2025年06月四级第3套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) Traffic jams are a common problem of most big cities, either in developed or in developing countries, but one kind of traffic jams in particular can be especially frustrating. These are generally known as "phantom" traffic jams, in which dense traffic crawls to a halt for no apparent reason at all.

交通拥堵是大多数大城市面临的普遍问题，无论发达国家还是发展中国家皆是如此，但其中一类交通拥堵尤为令人沮丧。这种现象通常被称为“幽灵堵车”，即密集的车流无缘无故地缓慢爬行直至停滞。

B) "When caught in such a traffic jam, it is common for drivers to assume that there must be an accident, or construction or something," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer science professor Berthold Horn. "And then you drive and drive and drive...and there isn't anything there."

麻省理工学院（MIT）计算机科学教授贝特霍尔德·霍恩表示：“遇到这种堵车时，司机们往往会认为前方肯定发生了事故、施工或其他状况。然而你继续往前开啊开……却什么都没有。”

C) The exact cause of these phantom traffic jams has long remained a mystery. But now, new research has found the cause and researchers may have come up with a solution for this frustrating traffic pattern: maintaining equal spacing between cars on the road, rather than driving so closely behind another vehicle that a collision (碰撞) is likely if that vehicle brakes suddenly.

这类幽灵堵车的确切成因长期以来一直是个谜。但如今，新研究发现了其成因，研究者们可能已经为这种恼人的交通模式找到了解决方案：保持车辆间的等距行驶，而不是紧贴前车——避免前车突然刹车时可能发生碰撞。

D) Horn said phantom traffic jams are an emergent property of the flow of vehicles down a highway. A phantom jam begins when a car in dense traffic slows down even slightly, which causes the car behind that vehicle to slow even more—and the slowing action spreads backward through the lane of traffic like a wave, getting worse the farther it spreads. Eventually, the cars far behind are forced to stop completely or risk hitting the slower vehicles ahead—and so the traffic grinds to a halt over nothing, Horn said.

霍恩指出，幽灵堵车是高速公路上车流的一种涌现特性。当密集车流中的一辆车略微减速时，幽灵堵车便开始了，这会导致后车减速更多——这种减速效应如波浪般向后方车道传播，且传播越远情况越糟。最终，后方的车辆被迫完全停下，否则就可能撞上前方的慢车——于是交通就这样毫无缘由地陷入停滞。

E) Horn has been working on the problem of phantom traffic jams for years, and he has come up with a solution: By splitting the difference between the cars in front and the cars behind, the spacing of cars in a stream of traffic can act as a damper (抑制器) on phantom traffic jams. That is, it can prevent the slow-down effect from being amplified (增强) by the cars that follow behind, he said. In essence, each driver would constantly make adjustments to keep their car roughly halfway between the car in front and the car behind.

霍恩研究幽灵堵车问题已持续多年，他提出了一个解决方案：通过兼顾前后车辆距离，车流中的车辆间距可以成为抑制幽灵堵车的缓冲器。这意味着它可以防止减速效应被后方车辆放大。本质上，每位司机会持续调整车速，使自己的车辆大致保持在前后车辆的中间位置。

F) Horn calls this method of vehicle spacing bilateral (双边的) control, and he said it could be achieved with relatively simple modifications to the adaptive cruise control that many new cars already have. Adaptive cruise control is a driver assistance technology that sets a maximum speed for vehicles and automatically slows the speed of the car when traffic is sensed in front of the vehicle. The technology is also known as autonomous cruise control. Such modifications, Horn said, could help fight phantom jams within a few years, maybe decades before an alternative solution, such as networked self-driving cars, becomes a reality on the roads.

霍恩将这种车辆间距调控方法称为双边控制，并表示这可以通过对许多新车已配备的自适应巡航控制系统进行相对简单的改装来实现。自适应巡航控制是一种驾驶辅助技术，可设定车辆最高时速，并在感知到前方有车辆时自动降速。该技术也称为自主巡航控制。霍恩表示，此类改装可能在几年内帮助缓解幽灵堵车，或许在联网自动驾驶汽车等替代方案成为现实前的数十年就能见效。

G) Traffic jams are caused by a number of factors, such as roads that are poorly designed or over-capacity, localized factors like city traffic-lighting patterns, and events like accidents and construction. But phantom traffic jams can make all those problems worse, Horn said. And the researchers in the new study have calculated that solving phantom jams could save at least some of the estimated $121 billion per year that traffic jams are estimated to cost the U.S. economy, Horn told Live Science.

