2006年11月9日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（43）（书评）

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.11.18日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励100沪元

New fiction

Insipid and overcooked

Oct 26th 2006
From The Economist print edition

①COMMERCIAL expectations will be high for “Thirteen Moons”, Charles Frazier's first novel since his bestselling debut “Cold Mountain”. So Random House must have been heartened that Mr Frazier's new book entered the New York Times bestseller list at number two. But sometimes there is no clever way to say it: “Thirteen Moons” is awful.

“Cold Mountain” was a clever book and by loosely basing Will Cooper, the narrator of this latest tale, on a fascinating frontiersman, William Holland Thomas, as Mr Frazier has done, this novel might perhaps have turned out just as well. So it is a puzzle that he could render such a compelling life story in a manner so dull. But then the finest ingredients can turn to overcooked mush in the hands of a cackhanded chef.

In the early 19th century the orphaned Will is a “bound boy” compelled to run a trading post in North Carolina's Cherokee Nation. At 13, he wins young Claire in a card game, and with the briefest of introductions is smitten. Although for most of the story the two are parted, Will's pining for his true love should provide the novel with its narrative drive. But the gearbox is stuck in neutral, and the narrative merely coasts. Claire has no character. Since Will has none either, they are perhaps perfectly suited. Yet the double absence makes it impossible to care whether these two ciphers will, or will not, in the end get together as one glorious nullity.

②In long-winded, folksy prose, Will relates how he became an honorary Indian, a Great White Chief determined to protect a preserve for the Cherokee east of the Mississippi, even as President Andrew Jackson drives all Indians west of the river, an expulsion that infamously resulted in the 1838-39 Trail of Tears. (Readers will be embarrassingly unmoved.) To create this preserve, Will amasses great tracts of land whose ownership is precariously perched on dodgy deals and promissory notes, and eventually the entire venture collapses.

③Stuffed like a taxidermy project with lifeless details scooped from the books listed in the Author's Note (for example, “Cherokee Dance and Drama”), “Thirteen Moons” is a rather heavy volume to throw across the room. Best let the bookshops stow their stocks safely on the front tables that Random House will have so bounteously paid for.

Thirteen Moons.
By Charles Frazier.
Random House; 420 pages; $26.95.
Sceptre; £17.99

  2006年10月30日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（42）（气候变化）

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.11.05日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励100沪元

Climate change

Bubbling up

Oct 26th 2006
From The Economist print edition

A new experiment to test the role of cosmic rays in global warming

SIR WILLIAM HERSCHEL, an 18th-century astronomer, is credited with being the first person to notice the effect of variations in the sun's activity on the Earth. In 1801 he observed that when the sun had many spots on its surface, the price of wheat fell—a connection he attributed to the weather being more temperate. Over the next 200 years scientists tried, without much success, to understand exactly how these transient sunspots might affect the climate. Now an experiment has begun that could explain what is going on.

The Earth is continually bombarded by streams of particles that come from outside the solar system. These cosmic rays, as they are called, consist mostly of protons. They strike the gases of the Earth's atmosphere at great speeds, creating showers of debris including streams of electron-like particles called muons. An international team of physicists led by Jasper Kirkby, who works at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, has devised an experiment to find out how this process might affect the climate.

When scientists first turned their attention to subatomic particles, including cosmic rays, they used a device called a cloud chamber to study them. These are boxes containing air that is super-saturated with water vapour. When a charged particle zips through the chamber, the vapour condenses into a trail of droplets showing the particle's path and, if the box is placed in a magnetic field, its electrical charge.

In an updated version of a cloud chamber the researchers are recreating the Earth's atmosphere. They fill the container with pure air made by evaporating liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen, and add water vapour and some trace gases. They adjust the temperature and pressure of the mix to mimic conditions at various heights above sea level. Then they zap the results with a stream of particles from the laboratory's elderly proton synchrotron. Ideally, they would use muons but, in practice, they are using a close cousin, the pion.

When the sun is at its most active, which is when it is spotty, the solar wind is stronger and fewer cosmic rays penetrate. Conversely, when solar activity is less intense, more cosmic rays get through. A study using data on cloud cover taken from satellite images dating from 1979 found that 65% of the world's skies were covered by cloud when cosmic rays were weakest and 68% when they were strongest.

