P3 Examples of benefits or costs of the current concentration wave are scanty. 关于目前这股并购浪潮的利与弊的例子还不多见。

P4 The bodies playing major professional sports have changed dramatically over the years.这几年，参加重要职业运动的运动员的身材发生了显著的变化

P4 During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair play to keep itself financially secure has been transformed by economic risk and new realities. 在上一代人中，曾经能够依靠努力工作和公平竞争来保持其经济上的稳定性的美国中产阶级家庭， 已经被经济风险和新的现实所改变。

P4 A bill by Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, which would offer financial incentives for private industry, is a promising start. 西弗吉尼亚州的民主党参议员罗伯特·伯德提出的一项议案是一个良好的开端。该议案将为私有行业提供财政激励。

P4 There were political leaders like John Winthrop, an educated gentleman, lawyer, and official of the Crown before he journey to Boston. 有像约翰·温斯洛普这样的政治领袖，他是一个受过良好教育的绅士，律师，并且在旅行到波士顿之前曾担任王室官员。

P4 Building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations. 在这里建立新的教育体制并且让更多人通过它结构教育来提高经济业绩将需要两代或三代人。

P5 Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. 不公平所引起的愤怒感看上去并不是人类的专利。

P5 Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher. 增强经济增长以及北半球冬季的到来，会把（石油）价格推高。

P5 To say that the child learns by imitation and that the way to teach is to set a good example oversimplifies. 认为孩子学习是靠模仿，教育的方式就是树立榜样，这些说法都过于简单了。

P5 It is crucial that our nation and the world base important policies on the best judgments that science can provide concerning the future consequences of present actions. 我们国家和整个世界应该把重要的政策建立在最好的判断基础上，而这些应该是科学关于目前的行为所产生的将来的后果所能提供的最好的判断。这一点很重要。

P5 Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest exccutive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore-and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands. 信任，经济资产中最有价值的部分，很容易遭到破坏并且恢复起来代价高昂；而一个让敏感的个人信息（数据）落入不法之手的公司是最可能破坏信任的。想必这对于最愚笨的行政管理人员也应该是最显而易见的。

P6 However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.但是，这种公平感是在卷尾猴和人类身上各自进化而成，还是来自于三千五百万年前他们拥有的共同祖先，这还是一个迄今为止有待回答的问题。

P6 It is not obvious how the capacity to visualize objects and to figure out numerical patterns suits one to answer questions that have eluded some of the best potes and philosopers. 想象物体和计算数字模式的能力是如何适合一个人回答那些曾经让优秀诗人和哲学家都难以解决的的问题的，这一点尚不清楚。

P7 But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to expore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. 但是，最奇怪的可能是这一点：艺术家唯一的工作就是探索情感，但是他们选择把焦点放在探索令人感觉不好的情感上。

P7 Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newpapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage. 在过去25年英文报纸发生的所有变化中，最深远的变化一直是其艺术报道的范围和严肃性方面不可阻挡的衰落。

P8 The president of the National Academy, Bruce Alberts, added this key point in the preface to the panel's report “Science never has all the answers”. But science does provide us with the best available guide to the future. 国家科学院院长鲁斯·艾伯特在专家团报告的前言中加上了这一重要的观点：“科学无法解决所有的问题。”但是科学确实为我们的未来提供了最好的有效指导。

P8 The three-fifths formula handed Jefferson his narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 by inflating the votes of the southern states in the Electoral College. 通过抬高选举团中南方州的选票，五分之三方案给予杰斐逊在1800年大选中的险胜。

P8 These gave banks more freedom to use models to value illiquid assets and more flexibility in recognizing losses on long-term assets in their income statements. 这些赋予银行使用模型评估非流动资产的更多自由，以及在收入报表里确认长期资产损失方面更多的灵活性。

P8 Alvarez’s experience demonstrates the importance of finding ways to diffuse stress before it threatens your health and your ability to function. 阿尔瓦雷兹的经历表明在压力威胁你的健康和行动能力之前找到缓解压力的方法的重要性。

P8 Working with a personal search agent means having another set of eyes looking out for you. 和个人搜索代理一起工作意味着拥有另外一双眼睛为你留意。

P9 Most tests require collecting cells by swabbing saliva in the mouth and sending it to the company for testing.大多数检测需要用药棉在嘴里蘸取唾液的方式收集细胞并且把唾液送到公司进行检测。

P9 The 1990 Census revealed that “a majority of immigrants from each of the fifteen most common countries of origin spoke English ‘well’ or ‘very well’ aftern ten years of residence.” 1990年的人口普查显示： “来自十五个最广知的来源国中每一个国家的大多数移民在居住十年后英语讲得‘好’或者‘非常好’。”

