2018年12月六级第2套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) Maria Sibylla Merian, like many European women of the 17th century, stayed busy managing a household and rearing children. But on top of that, Merian, a German-born woman who lived in the Netherlands, also managed a successful career as an artist, botanist, naturalist and entomologist (昆虫学家).

玛丽亚·西比拉·梅里安，像17世纪的许多欧洲女性一样，忙于管理家务和抚养孩子。但除此之外，梅里安，一位出生在德国、居住在荷兰的女性，还成功经营了作为艺术家、植物学家、自然学家和昆虫学家（昆虫学家）的职业生涯。

B) "She was a scientist on the level with a lot of people we spend a lot of time talking about," said Kay Etheridge, a biologist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania who has been studying the scientific history of Merian's work. "She didn't do as much to change biology as Charles Darwin, but she was significant."

“她是一位与许多我们经常谈论的科学家齐名的科学家，”宾夕法尼亚州盖茨堡学院的生物学家凯·埃瑟里奇说，他一直在研究梅里安工作的科学历史。“她在改变生物学方面不如查尔斯·达尔文那样有影响，但她很重要。”

C) At a time when natural history was a valuable tool for discovery, Merian discovered facts about plants and insects that were not previously known. Her observations helped dismiss the popular belief that insects spontaneously emerged from mud. The knowledge she collected over decades didn't just satisfy those curious about nature, but also provided valuable insights into medicine and science. She was the first to bring together insects and their habitats, including food they ate, into a single ecological composition.

在自然历史作为发现的重要工具的时代，梅里安发现了以前未知的关于植物和昆虫的事实。她的观察有助于推翻昆虫从泥中自发产生的流行观念。她数十年收集的知识不仅满足了那些对自然好奇的人，还为医学和科学提供了宝贵的见解。她是第一个将昆虫及其栖息地，包括它们所吃的食物，整合到一个单一的生态构成中的人。

D) After years of pleasing a fascinated audience across Europe with books of detailed descriptions and life-size paintings of familiar insects, in 1699 she sailed with her daughter nearly 5,000 miles from the Netherlands to South America to study insects in the jungles of what is now known as Suriname. She was 52 years old. The result was her masterpiece, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

在多年来用详细描述和实物大小的熟悉昆虫绘画让欧洲观众着迷之后，1699年，她与女儿从荷兰航行近5000英里到南美洲，在现在被称为苏里南的丛林中研究昆虫。她当时52岁。结果是她的杰作《苏里南昆虫变态记》。

E) In her work, she revealed a side of nature so exotic, dramatic and valuable to Europeans of the time that she received much acclaim. But a century later, her findings came under scientific criticism. Shoddy (粗糙的) reproductions of her work along with setbacks to women's roles in 18th- and 19th-century Europe resulted in her efforts being largely forgotten. "It was kind of stunning when she sort of dropped off into oblivion (遗忘)," said Dr. Etheridge. "Victorians started putting women in a box, and they're still trying to crawl out of it."

在她的作品中，她揭示了自然的一面，如此异国情调、戏剧性和对当时的欧洲人有价值，以至于她获得了许多赞誉。但一个世纪后，她的发现受到了科学的批评。她作品的粗糙复制品以及18和19世纪欧洲女性角色的挫折导致她的努力在很大程度上被遗忘。“当她逐渐被遗忘时，这有点令人震惊，”埃瑟里奇博士说。“维多利亚时代的人开始把女性放进一个盒子里，她们仍在试图爬出来。”

F) Today, the pioneering woman of the sciences has re-emerged. In recent years, feminists, historians and artists have all praised Merian's tenacity (坚韧), talent and inspirational artistic compositions. And now biologists like Dr. Etheridge are digging into the scientific texts that accompanied her art. Three hundred years after her death, Merian will be celebrated at an international symposium in Amsterdam this June.