Scientists modelling climate change have ignored cosmic rays up to now because there was not enough evidence about how they might work. However, the results of this experiment, expected by summer 2007, could show how nature periodically sticks her oar in. The experiment on cloud formation also seems likely to undermine the particle physics laboratory's reputation for pursuing only blue skies research.

  2006年10月23日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（41）（数字侦探）

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.10.30日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励100沪元

Secrets of the Digital Detectives

①THE pleasure of reading a classic detective story comes from the way that the sleuth puts together several clues to arrive at a surprising conclusion. What is enjoyable is not so much finding out who the villain is, but hearing the detectives explain their reasoning. Today, not all detectives are human.②At insurance companies, banks and telecoms firms, fraud-detection software is used to comb through millions of transactions, looking for patterns and spotting fraudulent activity far more quickly and accurately than any human could. But like human detectives, these software sleuths follow logical rules and combine disparate pieces of data—and there is something curiously fascinating about the way they work.

Consider car insurance. Every Monday morning, telephone operators at insurance firms listen to stories of the weekend's motoring mishaps, typing the answers to several dozen standard questions into their computers. Once, each claim form then passed to a loss adjuster for approval; now software is increasingly used instead. The Monday-morning insurance claims, it turns out, are slightly more likely to be fraudulent than Tuesday claims, since weekends make it easier for policyholders who stage accidents to assemble friends as false witnesses. A single rule like that is straightforward enough for a human loss adjuster to take into account. But fraud-detection software can consider dozens of other variables, too.

If a claimant was nearly injured (because of an impact near the driver's seat, for example), the accident is less likely to have been staged and the claim less likely to be fraudulent, even if it is being filed on a Monday. Drivers of cars with low resale values are proportionately more likely to file fraudulent claims. But that factor is less important if the claimant also owns a luxury car, which suggests affluence. And if the insurance on the luxury car has expired, the likelihood of foul play drops further, since this increases the likelihood a person will drive a cheaper but properly insured car. And so on.

The staggering number of combinations, each an indication of fraud or legitimacy, underscores the limitations of human analysis. Fraud-detection software, however, can evaluate a vast number of permutations and deliver a fraud-probability score. And such programs are getting better as new claims provide extra statistics that can help tune the computational recipes, or algorithms, used to detect fraud.

German insurers, for example, recently noticed that claimants who call back shortly after filing, angrily demanding speedy settlement, are disproportionately more likely to be cheaters, says J?rg Schiller, an insurance expert at the Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany. Evidently fraudsters consider themselves good actors. But when pugnacious policyholders call after the 20th of the month, the probability that they are acting decreases slightly, since funds from the previous month's paycheque may be dwindling. Mr Schiller says most car insurers in rich countries now use fraud-detection software, and those in developing countries are adopting it rapidly.

Buying petrol seems innocent enough. If no attendant is present, however, the risk score goes up, because fraudsters prefer to avoid face-to-face purchases. Buying a diamond ring soon after buying petrol results in an even higher risk score: thieves often test a card's validity with a small purchase before buying something much bigger. A $100 purchase at a shop that sells hard liquor is more likely to be fraudulent than a more expensive shopping spree at a wine shop, because whisky is easier to fence. A purchase of sports shoes is risky because trainers appeal to a demographic with less money than, say, buyers of golf clubs. Buying two pairs of trainers increases the risk, as this may indicate plans to resell them. Shoes in teenage sizes bump up the score further, since pre-teens are less likely to buy stolen goods. Sales in London, New York or Miami, all cities with vibrant black markets for shoes, push scores higher, as do purchases made during school holidays. The fraud history of individual shops can also be taken into account.

③Seasoned criminals can, of course, figure out such rules and change their behaviour in an attempt to avoid detection. Some types of purchases are less likely to be fraudulent. A shopping spree in a linen shop, however, does not have much appeal to most criminals. However, says Mike Davis, a fraud expert at Butler Group, a consultancy, the "vast majority" of fraudsters are low-level opportunists fairly easily foiled by today's fraud-detection software. The situation, he says, is "spectacularly better" than it was just a few years ago.

