2020年12月四级第3套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) It was made of shiny, bright pink plastic with a Little Mermaid sticker on the front, and I carried it with me nearly every single day. My lunch box was one of my first prized possessions, a proud statement to everyone in my kindergarten: "I love Mermaid-Ariel on my lunch box."

它由闪亮的亮粉色塑料制成，前面贴着小美人鱼贴纸，我几乎每天都随身携带。我的午餐盒是我最早的珍贵财产之一，是向幼儿园里所有人宣告的骄傲：“我爱我午餐盒上的美人鱼爱丽儿。”

B) That bulky container served me well through my first and second grades, until the live-action version of 101 Dalmatians hit theaters, and I needed the newest red plastic box with characters like Pongo and Perdita on the front. I know I'm not alone here—I bet you loved your first lunch box, too.

那个笨重的容器在我的一年级和二年级期间一直很好地为我服务，直到真人版的《101斑点狗》上映，我需要最新的红色塑料盒，上面有像庞哥和佩蒂这样的角色。我知道我不是一个人——我打赌你也爱你的第一个午餐盒。

C) Lunch boxes have been connecting kids to cartoons and TV shows and super-heroes for decades. But it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, they weren't even boxes. As schools have changed in the past century, the midday meal container has evolved right along with them.

几十年来，午餐盒一直将孩子们与卡通、电视节目和超级英雄联系在一起。但并非总是如此。曾经，它们甚至不是盒子。随着过去一个世纪学校的变化，午餐容器也随之演变。

D) Let's start back at the beginning of the 20th century—the beginning of the lunch box story, really. While there were neighborhood schools in cities and suburbs, one-room schoolhouses were common in rural areas. As grandparents have been saying for generations, kids would travel miles to school in the countryside (often on foot).

让我们回到20世纪初——午餐盒故事的真正开始。虽然在城市和郊区有邻里学校，但在农村地区，单间校舍很常见。正如祖父母世代所说的那样，孩子们在乡下要走几英里去上学（通常是步行）。

E) "You had kids in rural areas who couldn't go home from school for lunch, so bringing your lunch wrapped in a cloth, in oiled paper, in a little wooden box or something like that was a very long standing rural tradition," says Paula Johnson, head of food history section at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

史密森尼国家美国历史博物馆食品历史部门负责人保拉·约翰逊说：“农村地区的孩子不能回家吃午饭，所以用布、油纸或小木盒之类的东西包裹午餐带来，是一个非常悠久的农村传统。”

F) City kids, on the other hand, went home for lunch and came back. Since they rarely carried a meal, the few metal lunch buckets on the market were mainly for tradesmen and factory workers.

另一方面，城市孩子回家吃午饭然后回来。由于他们很少携带餐食，市场上少数金属午餐桶主要面向商人和工厂工人。

G) After World War II, a bunch of changes reshaped schools—and lunches. More women joined the workforce. Small schools consolidated into larger ones, meaning more students were farther away from home. And the National School Lunch Act in 1946 made cafeterias much more common. Still, there wasn't much of a market for lunch containers—yet. Students who carried their lunch often did so in a re-purposed bucket or tin of some kind.

第二次世界大战后，一系列变化重塑了学校和午餐。更多女性加入劳动力队伍。小学校合并为大学校，意味着更多学生离家更远。1946年的《国家学校午餐法》使自助餐厅变得更加普遍。尽管如此，午餐容器的市场还不大。携带午餐的学生通常使用某种改装过的桶或罐子。

H) And then everything changed in the year of 1950. You might as well call it the Year of the Lunch Box, thanks in large part to a genius move by a Nashville-based manufacturer, Aladdin Industries. The company already made square metal meal containers, the kind workers carried, and some had started to show up in the hands of school kids.

然后，在1950年，一切都改变了。你不妨称之为午餐盒之年，这在很大程度上归功于纳什维尔制造商阿拉丁工业的一个天才之举。该公司已经生产了工人携带的方形金属餐盒，其中一些开始出现在学校孩子手中。

I) But these containers were really durable, lasting years on end. That was great for the consumer, not so much for the manufacturer. So executives at Aladdin hit on an idea that would harness the newfound popularity of television. They covered lunch boxes with striking red paint and added a picture of TV and radio cowboy Hopalong Cassidy on the front.

但这些容器非常耐用，能持续使用多年。这对消费者来说很好，但对制造商来说就不那么好了。因此，阿拉丁的高管们想到了一个利用电视新流行的想法。他们用醒目的红色油漆覆盖午餐盒，并在前面加上了电视和广播牛仔霍帕隆·卡西迪的图片。

J) The company sold 600,000 units the first year. It was a major "Ah-ha!" moment, and a wave of other manufacturers jumped on board to capitalize on new TV shows and movies. "The Partridge Family, the Addams Family, the Six Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Woman—everything that was on television ended up on a lunch box," says Allen Woodall. He's the founder of the Lunch Box Museum in Columbus, Georgia. "It was a great marketing tool because kids were taking that TV show to school with them, and then when they got home they had them captured back on TV," he says.