今天，这位科学先驱女性重新浮出水面。近年来，女权主义者、历史学家和艺术家都赞扬了梅里安的坚韧、才华和鼓舞人心的艺术构图。现在，像埃瑟里奇博士这样的生物学家正在深入研究伴随她艺术的科学文本。在她去世三百年后，梅里安将在今年六月阿姆斯特丹的一个国际研讨会上受到庆祝。

G) And last month, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium was republished. It contains 60 plates (插图) and original descriptions, along with stories about Merian's life and updated scientific descriptions. Before writing Metamorphosis, Merian spent decades documenting European plants and insects that she published in a series of books. She began in her 20s, making textless, decorative paintings of flowers with insects. "Then she got really serious," Dr. Etheridge said. Merian started raising insects at home, mostly butterflies and caterpillars. "She would sit up all night until they came out of the pupa (蛹) so she could draw them," she said.

上个月，《苏里南昆虫变态记》再版。它包含60幅插图和原始描述，以及关于梅里安生平的故事和更新的科学描述。在写《变态记》之前，梅里安花了数十年时间记录欧洲植物和昆虫，她出版了一系列书籍。她20多岁时开始，制作无文字的、装饰性的花卉与昆虫绘画。“然后她变得非常认真，”埃瑟里奇博士说。梅里安开始在家里饲养昆虫，主要是蝴蝶和毛虫。“她会通宵坐着，直到它们从蛹中出来，以便她能画它们，”她说。

H) The results of her decades' worth of careful observations were detailed paintings and descriptions of European insects, followed by unconventional visuals and stories of insects and animals from a land that most at the time could only imagine. It's possible Merian used a magnifying glass to capture the detail of the split tongues of sphinx moths (斯芬克斯飞蛾) depicted in the painting. She wrote that the two tongues combine to form one tube for drinking nectar (花蜜). Some criticized this detail later, saying there was just one tongue, but Merian wasn't wrong. She may have observed the adult moth just as it emerged from its pupa. For a brief moment during that stage of its life cycle, the tongue consists of two tiny half-tubes before merging into one.

她数十年细心观察的结果是详细的欧洲昆虫绘画和描述，接着是来自当时大多数人只能想象的土地的昆虫和动物的非常规视觉和故事。梅里安可能使用了放大镜来捕捉绘画中描绘的斯芬克斯飞蛾分叉舌头的细节。她写道，两个舌头结合成一个管子来喝花蜜。后来有些人批评这个细节，说只有一个舌头，但梅里安没有错。她可能是在成虫从蛹中出来的那一刻观察到的。在它生命周期的那个短暂阶段，舌头由两个微小的半管组成，然后合并成一个。

I) It may not have been ladylike to depict a giant spider devouring a hummingbird, but when Merian did it at the turn of the 18th century, surprisingly, nobody objected. Dr. Etheridge called it revolutionary. The image, which also contained novel descriptions of ants, fascinated a European audience that was more concerned with the exotic story unfolding before them than the gender of the person who painted it.

描绘一只巨型蜘蛛吞噬一只蜂鸟可能不淑女，但当梅里安在18世纪之交这样做时，令人惊讶的是，没有人反对。埃瑟里奇博士称之为革命性的。这幅图像还包含了对蚂蚁的新颖描述，迷住了欧洲观众，他们更关心展现在他们面前的异国故事，而不是画家的性别。

J) "All of these things shook up their nice, neat little view," Dr. Etheridge said. But later, people of the Victorian era thought differently. Her work had been reproduced, sometimes incorrectly. A few observations were deemed impossible. "She'd been called a silly woman for saying that a spider could eat a bird," Dr. Etheridge said. But Henry Walter Bates, a friend of Charles Darwin, observed it and put it in book in 1863, proving Merian was correct.

“所有这些事情都动摇了他们美好、整洁的小观点，”埃瑟里奇博士说。但后来，维多利亚时代的人有不同的想法。她的作品被复制，有时不正确。一些观察被认为不可能。“她因为说蜘蛛能吃鸟而被称为愚蠢的女人，”埃瑟里奇博士说。但查尔斯·达尔文的朋友亨利·沃尔特·贝茨观察到了这一点，并于1863年写入书中，证明梅里安是正确的。

K) In the same plate, Merian depicted and described leaf-cutter ants for the first time. "In America there are large ants which can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night," she wrote in the description. Merian noted how the ants took the leaves below ground to their young. And she wouldn't have known this at the time, but the ants use the leaves to farm fungi (菌类) underground to feed their developing babies.

