2024年考研英语一阅读 Text 1 原文翻译及答案解析

Nearly 2000 years ago, as the Romans began to pull out of Scotland, they left behind a curious treasure: 10 tons of nails, nearly a million of the things. The nail hoard was discovered in 1960 in a four-metre-deep pit covered by two metres of gravel.

近2000年前，当罗马人开始撤离苏格兰时，他们留下了一件奇特的宝藏：10吨钉子，近百万枚之多。这批钉子宝藏于1960年在一个深四米、覆盖两米砾石的坑中被发现。

Why had the Romans buried a million nails? The likely explanation is that the withdrawal was rushed, and they didn't want the local Caledonians getting their hands on 10 tons of weapons grade iron. The Romans buried the nails so deep that they would not be discovered for almost two millennia.

罗马人为何埋下百万枚钉子？可能的解释是撤离仓促，他们不希望当地的喀里多尼亚人获得10吨武器级铁。罗马人将钉子埋得如此之深，以至于近两千年未被发现。

Later civilizations would value the skilled blacksmith's labour in a nail even more than the raw material. As Roma Agrawal explains in her new delightful book Nuts and Bolts, early 17th-century Virginians would sometimes burn down their homes if they were planning to relocate. This was an attempt to recover the valuable nails, which could be reused after sifting the ashes. The idea that one might burn down an entire house just to reclaim the nails underlines how scarce, costly and valuable the simple-seeming technology was.

后来的文明会更加重视钉子中熟练铁匠的劳动，而非原材料。正如罗玛·阿格拉瓦尔在她新近精彩的著作《螺母与螺栓》中所解释的，17世纪早期的弗吉尼亚人有时会在计划搬迁时烧毁自己的房屋。这是为了回收宝贵的钉子，这些钉子在筛除灰烬后可以重新使用。这种可能烧毁整座房屋只为回收钉子的想法，突显了这种看似简单的技术是多么稀缺、昂贵和宝贵。

The price of nails fell by 90% between the late 1700s and mid-1900s, as economist Daniel Sichel points out in a research paper. According to Sichel, although the falling price of nails was driven partly by cheaper iron and cheaper energy, most of the credit goes to nail manufacturers who simply found more efficient ways to turn steel into nails.

正如经济学家丹尼尔·西切尔在一篇研究论文中指出，钉子的价格在18世纪末至20世纪中期下降了90%。据西切尔所述，尽管钉子价格下跌部分归因于铁和能源成本降低，但主要功劳应归于钉子制造商，他们只是找到了更高效的方法将钢材制成钉子。

Nails themselves have changed over the years. But Sichel studied them because they haven't changed much. Roman lamps and Roman chariots are very different from LED strips and sports cars, but Roman nails are still clearly nails. It would be absurd to try to track the changing price of sports cars since 1695, but to ask the same question of nails makes perfect sense.

钉子本身在这些年里有所变化。但西切尔研究它们是因为它们变化不大。罗马灯和罗马战车与LED灯带和跑车截然不同，但罗马钉子显然仍是钉子。试图追踪自1695年以来跑车价格的变化是荒谬的，但对钉子提出同样的问题则完全合理。

I make no apology for being obsessed by a particular feature of everyday objects: their price. I am an economist, after all. After writing two books about the history of inventions, one thing I've learnt is that while it is the enchantingly sophisticated technologies that get all the hype, it's the cheap technologies that change the world.

我为自己痴迷于日常物品的一个特定特征——它们的价格——毫无歉意。毕竟，我是一名经济学家。在写了两本关于发明史的书后，我学到的一件事是，尽管那些迷人的先进技术备受追捧，但改变世界的是那些廉价的技术。

The Gutenberg printing press transformed civilisation not by changing the nature of writing but by changing its cost - and it would have achieved little without a parallel collapse in the cost of surfaces to write on, thanks to an often overlooked technology called paper. Solar panels had a few niche uses until they became cheap; now they are transforming the global energy system.

古腾堡印刷机通过改变书写的成本而非本质来变革文明——如果没有书写表面成本的同时下降，它几乎不会取得什么成就，这要归功于一种常被忽视的技术，即纸张。太阳能电池板在变得廉价之前只有少数利基用途；现在它们正在改变全球能源系统。