  2006年10月14日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（40）（什么是竞争）

Cooling Off About Keeping Up

What's 'Competitiveness'?

By Robert J. Samuelson

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.10.20日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励50沪元

①A prominent journalist wrote in 1947: "The basic power determinant of any country is its steel production, and what makes this a great nation above all is the fact that it can roll over 90 million tons of steel ingots a year, more than Great Britain, prewar Germany, Japan, France, and the Soviet Union combined ." Well, that was then. In 2005 the United States ranked third in raw steel production. Its output (95 million metric tons) was behind Japan's (113 million tons) and less than a third of China's (349 million). So?

We are experiencing another competitiveness panic. These occur every 15 or 20 years. There's an outpouring of worried reports and articles. ②After Sputnik in 1957 -- the first artificial Earth satellite -- we were supposedly doomed to be overtaken by the Soviet Union. In the late 1970s and 1980s, it was Germany and then Japan. Lately, China and India have been the threats. Through it all, the United States has remained the dominant global economy, representing about one-fifth of the world's total output.

One problem with these debates is that competitiveness is a vague term. What does it mean?

If it means keeping the lead in every industry where we once led, we're doomed. As other countries develop, they create larger and better industries to meet their needs. Steel is an example. The United States doesn't need 350 million tons of steel. Textiles, consumer electronics and automobiles are other industries where we've lost ground to countries that have greater local needs, lower costs or better management. In many cases, U.S. multinational companies have relocated plants abroad to cut costs.

……

Maybe we ought to settle on this definition: productivity. That's economists' code word for "efficiency." It's usually measured as output per hour worked. Higher productivity allows for new products and services, from health care to iPods. Incomes and living standards tend to move parallel with productivity changes. In the first 25 years after World War II, productivity in the business sector grew about 3 percent a year. Then, in the early 1970s, it slowed, averaging only about 1.7 percent annually for the next 25 years. Since 1995, it's grown at about 3 percent again. If we can sustain that, we'll have an easier time meeting all the future's competing needs.

How to do that? Good question. Unfortunately, economists don't understand why productivity has fluctuated so much. They tend to attribute the recent surge to information technologies -- but productivity actually improved after the dot-com crash. ③In practice, gains seem to stem from almost everything: good schools; open markets (including to foreign products and investments) that force companies to do better; sensible taxes and regulations that reward risk-taking; low inflation. The list runs on. We're really competing with ourselves to make the future better than the past. It's a tall order.

  2006年10月5日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（39）（石油的热浪已过）

The heat is off
Sep 28th 2006
From The Economist print edition

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.10.12日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励50沪元

Falling oil prices cheer central bankers

IN THE eyes of Edmund Daukoru, Nigeria's oil minister and the current president of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the price of oil is "very low". Compared with July, when it peaked at $78.40 a barrel, he is right. Since then, it has fallen by almost a quarter. On September 25th, it briefly slipped below $60 a barrel, its lowest level in six months. ①The same analysts who just a few short months ago were wondering about the effect of expensive oil on the world economy are now pondering the consequences of a slump.

That might prove premature. For one thing, Mr Daukoru insists that OPEC will do something to stem the slide. At its last meeting, in mid-September, the group threatened to cut its output without notice if the price fell further. Saudi Arabia, for one, has been selling less oil of late. ②Ministers from different OPEC countries have been making different noises about whether a cut is desirable or likely, but all would be loth to see their revenues eroded by lower prices.

The world is still consuming almost as much oil as it can pump, so any reduction in supply could send prices skywards again. Both the relative calm of this year's hurricane season and the diminishing threat of an interruption to Iran's oil exports seem to have contributed to the recent fall. But should clouds gather over the Atlantic, or tempers rise in the Middle East, the price could jump again.

Moreover, the price of oil usually falls in the autumn, after the summer surge in petrol consumption has abated but before winter brings higher demand for heating oil. ③According to Sabine Schels, a commodity strategist at Merrill Lynch, seasonal swings in fuel prices are becoming more pronounced, thanks to a shortage of refining and storage capacity. At times of peak demand, she argues, the petrol price must rise high enough to prompt the reopening of old and inefficient refineries that would not normally be profitable. Those refineries, in turn, use up a lot more oil, pushing up its price too.