霍恩指出，交通拥堵由多种因素导致，例如设计不良或容量不足的道路、城市交通灯模式等局部因素，以及事故和施工等事件。但幽灵堵车会使这些问题进一步恶化。霍恩告诉《生活科学》杂志，新研究的研究者们估算，解决幽灵堵车至少能节省部分交通拥堵给美国经济造成的每年约1210亿美元的损失。

H) New research by Horn and MIT postdoctoral associate Liang Wang, published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, shows how bilateral control can fight the problem. The researchers made computer models of real-world traffic conditions, showing how a typical U.S. freeway could benefit from cars using bilateral control. That would be in place when human drivers fail to slow down, thus avoiding tailgating (紧跟随) the car in front, Horn said. "Under reasonable conditions today, you might get 1,800 cars per lane per hour throughput (the volume of traffic passing through)," he added. "But with bilateral control, you could almost double that."

霍恩与麻省理工学院博士后研究员王梁发表在《IEEE智能交通系统汇刊》上的新研究，展示了双边控制如何应对此问题。研究者们通过模拟真实交通状况的计算机模型，证明了美国典型高速公路如何从采用双边控制的车辆中受益。霍恩表示，当人类驾驶员未能及时减速从而避免紧贴前车行驶时，该系统就会启动。“按当前合理条件计算，每条车道每小时通行车辆约为1800辆，”他补充道，“但采用双边控制后，这一数字几乎可以翻倍。”

I) The main alternative to increasing traffic throughput per lane has been to build more lanes and more highways, and putting in new roads is very expensive, he said. "If we can increase the throughput on major highways, even if it's only by 50 percent, that would be a big deal," Horn said.

他指出，提高单车道通行流量的主流替代方案是增建车道和公路，但新建道路造价高昂。“如果能提升主干道的通行能力，即使仅提高50%，那也是重大突破。”霍恩说道。

J) With the help of engineering students at high schools in Maine, Horn and Wang have also built a robot simulation (模拟) that shows how bilateral control can suppress phantom traffic jams. Increasing the spacing of vehicles dampens the effect of slowdowns by cars in front of a given car, so that the slowing is not worsened until it becomes a phantom jam, the researchers said.

在缅因州高中生工程学员的协助下，霍恩和王梁还搭建了机器人模拟系统，展示双边控制如何抑制幽灵堵车。研究者表示，增加车辆间距能缓冲前方车辆减速带来的影响，从而在减速效应恶化为幽灵堵车前予以遏制。

K) A video from the project shows a train of autonomous robots running along a track without bilateral control; they eventually back up in phantom jams. But when the robots are switched over to bilateral control (by flashing the lights in the room), each autonomous robot tries to keep itself halfway between the robot in front and the one behind; the phantom jams disappear as a result, Horn said.

项目展示的视频显示，一列未启用双边控制的自主机器人沿轨道运行，最终因幽灵堵车而堆积停滞。但当机器人通过房间灯光闪烁切换至双边控制模式后，每个自主机器人都试图保持在前后机器人的中间位置——幽灵堵车现象随之消失，霍恩如此描述。

L) Since starting his research on phantom traffic jams, Horn has learned that schools of fish and flocks of birds and bats use similar spacing strategies to avoid hitting each other while swimming or flying in densely packed groups. In particular, studies of millions of bats emerging at dusk from caves in Southeast Asia showed that each bat used a form of bilateral control to reduce the likelihood of collisions with other bats in the densely packed swarm (一大群), Horn said.

自开始研究幽灵堵车以来，霍恩发现鱼群、鸟群和蝙蝠群在密集群游或群飞时，都采用类似的间距策略以避免相互碰撞。他特别提到，对东南亚洞穴黄昏时分飞出的数百万只蝙蝠的研究表明，每只蝙蝠都运用某种形式的双边控制，以降低在密集蜂群中与其他个体碰撞的概率。

M) Unlike bats, birds and fish, however, humans have difficulty judging distances behind them. To address that weakness, Horn is now working with the car company Toyota to enable a form of bilateral control via modifications to existing adaptive cruise control systems, which use forward-facing sensors to judge the distance to the vehicle ahead. The bilateral control approach would include adding rear-facing sensors to determine the distance to the vehicle following a car.

然而与蝙蝠、鸟类和鱼类不同，人类难以判断后方距离。为弥补这一缺陷，霍恩正与丰田汽车公司合作，通过对现有自适应巡航控制系统（利用前向传感器判断与前车距离）进行改装来实现一种双边控制方式。该方案将增加后向传感器，用于探测与后方车辆的距离。

N) But until those systems become standard, human drivers can help reduce phantom traffic jams simply by not following the car in front so closely. As Horn argues, "There's absolutely no advantage of tailgating the car in front of you."

但在这些系统普及之前，人类驾驶员只需减少跟车距离就能有效缓解幽灵堵车。正如霍恩所言：“紧贴前车行驶毫无益处。”