2021年06月六级第1套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) A hundred years before iconic figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs permeated our lives, an Irish Italian inventor laid the foundation of the communication explosion of the 21st century. Guglielmo Marconi was arguably the first truly global figure in modern communication. Not only was he the first to communicate globally, he was the first to think globally about communication. Marconi may not have been the greatest inventor of his time, but more than anyone else, he brought about a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

在像比尔·盖茨和史蒂夫·乔布斯这样的标志性人物融入我们生活的100年前，一位爱尔兰裔意大利发明家为21世纪的通信爆炸奠定了基础。古列尔莫·马可尼可以说是现代通信中第一个真正全球性的人物。他不仅是第一个进行全球通信的人，也是第一个从全球角度思考通信的人。马可尼可能不是他那个时代最伟大的发明家，但比任何人都更多地，他从根本上改变了我们的通信方式。

B) Today's globally networked media and communication system has its origins in the 19th century, when, for the first time, messages were sent electronically across great distances. The telegraph, the telephone, and radio were the obvious predecessors of the Internet, iPods, and mobile phones. What made the link from then to now was the development of wireless communication. Marconi was the first to develop and perfect this system, using the recently-discovered "air waves" that make up the electromagnetic spectrum.

今天全球网络化的媒体和通信系统起源于19世纪，当时首次实现了电子化远距离发送信息。电报、电话和无线电显然是互联网、iPod和移动电话的前身。将过去与现在连接起来的是无线通信的发展。马可尼是第一个开发和完善这个系统的人，他利用了新发现的“空气波”——构成电磁频谱的波。

C) Between 1896, when he applied for his first patent in England at the age of 22, and his death in Italy in 1937, Marconi was at the center of every major innovation in electronic communication. He was also a skilled and sophisticated organizer, an entrepreneurial innovator, who mastered the use of corporate strategy, media relations, government lobbying, international diplomacy, patents, and prosecution. Marconi was really interested in only one thing: the extension of mobile, personal, long distance communication to the ends of the earth (and beyond, if we can believe some reports). Some like to refer to him as a genius, but if there was any genius to Marconi it was this vision.

从1896年他22岁在英格兰申请第一个专利，到1937年在意大利去世，马可尼一直处于电子通信每一次重大创新的中心。他还是一位技艺精湛、经验丰富的组织者，一位创业型创新者，精通企业战略、媒体关系、政府游说、国际外交、专利和诉讼的运用。马可尼真正感兴趣的只有一件事：将移动、个人、长距离通信扩展到地球的尽头（如果我们相信一些报道，甚至更远）。有些人喜欢称他为天才，但如果马可尼有任何天才之处，那就是这种远见。

D) In 1901 he succeeded in signaling across the Atlantic, from the west coast of England to Newfoundland in the USA, despite the claims of science that it could not be done. In 1924 he convinced the British government to encircle the world with a chain of wireless stations using the latest technology that he had devised, shortwave radio. There are some who say Marconi lost his edge when commercial broadcasting came along; he didn't see that radio could or should be used to frivolous (无聊的) ends. In one of his last public speeches, a radio broadcast to the United States in March 1937, he deplored that broadcasting had become a one-way means of communication and foresaw it moving in another direction, toward communication as a means of exchange. That was visionary genius.

1901年，他成功实现了跨大西洋信号传输，从英格兰西海岸到美国的纽芬兰，尽管科学界声称这是不可能的。1924年，他说服英国政府用他发明的最新技术——短波无线电——建立一系列无线电台来环绕世界。有些人说，当商业广播出现时，马可尼失去了优势；他没有看到无线电可以或应该用于无聊的目的。在他最后的公开演讲之一中，1937年3月对美国的无线电广播，他悲叹广播已经成为单向的通信方式，并预见它将朝另一个方向发展，成为交流的手段。这就是有远见的天才。

E) Marconi's career was devoted to making wireless communication happen cheaply, efficiently, smoothly, and with an elegance that would appear to be intuitive and uncomplicated to the user-user friendly, if you will. There is a direct connection from Marconi to today's social media, search engines, and program streaming that can best be summed up by an admittedly provocative exclamation: the 20th century did not exist. In a sense, Marconi's vision jumped from his time to our own.

马可尼的职业生涯致力于使无线通信变得廉价、高效、顺畅，并以一种对用户来说显得直观和简单——如果你愿意，可以说是用户友好——的优雅方式实现。从马可尼到今天的社交媒体、搜索引擎和节目流媒体，存在一种直接联系，这可以用一句公认的煽动性感叹来概括：20世纪并不存在。在某种意义上，马可尼的远见从他的时代跳跃到了我们的时代。

F) Marconi invented the idea of global communication-or, more straightforwardly, globally networked, mobile, wireless communication. Initially, this was wireless Morse code telegraphy (电报通讯), the principal communication technology of his day. Marconi was the first to develop a practical method for wireless telegraphy using radio waves. He borrowed technical details from many sources, but what set him apart was a self-confident vision of the power of communication technology on the one hand, and, on the other, of the steps that needed to be taken to consolidate his own position as a player in that field. Tracing Marconi's lifeline leads us into the story of modern communication itself. There were other important figures, but Marconi towered over them all in reach, power, and influence, as well as in the grip he had on the popular imagination of his time. Marconi was quite simply the central figure in the emergence of a modern understanding of communication.