Oil markets will not escape this cycle, Miss Schels believes, until more refineries and storage tanks are built, and more fields developed--a process that can take years. Traders in the futures market also seem to believe that the oil price will rise again. Oil for delivery in December 2007, for example, cost $68 on September 27th. The price is more than $60 for all months until December 2011.

Those bets could sour, however, if the American economy slows, as many suspect it is already doing (see page 60). That would dent demand for oil, both from America itself and from countries that supply it with imports, such as China. Economists at HSBC, who expect a sharp American slowdown in 2007, now think Asian GDP growth will be 5.8% in 2007, against the consensus forecast of 6.3%.

On the other hand, cheaper oil might help to mitigate any slowdown, in several ways. It would boost firms hit by higher energy prices, such as the struggling manufacturers of gas-guzzling cars. And it will relieve the pressure on consumers, at a time when many are worried that a stalling housing market may weigh on their spending. Economists at Morgan Stanley estimate that the fall in petrol prices from over $3 to $2.50 a gallon (the average is now $2.42) will alone have added some $78 billion to American purchasing power. Consumer confidence numbers, released on September 26th, were unexpectedly strong.

Above all, cheaper oil would ease concerns about inflation, and so reduce the need for central bankers to increase interest rates. American inflation slowed in August, thanks in part to smaller increases in the cost of energy and transport. That's good news, except that it might simply prompt Americans to drive more.

  2006年8月20日

Is There An Oil 'Bubble'?

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, July 26, 2006; A17

Could there be an oil "bubble''? Well, yes. In early 2002 oil sold for roughly $20 a barrel; now it's close to $75. The main cause lies in tightening supply and demand -- and the fact that supply (as the present Middle East fighting reminds us) could be interrupted at any time. Old-fashioned speculation may also have played a role, and that raises the possibility of a bubble. But any bubble would be a peculiar beast, and if it burst and prices dropped significantly, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that this might signal a new era of comfortable abundance. It wouldn't.

In financial bubbles, prices become disconnected from "fundamentals." ①At the height of the tech bubble, stocks of dot-com companies with no profits (and little prospect for them) sold at fabulous prices. By contrast, oil prices aren't unhinged from "fundamentals." Despite all the griping, gasoline is still affordable. Even at $3 a gallon, it costs Americans only about 4 percent of their disposable income, reports economist Nigel Gault of Global Insight. The same is true globally. At $70 a barrel, global crude sales would total about $2.2 trillion annually; that's still a tiny share of the $50 trillion world economy.

Indeed, it is precisely because people and companies need oil so desperately -- it's essential for almost everything they do -- that any possible scarcity raises prices sharply. In economics jargon, demand is "inelastic." ②A big jump in prices dampens demand only slightly. Similarly, a big decline in prices increases it only slightly.

For decades, crude was in surplus. In 1985, for example, the world used 60 million barrels daily (mbd) of oil, while countries could produce about 70 mbd. Refineries were also in surplus; in 1985, U.S. refineries operated at 78 percent of capacity. Loss of crude supplies or refineries didn't create scarcities. "Historically, when something went wrong -- and something was always going wrong, a pipeline outage or refinery accident -- the problem was made up somewhere else," says economist Lawrence Goldstein of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, an industry think tank. Prices moved by a few pennies or dimes. Hardly anyone noticed.

③Now demand is about 85 mbd, and extra capacity is 1 to 2 mbd. Even this surplus is more apparent than real, notes Goldstein. It consists mainly of high-sulfur ("sour'') oil, for which there is scant refining capacity. All refineries are stretched tight. The U.S. operating rate typically exceeds 90 percent of capacity -- a margin needed for maintenance.

Low prices and miscalculation explain the turnaround. From 1985 to 1999, crude prices averaged $18 a barrel. Investment in expensive oil fields and new refineries became unprofitable. Companies cut budgets. They fired petroleum engineers and merged. Exxon bought Mobil; Chevron absorbed Texaco. Meanwhile, almost everyone underestimated oil demand. Driven by China, it grew much faster after 2000 than before.

