2020年12月六级第2套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) Our world is full of—mostly untold—stories of slow hope, driven by the idea that change is possible. They are 'slow' in their unfolding, and they are slow because they come with setbacks.

我们的世界充满了——大多是未被讲述的——缓慢希望的故事，这些故事受到变革可能的理念驱动。它们展开得很“缓慢”，之所以缓慢是因为它们伴随着挫折。

B) At the beginning of time—so goes the myth—humans suffered, shivering in the cold and dark until the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Just as in the myth, technology—first fire and stone tools, and later farming, the steam engine and industry, fossil fuels, chemicals and nuclear power—has allowed us to alter and control the natural world. The myth also reminds us that these advances have come at a price: as a punishment for Prometheus' crime, the gods created Pandora, and they gave her a box filled with evils and curses. When Pandora's box was opened, it unleashed swarms of diseases and disasters upon humankind.

在时间之初——神话如此叙述——人类受苦，在寒冷和黑暗中发抖，直到巨人普罗米修斯从众神那里偷来了火。就像神话中一样，技术——最初是火和石器，后来是农业、蒸汽机和工业、化石燃料、化学品和核能——使我们能够改变和控制自然世界。神话也提醒我们，这些进步是有代价的：作为对普罗米修斯罪行的惩罚，众神创造了潘多拉，并给了她一个装满邪恶和诅咒的盒子。当潘多拉的盒子被打开时，它释放出成群的疾病和灾难降临在人类身上。

C) Today we can no longer ignore the ecological curses that we have released in our search for warmth and comfort. In engineering and exploiting and transforming our habitat, we have opened tens of thousands of Pandora's boxes. In recent decades, environmental threats have expanded beyond regional boundaries to have global reach and, most hauntingly, are multiplying at a dizzying rate. On a regular basis, we are reminded that we are running out of time. Year after year, faster and faster, consumption outpaces the biological capacity of our planet. Stories of accelerated catastrophe multiply. We fear the breakdown of the electric grid, the end of non-renewable resources, the expansion of deserts, the loss of islands, and the pollution of our air and water.

今天，我们再也无法忽视在追求温暖和舒适的过程中释放的生态诅咒。在工程化、开发和改造我们的栖息地的过程中，我们打开了成千上万个潘多拉的盒子。近几十年来，环境威胁已经超越了区域边界，具有全球范围，并且最令人不安的是，它们正以令人眩晕的速度倍增。我们经常被提醒，时间所剩无几。年复一年，越来越快，消耗超过了我们星球的生物承载能力。加速灾难的故事倍增。我们害怕电网崩溃、不可再生资源枯竭、沙漠扩张、岛屿消失以及空气和水的污染。

D) Acceleration is the signature of our time. Populations and economic activity grew slowly for much of human history. For thousands of years and well into early modern times, world economies saw no growth at all, but from around the mid-19th century and again, in particular, since the mid-20th, the real GDP has increased at an enormous speed, and so has human consumption. In the Middle Ages, households in Central Europe might have owned fewer than 30 objects on average; in 1900, this number had increased to 400, and in 2020 to 15,000. The acceleration of human production, consumption and travel has changed the animate and inanimate spheres. It has echoed through natural processes on which humans depend. Species extinction, deforestation, damming of rivers, occurrence of floods, the depletion of ozone, the degradation of ocean systems and many other areas are all experiencing acceleration. If represented graphically, the curve for all these changes looks rather like that well-known hockey stick: with little change over millennia and a dramatic upswing over the past decades.