马可尼发明了全球通信的概念——或者更直接地说，全球网络化、移动、无线通信。最初，这是无线摩尔斯电报（电报通讯），他那个时代的主要通信技术。马可尼是第一个开发使用无线电波进行无线电报的实用方法的人。他从许多来源借鉴了技术细节，但使他脱颖而出的是：一方面对通信技术力量的自信远见，另一方面对巩固自己作为该领域参与者所需步骤的把握。追溯马可尼的生命线将我们带入现代通信本身的故事。还有其他重要人物，但马可尼在范围、权力和影响力上都超越了他们，以及在他那个时代对大众想象力的掌控上。马可尼可以说是现代通信理解出现的核心人物。

G) In his lifetime, Marconi foresaw the development of television and the fax machine, GPS, radar, and the portable hand-held telephone. Two months before he died, newspapers were reporting that he was working on a "death ray," and that he had "killed a rat with an intricate device at a distance of three feet." By then, anything Marconi said or did was newsworthy. Stock prices rose or sank according to his pronouncements. If Marconi said he thought it might rain, there was likely to be a run on umbrellas.

在他的一生中，马可尼预见了电视和传真机、GPS、雷达以及便携手持电话的发展。在他去世两个月前，报纸报道他正在研究一种“死亡射线”，并且他“用一个精密装置在三英尺距离外杀死了一只老鼠。”那时，马可尼的任何言行都具有新闻价值。股价根据他的言论而涨跌。如果马可尼说他认为可能会下雨，很可能会出现抢购雨伞的情况。

H) Marconi's biography is also a story about choices and the motivations behind them. At one level, Marconi could be fiercely autonomous and independent of the constraints of his own social class. On another scale, he was a perpetual outsider. Wherever he went, he was never "of" the group; he was always the "other," considered foreign in Britain, British in Italy, and "not American" in the United States. At the same time, he also suffered tremendously from a need for acceptance that drove, and sometimes stained, every one of his relationships.

马可尼的传记也是一个关于选择及其背后动机的故事。在一个层面上，马可尼可以非常自主，摆脱自己社会阶层的束缚。在另一个层面上，他是一个永恒的局外人。无论他去哪里，他从未“属于”群体；他总是“他者”，在英国被视为外国人，在意大利被视为英国人，在美国被视为“非美国人”。与此同时，他也深受对接受的需求所苦，这种需求驱动，有时玷污了他的每一段关系。

I) Marconi placed a permanent stamp on the way we live. He was the first person to imagine a practical application for the wireless spectrum, and to develop it successfully into a global communication system-in both terms of the word; that is, worldwide and all-inclusive. He was able to do this because of a combination of factors-most important, timing and opportunity-but the single-mindedness and determination with which he carried out his self-imposed mission was fundamentally character-based; millions of Marconi's contemporaries had the same class, gender, race, and colonial privilege as he, but only a handful did anything with it. Marconi needed to achieve the goal that was set in his mind as an adolescent; by the time he reached adulthood, he understood, intuitively, that in order to have an impact he had to both develop an independent economic base and align himself with political power. Disciplined, uncritical loyalty to political power became his compass for the choices he had to make.

马可尼在我们的生活方式上留下了永久的印记。他是第一个想象无线频谱实际应用的人，并成功地将其发展成一个全球通信系统——在两种意义上：即全球范围和全面包容。他能够做到这一点是因为多种因素的结合——最重要的是时机和机会——但他执行自我赋予使命的专注和决心本质上是基于性格的；数百万马可尼的同代人拥有与他相同的阶级、性别、种族和殖民特权，但只有极少数人利用了它。马可尼需要实现他在青少年时期设定的目标；当他成年时，他直觉地理解，为了产生影响，他必须既发展独立的经济基础，又与政治权力结盟。对政治权力的纪律严明、不加批判的忠诚成为他必须做出的选择的指南针。

J) At the same time, Marconi was uncompromisingly independent intellectually. Shortly after Marconi's death, the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi-soon to be the developer of the Manhattan Project-wrote that Marconi proved that theory and experimentation were complementary features of progress. "Experience can rarely, unless guided by a theoretical concept, arrive at results of any great significance ... on the other hand, an excessive trust in theoretical conviction would have prevented Marconi from persisting in experiments which were destined to bring about a revolution in the technique of radio-communications." In other words, Marconi had the advantage of not being burdened by preconceived assumptions.

与此同时，马可尼在知识上毫不妥协地独立。马可尼去世后不久，核物理学家恩里科·费米——即将成为曼哈顿计划的开发者——写道，马可尼证明了理论和实验是进步的互补特征。“经验很少能在没有理论概念指导下取得任何重大成果……另一方面，对理论信念的过度信任会阻止马可尼坚持那些注定会带来无线电通信技术革命的实验。”换句话说，马可尼的优势在于没有预设假设的负担。

K) The most controversial aspect of Marconi's life-and the reason why there has been no satisfying biography of Marconi until now-was his uncritical embrace of Benito Mussolini. At first this was not problematic for him. But as the regressive (倒退的) nature of Mussolini's regime became clear, he began to suffer a crisis of conscience. However, after a lifetime of moving within the circles of power, he was unable to break with authority, and served Mussolini faithfully (as president of Italy's national research council and royal academy, as well as a member of the Fascist Grand Council) until the day he died-conveniently-in 1937, shortly before he would have had to take a stand in the conflict that consumed a world that he had, in part, created.

马可尼生活中最具争议的方面——也是为什么直到现在都没有令人满意的马可尼传记的原因——是他对贝尼托·墨索里尼的不加批判的拥抱。起初，这对他来说没有问题。但随着墨索里尼政权倒退性质变得明显，他开始遭受良心危机。然而，在权力圈内活动了一生后，他无法与权威决裂，忠诚地服务于墨索里尼（担任意大利国家研究委员会和皇家学院的主席，以及法西斯大委员会的成员），直到他去世——巧合地——在1937年，就在他不得不对那个消耗了他部分创造的世界的冲突表明立场之前。