So prices had to rise. Otherwise, demand might have exceeded supply. But did they have to rise from $20 to $70 a barrel? Here's where speculation may have contributed.

"Speculation" has a bad image. It suggests financial sharpies plundering everyone else. The reality is often the opposite: financial innocents following the latest fad to ruin. That happened with tech stocks. The oil picture is murkier. The big "speculators" are institutional investors -- pension funds, hedge funds (pools of loosely regulated funds) and investment banks. They have purchased oil futures contracts and, in effect, bet that prices six months or a year out will exceed present prices. Since 2002, investment in futures contracts may have quintupled to more than $100 billion, estimates energy economist Philip Verleger Jr.

This may have raised present (or "spot'') oil prices, argues a staff report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. As investors pour money into futures contracts, futures prices rise. Since late 2004 they have usually exceeded spot prices. On a recent day, the spot price was $74.60 and the futures price for December was $2 higher. This creates an incentive for companies to put more oil into storage ("inventories''), the report says, because it's more profitable to sell oil in the future than today. Oil inventories for industrial countries "are at a 20-year high." Spot prices rise because there's less oil on the market.

......

  2006年8月13日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（32）（石油泡沫）

Is There An Oil 'Bubble'?

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.8.20日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励50沪元

Is There An Oil 'Bubble'?

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, July 26, 2006; A17

Could there be an oil "bubble''? Well, yes. In early 2002 oil sold for roughly $20 a barrel; now it's close to $75. The main cause lies in tightening supply and demand -- and the fact that supply (as the present Middle East fighting reminds us) could be interrupted at any time. Old-fashioned speculation may also have played a role, and that raises the possibility of a bubble. But any bubble would be a peculiar beast, and if it burst and prices dropped significantly, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that this might signal a new era of comfortable abundance. It wouldn't.

In financial bubbles, prices become disconnected from "fundamentals." At the height of the tech bubble, stocks of dot-com companies with no profits (and little prospect for them) sold at fabulous prices. By contrast, oil prices aren't unhinged from "fundamentals." Despite all the griping, gasoline is still affordable. Even at $3 a gallon, it costs Americans only about 4 percent of their disposable income, reports economist Nigel Gault of Global Insight. The same is true globally. At $70 a barrel, global crude sales would total about $2.2 trillion annually; that's still a tiny share of the $50 trillion world economy.

①Indeed, it is precisely because people and companies need oil so desperately -- it's essential for almost everything they do -- that any possible scarcity raises prices sharply. In economics jargon, demand is "inelastic." A big jump in prices dampens demand only slightly. Similarly, a big decline in prices increases it only slightly.

For decades, crude was in surplus. In 1985, for example, the world used 60 million barrels daily (mbd) of oil, while countries could produce about 70 mbd. Refineries were also in surplus; in 1985, U.S. refineries operated at 78 percent of capacity. Loss of crude supplies or refineries didn't create scarcities. ②"Historically, when something went wrong -- and something was always going wrong, a pipeline outage or refinery accident -- the problem was made up somewhere else," says economist Lawrence Goldstein of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, an industry think tank. Prices moved by a few pennies or dimes. Hardly anyone noticed.

Now demand is about 85 mbd, and extra capacity is 1 to 2 mbd. Even this surplus is more apparent than real, notes Goldstein. It consists mainly of high-sulfur ("sour'') oil, for which there is scant refining capacity. All refineries are stretched tight. The U.S. operating rate typically exceeds 90 percent of capacity -- a margin needed for maintenance.

  2006年8月6日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（31）（多哈谈判中断）

World trade talks fail over impasse on farm tariffs

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.8.13日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励50沪元

World trade talks fail over impasse on farm tariffs

By Tom Wright and Steve Weisman International Herald Tribune

Published: July 25, 2006

GENEVA Negotiations aimed at reaching a new global trade agreement collapsed here Monday, touching off a bitter new round of recriminations between the United States and Europe over farm trade barriers and dealing a blow to the Bush administration's international economic agenda.

After two days of discussions among negotiators from the United States, the European Union, Japan, Brazil, India and Australia, the director general of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, formally suspended the talks.

