2022年考研英语一阅读 Text 1 原文翻译及答案解析

People often complain that plastics are too durable. Water bottles, shopping bags, and other trash litter the planet, from Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, because plastics are everywhere and don’t break down easily. But some plastic materials change over time. They crack and frizzle. They “weep” out additives. They melt into sludge. All of which creates huge headaches for institutions, such as museums, trying to preserve culturally important objects. The variety of plastic objects at risk is dizzying: early radios, avant-garde sculptures, celluloid animation stills from Disney films, the first artificial heart.

人们常常抱怨塑料太耐用。水瓶、购物袋和其他垃圾污染着地球，从珠穆朗玛峰到马里亚纳海沟，因为塑料无处不在且不易降解。但有些塑料材料会随时间变化。它们会开裂和起皱。它们会“渗出”添加剂。它们会融化成淤泥。所有这些都给博物馆等机构带来了巨大麻烦，它们试图保存具有文化重要性的物品。面临风险的塑料物品种类繁多，令人眼花缭乱：早期收音机、前卫雕塑、迪士尼电影的赛璐珞动画剧照、第一个人造心脏。

Certain artifacts are especially vulnerable because some pioneers in plastic art didn’t always know how to mix ingredients properly, says Thea van Oosten, a polymer chemist who, until retiring a few years ago, worked for decades at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE). “It’s like baking a cake: If you don’t have exact amounts, it goes wrong,” she says. “The object you make is already a time bomb.”

聚合物化学家西娅·范·奥斯滕表示，某些文物特别脆弱，因为一些塑料艺术的先驱并不总是知道如何正确混合成分。她曾在荷兰文化遗产局（RCE）工作数十年，直到几年前退休。她说：“这就像烤蛋糕：如果你没有精确的用量，就会出错。你制作的物品已经是一个定时炸弹。”

And sometimes, it’s not the artist’s fault. In the 1960s, the Italian artist Piero Gilardi began to create hundreds of bright, colorful foam pieces. Those pieces included small beds of roses and other items as well as a few dozen “nature carpets” — large rectangles decorated with foam pumpkins, cabbages, and watermelons. He wanted viewers to walk around on the carpets — which meant they had to be durable.

有时，这不是艺术家的错。20世纪60年代，意大利艺术家皮耶罗·吉拉尔迪开始创作数百件明亮、多彩的泡沫作品。这些作品包括小玫瑰床和其他物品，以及几十条“自然地毯”——用泡沫南瓜、卷心菜和西瓜装饰的大矩形。他希望观众在地毯上走动——这意味着它们必须耐用。

Unfortunately, the polyurethane foam he used is inherently unstable. It’s especially vulnerable to light damage, and by the mid-1990s, Gilardi’s pumpkins, roses, and other figures were splitting and crumbling. Museums locked some of them away in the dark.

不幸的是，他使用的聚氨酯泡沫本质上不稳定。它特别容易受到光线损坏，到了20世纪90年代中期，吉拉尔迪的南瓜、玫瑰和其他形象开始开裂和碎裂。博物馆将其中一些锁在黑暗中。

So van Oosten and colleagues worked to preserve Gilardi’s sculptures. They infused some with stabilizing and consolidating chemicals. Van Oosten calls those chemicals “sunscreens” because their goal was to prevent further light damage and rebuild worn polymer fibers. She is proud that several sculptures have even gone on display again, albeit sometimes beneath protective cases.

于是，范·奥斯滕和同事们致力于保存吉拉尔迪的雕塑。他们给一些作品注入了稳定和加固的化学物质。范·奥斯滕称这些化学物质为“防晒霜”，因为它们的目标是防止进一步的光线损坏并修复磨损的聚合物纤维。她自豪地说，几件雕塑甚至再次展出，尽管有时是在保护罩下。

Despite success stories like van Oosten’s, preservation of plastics will likely get harder. Old objects continue to deteriorate. Worse, biodegradable plastics, designed to disintegrate, are increasingly common.

尽管有范·奥斯滕这样的成功案例，但塑料的保存可能会变得更加困难。旧物品继续恶化。更糟糕的是，旨在分解的生物降解塑料越来越普遍。

And more is at stake here than individual objects. Joana Lia Ferreira, an assistant professor of conservation and restoration at the NOVA School of Science and Technology, notes that archaeologists first defined the great material ages of human history — Stone Age, Iron Age, and so on — after examining artifacts in museums. We now live in an age of plastic, she says, “and what we decide to collect today, what we decide to preserve...will have a strong impact on how in the future we’ll be seen.”

这里涉及的不仅仅是单个物品。新葡京科学技术学院保护与修复助理教授乔安娜·利亚·费雷拉指出，考古学家在博物馆中检查文物后，首次定义了人类历史的伟大物质时代——石器时代、铁器时代等等。她说，我们现在生活在一个塑料时代，“而我们今天决定收集什么、决定保存什么……将对我们未来被如何看待产生重大影响。”