2010年考研英语二阅读 Text 2 原文翻译及答案解析

I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room - a women's group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative, frequently offering ideas and anecdotes, while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch. Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don't talk to them. This man quickly nodded in agreement. He gestured toward his wife and said, "She's the talker in our family." The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. "It's true," he explained. "When I come home from work I have nothing to say. If she didn't keep the conversation going, we'd spend the whole evening in silence."

我在弗吉尼亚郊区的一个客厅里向一个小团体讲话——这是一个邀请男性加入的女性团体。整个晚上，一个男人特别健谈，频繁提供想法和轶事，而他的妻子默默地坐在他旁边的沙发上。接近晚上结束时，我评论说女性经常抱怨丈夫不和她们交谈。这个男人迅速点头同意。他指着妻子说：“她是我们家健谈的人。”房间里爆发出笑声；男人看起来困惑而受伤。“这是真的，”他解释道。“当我下班回家时，我没什么可说的。如果不是她维持对话，我们会整晚都沉默不语。”

This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.

这个事件突显了一种讽刺：尽管美国男性在公共场合往往比女性话多，但他们在家里往往话少。这种模式正在破坏婚姻。

The pattern was observed by political scientist Andrew Hacker in the late 1970s. Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she interviewed - but only a few of the men - gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. Given the current divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, that amounts to millions of cases in the United States every year a virtual epidemic of failed conversation.

政治学家安德鲁·哈克在1970年代末观察到了这种模式。社会学家凯瑟琳·科勒·里斯曼在她的新书《离婚谈话》中报告说，她采访的大多数女性——但只有少数男性——将缺乏沟通作为离婚的原因。鉴于当前近50%的离婚率，这相当于美国每年数百万起案件，几乎是一种对话失败的流行病。

In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking and social arrangements. Instead, they focused on communication: "He doesn't listen to me." "He doesn't talk to me." I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives want their husbands to be, first and foremost, conversational partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives.

在我自己的研究中，女性对丈夫的抱怨最常不是集中在有形的不平等上，比如放弃职业机会陪伴丈夫工作，或者承担远超出她们份额的日常生活支持工作，如清洁、烹饪和社交安排。相反，她们关注沟通：“他不听我说话。”“他不和我说话。”我发现，正如哈克多年前观察到的，大多数妻子希望丈夫首先是对话伙伴，但很少有丈夫对妻子抱有同样的期望。

In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.

简而言之，最能代表当前危机的形象是那种典型的漫画场景：一个男人坐在早餐桌前，报纸举在面前，而一个女人则盯着报纸的背面，想要说话。