P9 Yet bank shares rose and the changes enhance what one lobbying group politely calls “the use of judgment by management.” 然而，银行股票上涨了，这些改变增强了一个游说团体客气地称之的“通过管理运用判断”。

P9 On the contrary, constraints on improving productivity explain why education isn’t developing more quickly there than it is. 相反，提高生产率方面的限制解释了为什么目前教育在那里没有比原本发展得更快。

P9 Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness.同样的，在诗歌中，高度个人化的和富有表现力的创作风格成为了唯一有真正表现力的形式。

P10 The New England colonies were the scenes of important episodes in the pursuit of widely understood ideas of civility and virtuosity. 新英格兰移民地地区成为追求广泛认可的礼貌和技艺的重要事件的发生地。

P10 To read such books today is to marvel at the fact that their learned contents were once deemied suitable for publication in general-circulation dailies. 今天我们阅读这些书籍等同于惊讶于这样一个事实：书中学术性的内容曾一度被认为适合在普通发行的日报上发表。

P10 The IASB says it does not want to act without overall planning, but the pressure to fold when it completes its reconstruction of rules later this yers is strong. IASB说它不想在没有总体规划的情况下行动，但是今年晚些时候当它完成其规则的改造时屈服的压力是非常大的。

P11 The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classical-music world ever since the sudden announcement of his appointment in 2009. 纽约爱乐乐团决定聘请艾伦·吉尔伯特为其下任音乐总监，这个决定自从2009突然宣布以来就一直是古典音乐界谈论的话题。

P11 The Federal Circuit’s action comes in the wake of a series of rencent decisions by the Supreme Cour that has narrowed the scope of protections for patent holders. 联邦巡回法院的行动紧随由最高法院所做出的一系列决定之后。最高法院缩小了对专利持有人的保护范围。

P11 That ruling produced an explosion in business-method patent filings, initially by emerging Internet companies trying to stake out exclusive rights to specific types of online transactions. 那项裁决导致了商业专利法申请的激增，（这些申请）最初是由新兴网络公司提出的，他们试图宣布对特定类型的在线交易拥有度假权利。

P11 The examples of Virtual Vineyards, Amazon.com, and other pioneers show that a Web site selling the right kind of products with the right mix of interactivity, hospitality, and security will attract online customers. 虚拟葡萄园，亚马逊以及其他开拓者的例子表明，一个销售正确商品的网站，再结合良好的互动，热情的服务和安全性，将会吸引网上用户。

P12 They believe the data support an idea current among marine biologists, that of the “shifting baseline”. 他们认为数据支持在海洋生物学家中流行的一个观点，即“改变底线”。

P12 There is “the democratizing uniformity of dress and discourse, and the casualness and absence of deference” characteristic of popular culture. 服饰和谈吐的民主化的一致性以及对于尊重的漫不经心和不拘小节是流行文化的特点。

P12 Traditional tests best assess analytical and verbal skills but fail to measure creativity and practical knowledge, components also critical to problem solving and life success. 传统测试很好的评估了分析能力和语言能力，但是未能评估创造力和实践知识，而创造力和实践知识对于解决问题和生活的成功至关重要。

P12 The details may be unknowable, but the independence of standard-setters, essential to the proper functioning of capital markets, is being compromised.细节或许无从知晓，但是对于资本市场正常运作至关重要的标准制定者的独立性正在遭到破坏。

P12 Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities. 今年，几次顾客和员工数据的大规模的泄漏，包括时代华纳，美国国防项目承办机构—科学应用国际公司，甚至加州伯克利分校，已经使管理者们匆忙的仔细检查他们复杂的信息系统和商业流程以寻找潜在的弱点。

P13 The individual now has more information available than any generation, and the task of finding the piece of information relevant to his or her specific problem is complicated, time-consuming. 人们现在比之前任何一代都可以得到更多的信息，（因此）搜索与自己的特定的问题相关的信息的任务变得复杂和耗时。

P13 The American president and vice-president have surnames starting with B and C respectively; and 26 of George Bush’s predecessors (including his father) had surnames in the first half of the alphabet against just 16 in the second half. 美国总统和副总统有分别以B和C字母开头的姓氏；并且，与之有16位总统的姓氏在字母表的后半部分对比，乔治•布什的前任（包括其父）中的26位总统的姓氏在字母表的前半部分。

P13 “There’s a kind of false precision being hawked by people claiming they are doing ancestry testing,” says Troy Duster. 特洛伊·达斯特说：有一种被声称在做家谱测试的人们所兜售的虚假的准确性。