加速是我们时代的标志。在人类历史的大部分时间里，人口和经济增长缓慢。数千年来直至近代早期，世界经济根本没有增长，但大约从19世纪中叶开始，特别是20世纪中叶以来，实际GDP以巨大速度增长，人类消费也是如此。在中世纪，中欧家庭平均可能拥有不到30件物品；1900年，这个数字增加到400件，2020年增加到15000件。人类生产、消费和旅行的加速改变了生命和非生命领域。它在人类所依赖的自然过程中产生了回响。物种灭绝、森林砍伐、河流筑坝、洪水发生、臭氧消耗、海洋系统退化以及许多其他领域都正在经历加速。如果用图形表示，所有这些变化的曲线看起来就像那个著名的曲棍球棒：千年间变化甚微，过去几十年急剧上升。

E) Some of today's narratives about the future seem to suggest that we too, like Prometheus, will be saved by a new Hercules, a divine engineer, someone who will mastermind, manoeuver and manipulate our planet. They suggest that geoengineering, cold fusion or faster-than-light spaceships might transcend once and for all the terrestrial constraints of rising temperatures, lack of energy, scarcity of food, lack of space, mountains of waste, polluted water—you name it.

今天关于未来的一些叙述似乎暗示，我们也会像普罗米修斯一样，被一个新的赫拉克勒斯、一个神圣的工程师、一个将策划、操纵和控制我们星球的人所拯救。他们暗示，地球工程、冷聚变或超光速飞船可能一劳永逸地超越地球的限制：气温上升、能源缺乏、食物短缺、空间不足、堆积如山的废物、污染的水——诸如此类。

F) Yet, if we envisage our salvation to come from a deus ex machina, from a divine engineer or a tech solutionist who will miraculously conjure up a new source of energy or another cure-all with revolutionary potency, we might be looking in the wrong place. The fact that we now imagine our planet as a whole does not mean that the 'rescue' of our planet will come with one big global stroke of genius and technology. It will more likely come by many small acts. Global heating and environmental degradation are not technological problems. They are highly political issues that are informed by powerful interests. Moreover, if history is a guide, then we can assume that any major transformations will once again be followed by a huge set of unintended consequences. So what do we do?

然而，如果我们设想拯救来自一个解围之神、一个神圣的工程师或一个技术解决方案主义者，他们奇迹般地变出一个新的能源或另一个具有革命效力的万能药，我们可能找错了地方。我们现在将地球视为一个整体，这一事实并不意味着对地球的“拯救”会来自一次全球性的天才和技术壮举。它更可能来自许多小的行动。全球变暖和环境退化不是技术问题。它们是受强大利益影响的高度政治化问题。此外，如果历史是指导，那么我们可以假设任何重大转型都将再次伴随着大量意想不到的后果。那么我们该怎么做？

G) This much is clear: we need to find ways that help us flatten the hockey-stick curves that reflect our ever-faster pace of ecological destruction and social acceleration. If we acknowledge that human manipulation of the Earth has been a destructive force, we can also imagine that human endeavours can help us build a less destructive world in the centuries to come. We might keep making mistakes. But we will also keep learning from our mistakes.

这一点很清楚：我们需要找到方法来帮助我们拉平那些反映我们日益加速的生态破坏和社会加速的曲棍球棒曲线。如果我们承认人类对地球的操纵是一种破坏性力量，我们也可以想象，人类的努力可以帮助我们在未来几个世纪中构建一个破坏性较小的世界。我们可能继续犯错误。但我们也将继续从错误中学习。

H) To counter the fears of disaster, we need to identify stories, visions and actions that work quietly towards a more hopeful future. Instead of one big narrative, a story of unexpected rescue by a larger-than-life hero, we need multiple stories: we need stories, not only of what Rob Nixon of Princeton University has called the 'slow violence' of environmental degradation (that is, the damage that is often invisible at first and develops slowly and gradually), but also stories of what I call 'slow hope'.

为了对抗对灾难的恐惧，我们需要识别那些悄然朝着更希望未来努力的故事、愿景和行动。我们需要多个故事，而不是一个大叙事，一个由超越凡人的英雄意外拯救的故事：我们需要故事，不仅关于普林斯顿大学的罗布·尼克松所说的环境退化的“缓慢暴力”（即起初往往不可见且缓慢渐进发展的损害），还有关于我称之为“缓慢希望”的故事。

I) We need an acknowledgement of our present ecological plight but also a language of positive change, visions of a better future. In The Principle of Hope (1954-1959), Ernst Bloch, one of the leading philosophers of the future, wrote that 'the most tragic form of loss... is the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different'. We need to identify visions and paths that will help us imagine a different, more just and more ecological world. Hope, for Bloch, has its starting point in fear, in uncertainty, and in crisis: it is a creative force that goes hand in hand with utopian 'wishful images'. It can be found in cultural products of the past—in fairy tales, in fiction, in architecture, in music, in the movies—in products of the human mind that contain 'the outlines of a better world'. What makes us 'authentic' as humans are visions of our 'potential'. In other words: living in hope makes us human.