该公司第一年售出了60万个。这是一个重大的“啊哈！”时刻，一波其他制造商纷纷加入，利用新的电视节目和电影。“帕特里奇一家、亚当斯一家、六百万美元男人、女超人——电视上的一切都出现在午餐盒上，”艾伦·伍德尔说。他是乔治亚州哥伦布市午餐盒博物馆的创始人。“这是一个很棒的营销工具，因为孩子们把那个电视节目带到学校，然后当他们回家时，他们又在电视上看到了它们，”他说。

K) And yes, you read that right: There is a lunch box museum, right near the Chattahoochee River. Woodall has more than 2,000 items on display. His favorite? The GreenHornet lunch box, because he used to listen to the radio show back in the 1940s.

是的，你没看错：有一个午餐盒博物馆，就在查塔胡奇河附近。伍德尔展出了2000多件物品。他最喜欢的是什么？青蜂侠午餐盒，因为他1940年代常听广播节目。

L) The new trend was also a great example of planned obsolescence, that is, to design a product so that it will soon become unfashionable or impossible to use and will need replacing. Kids would beg for a new lunch box every year to keep up with the newest characters, even if their old lunch box was perfectly usable.

这一新趋势也是计划性淘汰的一个很好例子，即设计一种产品，使其很快变得不时尚或无法使用，需要更换。孩子们每年都会乞求一个新午餐盒以跟上最新的角色，即使他们的旧午餐盒完全可用。

M) The metal lunch box craze lasted until the mid-1980s, when plastic took over. Two theories exist as to why. The first and most likely is that plastic has simply become cheaper. The second theory possibly an urban myth is that concerned parents in several states proposed bans on metal lunch boxes, claiming kids were using them as "weapons" to hit one another. There's a lot on the internet about a state-wide ban in Florida, but a few days worth of digging by a historian at the Florida State Historical Society found no such legislation. Either way, the metal lunch box was out.

金属午餐盒热潮持续到20世纪80年代中期，当时塑料取而代之。关于原因有两种理论。第一种也是最可能的是塑料变得更便宜了。第二种理论可能是一个都市传说，即几个州的担忧父母提议禁止金属午餐盒，声称孩子们用它们作为“武器”互相打击。互联网上有很多关于佛罗里达州全州禁令的信息，但佛罗里达州历史学会的历史学家几天的挖掘没有发现这样的立法。无论如何，金属午餐盒被淘汰了。

N) The last few decades have brought a new lunch box revolution, of sorts. Plastic boxes changed to lined cloth sacks, and eventually, globalism brought tiffin containers from India and bento boxes from Japan. Even the old metal lunch boxes have regained popularity. "I don't think the heyday (鼎盛时期) has passed," says D. J. Jayasekara, owner and founder of lunchbox.com, a retailer in Pasadena, California. "I think it has evolved. The days of the ready-made, 'you stick it in a lunch box and carry it to school' are kind of done."

过去几十年带来了一种新的午餐盒革命。塑料盒变成了衬里布袋，最终，全球化带来了印度的提芬容器和日本的便当盒。甚至旧的金属午餐盒也重新流行起来。“我认为鼎盛时期还没有过去，”位于加利福尼亚州帕萨迪纳的零售商lunchbox.com的老板和创始人D. J. 贾亚塞卡拉说。“我认为它已经演变了。那种‘你把它塞进午餐盒带到学校’的现成日子已经结束了。”

O) The introduction of backpacks changed the lunch box scene a bit, he adds. Once kids started carrying book bags, that bulky traditional lunch box was hard to fit inside. "But you can't just throw a sandwich in a backpack," Jayasekara says. "It still has to go into a container." That is, in part, why smaller and softer containers have taken off—they fit into backpacks.

他补充说，背包的引入稍微改变了午餐盒的格局。一旦孩子们开始携带书包，那个笨重的传统午餐盒就很难放进去了。“但你不能把三明治直接扔进背包，”贾亚塞卡拉说。“它仍然需要放进一个容器里。”这部分是因为较小和较软的容器开始流行——它们适合放进背包。

P) And don't worry—whether it's a plastic bento box or a cloth bag, lunch containers can still easily be covered with popular culture. "We keep pace with the movie industries so we can predict which characters are going to be popular for the coming months," Jayasekara says. "You know, kids are kids."

别担心——无论是塑料便当盒还是布袋，午餐容器仍然可以轻松地覆盖流行文化。“我们与电影产业保持同步，以便预测哪些角色在未来几个月会流行，”贾亚塞卡拉说。“你知道，孩子们就是孩子。”