P13 For example, a grandmotherly woman staffing an animal rights booth at a recent street fair was distributing a brochure that encouraged readers not to use anything that comes from or is tested in animals. 在最近一次街头集市上，一位在动物权利宣传站工作的老奶奶在散发小册子，规劝人们不要使用任何动物制品或动物实验制品。

P14 This “added-worker effect” could support the safety net offered by unemployment insurance or disability insurance to help familiies weather bad times. “附加的劳动者效应”能够支持失业保险或伤残保险提供的安全网，以帮助家庭度过难关。

P14 Databases used by some companies don’t rely on data collected systematically but rather lump together information from different research projects. 一些公司采用的数据库不依赖系统收集的数据，而是把来自不同研究项目的信息综合起来考虑。

P14 People are absorbed into “a culture of consumption” launched by the 19th century department stores that offered “vast arrays of goods in an elegant atmosphere”. 人们专心于一种由19世纪的百货商店发起的“消费文化”。这些商店“在优雅的环境中提供琳琅满目的物品”。

P14 For a social epidemic to occur, however, each person so affected must then influence his or her own acquaintances, who must in turn influence theirs, and so on. 但是，一种社会流行潮的发生，每个受到影响的人必然接着影响他/她自己的熟人，这些熟人必须转而影响他们的熟人，以此类推。

P14 Both the absolute cost of healthcare and the share of it borne by families have risen. 医疗卫生的绝对成本以及家庭承担的绝对成本的份额都已提高。

P14 After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness?毕竟，什么是一种几乎完全致力于描述快乐的现代表现形式呢？

P14 During his lifetime, though, he was also one of England’s foremost classical-music critics, and a stylist so widely admired that his Autobiography (1974) became a best-seller. 但是，在他的一生中，他还是英国首屈一指的古典音乐评论家，也曾是一位被广为赞赏以至于其«自传» （1947年）成为一本畅销书的作家。

P14 In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well connected. 马尔科姆·格拉德维尔在他的«引爆点»一书中认为：“社会流行潮”主要被极少数通常被称为“有影响力的人”的特殊个体的行为所推动，他们通常消息很灵通，很有说服力，或拥有良好的社会关系。

P15 Many consumers seem to have been influenced by stock-market swings, which investors now view as a necessary ingredient to a sustained boom. 很多消费者似乎已经受到了股票市场波动的影响。投资者现在把这种波动看做是持续繁荣的必须要素。

P15 Critics also argue that commercial genetic testing is only as good as the reference collecions to which a sample is compared. 批评者还认为：商业基因检测仅与样本与之对比的参考收集物一样好。

P15 The kinds of interpersonal violence that women are exposed to tend to be in domestic situaions, by, unfortunately, parents or other family members, and they tend not to be one-shot deals.妇女所遭遇的人际暴力往往发生在家庭环境里，不幸的是，这种暴力是由父母或其他家庭成员所造成的，而且这往往不是一次性的。

P15 America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed. 美国的国富民强是那些经济遭到战争重创的欧亚诸国做梦也无法想象的。

P15 Many settlers had slighter religious commitments than Dane’s, as one clergyman learned in confronting folk along the coast who mocked that they had not come to the New World for religion. 很多移民并没有丹耐这么虔诚的宗教信仰。正如一名牧师在于沿海地区的人们相遇时所了解到的。他们嘲弄的说，他们来新大陆不是为了宗教。

P15 “Schools have always been in a society where practical is more important than intellectual,” says education writer Diane Ravitch. 教育作家戴安·拉维奇说：学校一直处于一个实用性比才智更重要的社会中。

P16 There is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay for access to a collection of online journal titles through site-licensing agreements.（第一种是）所谓的“一揽子捆绑销售”，在这种方式中，机构订户通过许可协议付费阅读一系列电子杂志。

P16 Sexual confusion, economic frustration, and religious hope—all came together in a decisive moment when he opened the Bible, told his father that the first line he saw would settle his fate, and read the magical words: “Come out from among them, touch no unclean thing, and I will be your God and you shall be my people. 他的性困惑，经济挫折和宗教希望都在一个决定性的时刻一起到来了。当时，他打开圣经，告诉父亲他读到的第一行字将决定他的命运，接着读到了一下神奇的字眼： “从他们中走出来吧，别碰不干净的东西，我将是你的上帝，你将是我的信民。”

P16 I propose to offer a theory which, as far as I am aware, has not previously been set forth, that only those animals capable of speech are capable of laughter, and that thereore man, being the only animal that speaks, is the only animal that laughs. 我提出一个理论，就我所知，这个理论之前从未被提出过，那就是，只有能够说话的动物才能笑，因此，人类，作为唯一能够说话的动物，也是唯一能笑的动物。