我们需要承认我们当前的生态困境，但也需要一种积极改变的语言，一个更美好未来的愿景。在《希望原理》（1954-1959年）中，恩斯特·布洛赫，未来的主要哲学家之一，写道“最悲剧的损失形式……是失去想象事物可能不同的能力”。我们需要识别愿景和路径，帮助我们想象一个不同、更公正、更生态的世界。对布洛赫来说，希望的起点在于恐惧、不确定性和危机：它是一种与乌托邦“愿望形象”齐头并进的创造力量。它可以在过去的文化产品中找到——在童话故事、小说、建筑、音乐、电影中——在包含“更美好世界轮廓”的人类思维产品中。使我们作为人类“真实”的是我们对“潜力”的愿景。换句话说：生活在希望中使我们成为人类。

J) The power of small, grassroots movements to make changes that spread beyond their place of origin can be seen with the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy in the 1980s. The rise of fast-food restaurants after the Second World War produced a society full of cheap, industrially made foodstuffs. Under the leadership of Carlo Petrini, the Slow Food movement began in Piedmont, a region of Italy with a long history of poverty, violence and resistance to oppression. The movement transformed it into a region hospitable to traditional food cultures—based on native plants and breeds of animals. Today, Slow Food operates in more than 160 countries, poor and rich. It has given rise to thousands of projects around the globe, representing democratic politics, food sovereignty, biodiversity and sustainable agriculture.

小型草根运动做出超越其起源地变化的力量，可以从慢食运动中看出，该运动始于20世纪80年代的意大利。第二次世界大战后快餐店的兴起产生了充满廉价工业制造食品的社会。在卡洛·佩特里尼的领导下，慢食运动始于皮埃蒙特，一个有着长期贫困、暴力和反抗压迫历史的意大利地区。该运动将其转变为一个欢迎传统食品文化的地区——基于本土植物和动物品种。如今，慢食运动在160多个国家运营，涵盖贫穷和富裕国家。它在全球催生了数千个项目，代表了民主政治、粮食主权、生物多样性和可持续农业。

K) The unscrupulous commodification of food and the destruction of foodstuffs will continue to devastate soils, livelihoods and ecologies. Slow Food cannot undo the irresistible developments of the global food economy, but it can upset its theorists, it can 'speak differently', and it can allow people and their local food traditions and environments to flourish. Even in the United States—the fast-food nation—small farms and urban gardens are on the rise. The US Department of Agriculture provides an Urban Agriculture Toolkit and, according to a recent report, American millennials are changing their diets. In 2017, 6 per cent of US consumers claimed to be strictly vegetarian, up from 1 per cent in 2014. As more people realise that 'eating is an agricultural act', as the US poet and environmental activist Wendell Berry put it in 1989, slow hope advances.

食物的无耻商品化和食品的破坏将继续摧毁土壤、生计和生态系统。慢食运动无法逆转全球粮食经济的不可抗拒发展，但它可以扰乱其理论家，它可以“以不同方式言说”，它可以让人们及其当地食品传统和环境繁荣起来。即使在美国——这个快餐国家——小型农场和城市花园也在兴起。美国农业部提供了一个城市农业工具包，根据最近的一份报告，美国千禧一代正在改变他们的饮食。2017年，6%的美国消费者声称自己是严格的素食者，高于2014年的1%。随着越来越多的人认识到“吃是一种农业行为”，正如美国诗人和环保活动家温德尔·贝里在1989年所说，缓慢希望在推进。