在同一幅插图中，梅里安首次描绘和描述了切叶蚁。“在美洲，有大型蚂蚁能在一夜之间吃光整棵树，只剩下扫帚柄，”她在描述中写道。梅里安注意到蚂蚁如何将叶子带到地下给它们的幼崽。她当时不可能知道，但蚂蚁用叶子在地下种植菌类来喂养它们发育中的婴儿。

L) Merian was correct about the giant bird-eating spiders, ants building bridges with their bodies and other details. But in the same drawing, she incorrectly lumped together army and leaf-cutter ants. And instead of showing just the typical pair of eggs in a hummingbird nest, she painted four. She made other mistakes in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium as well: not every caterpillar and butterfly matched.

梅里安关于巨型食鸟蜘蛛、蚂蚁用身体搭桥和其他细节是正确的。但在同一幅画中，她错误地将行军蚁和切叶蚁混在一起。而且，她没有展示蜂鸟巢中典型的一对蛋，而是画了四个。她在《苏里南昆虫变态记》中也犯了其他错误：不是每只毛虫和蝴蝶都匹配。

M) Perhaps one explanation for her mistakes is that she cut short her Suriname trip after getting sick, and completed the book at home in Amsterdam. And errors are common among some of history's most-celebrated scientific minds, too. "These errors no more invalidate Ms. Merian's work than do well-known misconceptions published by Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton," Dr. Etheridge wrote in a paper that argued that too many have wrongly focused on the mistakes of her work.

也许对她错误的一个解释是，她在生病后缩短了苏里南之旅，在阿姆斯特丹的家中完成了这本书。而且，错误在历史上一些最著名的科学头脑中也很常见。“这些错误并不比查尔斯·达尔文或艾萨克·牛顿发表的著名误解更能使梅里安女士的工作失效，”埃瑟里奇博士在一篇论文中写道，他认为太多人错误地关注了她工作中的错误。

N) Merian's paintings inspired artists and ecologists. In an 1801 drawing from his book, General Zoology Amphibia, George Shaw, an English botanist and zoologist, credited Merian for describing a frog in the account of her South American expedition, and named the young tree frog after her in his portrayal of it. It wouldn't be fair to give Merian all the credit. She received assistance naming plants, making sketches and referencing the work of others. Her daughters helped her color her drawings.

梅里安的绘画启发了艺术家和生态学家。在1801年他的书《两栖动物通史》的一幅画中，英国植物学家和动物学家乔治·肖赞扬梅里安在她南美探险的记述中描述了一种青蛙，并在描绘中以她的名字命名了这种年轻的树蛙。把所有功劳都归于梅里安是不公平的。她在植物命名、制作草图和参考他人作品方面得到了帮助。她的女儿们帮她为画作上色。

O) Merian also made note of the help she received from the natives of Suriname, as well as slaves or servants that assisted her. In some instances she wrote moving passages that included her helpers in descriptions. As she wrote in her description of the peacock flower, "The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves."

梅里安也记录了从苏里南原住民以及帮助她的奴隶或仆人那里得到的帮助。在某些情况下，她写下了感人的段落，将她的助手包括在描述中。正如她在描述孔雀花时所写：“印第安人，受到荷兰主人的不好对待，用种子来流产他们的孩子，以免他们像自己一样成为奴隶。来自几内亚和安哥拉的黑人奴隶要求得到善待，威胁要拒绝生孩子。事实上，他们有时自杀，因为他们受到如此恶劣的对待，并且因为他们相信他们会重生，自由地生活在自己的土地上。他们亲自告诉了我。”

P) Londa Schiebinger, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, called this passage rather astonishing. It's particularly striking centuries later when these issues are still prominent in public discussions about social justice and women's rights. "She was ahead of her time," Dr. Etheridge said.

斯坦福大学科学史教授隆达·席宾格称这段话相当惊人。几个世纪后，当这些问题在关于社会正义和妇女权利的公开讨论中仍然突出时，这尤其引人注目。“她走在了时代前面，”埃瑟里奇博士说。