains its status as a place where even poor kids can access the resources to succeed. With Silicon Valley in its backyard, it certainly has the chance to do so. "I think there is a broad consciousness in the Valley that we can do better than to leave thousands of our neighbors behind through a period of extraordinary success," San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said.

圣何塞的领导人决心确保该市重拾其作为即使是贫困儿童也能获得成功资源之地的地位。背靠硅谷，它当然有这样的机会。"我认为，硅谷有一种广泛的共识，即我们可以做得更好，而不是在一段非凡的成功时期将成千上万的邻居抛在身后，"圣何塞市长萨姆·利卡多说道。

J) But in today's America—a land of rising inequality, increasing segregation, and stagnating (不增长的) middle-class wages—can the San Jose region really once again become a place of opportunity?

但在当今的美国——一个不平等日益加剧、种族隔离不断加深、中产阶级工资停滞不前的土地上——圣何塞地区真的能再次成为机遇之地吗？

K) The idea that those at the bottom can rise to the top is central to America's ideas about itself. That such mobility has become more difficult in San Jose raises questions about the endurance of that foundational belief. After all if the one-time land of opportunity can't be fixed, what does that say for the rest of America?

底层人民能够攀升至顶层的理念是美国人自我认同的核心。这种流动性在圣何塞变得愈发困难，引发了人们对这一基本信念持久性的质疑。毕竟，如果曾经的机遇之地都无法修复，那么这对美国其他地方又意味着什么呢？