①The inability of negotiators to reach a deal here on talks begun in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, does not mean that the global effort to reduce trade barriers is dead, but it is significant because it is likely to delay efforts to liberalize trade by months, if not years.

U.S. trade officials said there appeared to be little prospect of the talks resuming any time soon, probably dooming the chances of a trade accord during President George W. Bush's remaining time in office.

"This is a serious failure we find ourselves in," the U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab, said, "and the question is how do we regroup."

The EU agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel, said, "It is a big failure, and whether it is going to be definitive, only time will tell."

Negotiators said they were unlikely to come back to the table in the near future because of large differences over farm supports.

They had said earlier that if the outlines of an agreement were not secured by late this month, it would be nearly impossible to negotiate a trade-expanding agreement before the mid-2007 expiration of so-called fast-track authority that requires the U.S. Congress to accept or reject any trade deal without addressing specific provisions.

Bush's authority to negotiate a trade deal and get such a vote expires in mid- 2007, and it is doubtful that Congress can approve any deal before then.

The failure of the talks was particularly embarrassing because only last month, at the St. Petersburg summit meeting of world leaders, Bush and other leaders had called for a redoubled effort to make concessions in the trade area and break the impasse that has paralyzed the discussions for years.

European and Indian negotiators said that Europe offered on Sunday evening to move further than it had previously to reduce tariffs on agricultural imports - a crucial issue that had held up a deal. But the United States said that the offer did not go far enough, and the U.S. delegation declined to make its own improved offer to reduce agricultural subsidies.

②The top U.S. trade officials, Schwab and Mike Johanns, the U.S. agriculture secretary, said that the United States had come to Geneva prepared to make further concessions on lowering agriculture tariffs and what are called trade-distorting subsidies that enable farmers to compete with overseas farm imports.

.........

  2006年7月30日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（30）（移民）
The wrong side of history

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.8.5日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励50沪元

Immigration

The wrong side of history

Jul 13th 2006 | LOS ANGELES
From The Economist print edition

Wooing Latinos with one hand, bashing them with the other

①THE backlash against the presence in the United States of some 12m illegal immigrants, four-fifths of them from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, is at full strength. Right-wing talk-radio and cable TV hosts rant about the “broken border” with Mexico; House Republicans talk of making felons out of the undocumented and those who help them. This week Colorado, with an estimated 250,000 illegal residents in a population of 4.7m, voted to deny state benefits, including non-emergency health care, to anyone who cannot prove legal residence. That law was modelled on measures already passed in Georgia and Arizona.

So how did the Latino lobby group, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), have the power at its July 8th-11th convention in Los Angeles to attract so many star speakers from both sides of the political divide? For the Democrats, Bill Clinton, Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, and New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, queued up to say nice things. So did the Republicans' Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, and even Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, otherwise known as “Bush's brain”.

………

In theory, some kind of compromise between House and Senate remains possible. Perhaps the House will be less insistent on criminal sanctions; perhaps the Senate will agree to “triggers” (such as proof of secure borders) before a guest-worker programme can be introduced. But in the meantime, neither side is showing much appetite for a solution. The House Republicans, taking advantage of the coming summer recess, have started a series of “town-hall” hearings on the supposed defects of the Senate bill. The Senate is replying with similar hearings of its own.

To Mr Clinton, the reason is obvious. ②The conservative wing of the Republican Party sees immigration as “a way of creating a divided community and distracting people from the real challenges facing the country, whether it is in Iraq and Afghanistan, or homeland security, or how to build a clean energy future, or how to solve the health-care crisis, or how to create new jobs for America.”

  2006年7月22日

【研英翻译】备战07考研-英美报刊节选翻译练习（29）（八国峰会）

The G8 summit Living with a strong Russia

本期活动保持一周，截止日期：2006.7.30日

本期作业：翻译划线句子，认真答题者奖励50沪元

Jul 13th 2006

From The Economist print edition
The best approach to the host of this weekend's G8 summit is wary engagement

FORGET the formal agenda at this weekend's G8 summit, given over to energy security, infectious diseases and education. ①The really awkward issue for the leaders of the seven rich democracies gathering in St Petersburg concerns their host: how to live with a strong, but increasingly undemocratic, Russia.