P16 This, for those as yet unaware of uch a disadvantage, refers to discrimination against those whose surnames begin with a letter in the lower half of the alphabet.对于那些到目前为止没有意识到这样一种不利的人来说，这指的是对于那些姓氏以字母表后半部分的一个字母开始的人们的歧视。

P16 Consumers say they are not in despair because, despite the dreadful headlines, their own fortunes still feel pretty good. 消费者们说，尽管有些吓人的头条，他们并不绝望，因为他们自己的财富仍然感觉不错。

P17 At the start of the first year in infant school, teachers seat pupils alphabetically from the front, to make it easier to remember their names. 从幼儿园第一年开始，老师们就按照字母顺序给学生们从前往后排座位，以便于更容易记住他们的名字。

 

P17 Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progessing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day.大多数人似乎在前半夜做更多不好的梦，在醒来前朝着更加快乐的梦发展。这表明他们正在克服白天所产生的不良情绪。

P17 At the end of adolescence, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life. 然而，在青春期结束时，大脑关闭了那种能力的一半，只保留在生命最初十年左右的似乎非常有价值的那些思维方式。

P17 Illustated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents in unmistakable.麦荷特先生记录的一种趋势是不会被弄错的，这种确实被一系列有趣的来自上层和下层文化的例子进行了说明。

P17 Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss’s agenda in businesses of every variety.直到现在，信息保护一直被留给临时的，底层的IT员工负责并且被看做只是一些信息量比较大的行业，比如银行业，电信业和航空业的关注。而现在是各个行业老板们优先考虑的问题。

P18 The Internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it—is making access to scientific results a realiy网络以及来自于正在质疑商业出版商为什么会通过限制人们获取论文而从政府资助的研究中获利的基金会的压力使获取科研成果成为现实。

P18 The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access.知识的价值和研究方面恶公共投资的回报，在某种程度上，取决于广泛的推广和易于接近。

P18 Americans no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift.无论是在演讲中或是写作中，美国人不再期待公众人物，用技巧和天赋掌握英语。

P18 It is difficult to the point of impossibility for the average reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big city newspapers.对于四十岁以下的普通读者来说，想象一个高品质艺术评论能够存在于大多数大城市报纸上的时代是几乎不可能的。

P18 One difficulty is that almost all of what is called behavioral science continues to trace behavior to states of mind, feelings, traits of character, human nature, and so on. 难题之一在于所谓的“行为科学”几乎都是继续从心态，情感，性格特征和人性等方面寻找行为的根源。

P19 In dealing with a challenge on such a scale, it is no exaggeration to say, “United we stand, divided we fall”.在应对一个如此规模的挑战过程中，我们可以毫不夸张的说：“团结，我们就生存；分裂，我们就灭亡。”

P30 Now a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a disappearing spouse can reduce a family from solidly middle class to newly poor in a few months.现在，一张解雇通知书，一个恶性诊断结果或者丧偶都可以使一个稳固的中产阶级家庭在几个月内沦落为新的贫困户。

P30 Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it.如今，我们周围充斥着唾手可得的幸福承诺，我们需要艺术来告诉我们，正如宗教曾经告诉过我们的，记住：你将死亡，一切都会结束，幸福来自于忍受这一点而不在于否认它。

P30 Do you remember all those years when scientists argued that smoking would kill us but the doubters insisted that we didn’t know for sure? That the evidence was inconclusive, the science uncertain? That the antismoking lobby was out to destroy our way of life and the government should stay out of the way?你还记得那些年吗？当时科学家们认为吸烟会使我们丧命，但那些怀疑者们坚持认为我们并不确定；证据是非结论性的，科学是不确定的，反对吸烟的游说是为了破坏我们的生活方式，并且政府应该置身事外。

P30 The European Union is an imperfect creature，with some of its actions based on fine principles of political  economy and some on poor ones.欧盟是不完善的机构，它的一些举措是以正确的政治经济原则为基础的而另一些举措却建立在错误的政治经济原则之上。

P31 As families move away from their stable community，their friends of many years，their extended family relationships，the informal flow of information is cut off，and with it the confidence that information will be available when needed and will be trustworthy and reliable.随着家庭远离了他们稳定的社区，多年的老友以及大家庭的亲属关系，非正式的信息渠道被切断了，并且那种在需要时就能得到信息，并且信息是真实可靠的信心也随之被切断了。

P31 The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers. 20世纪，已婚女性走出家门工作人数的增加与其说和家务机械化以及妇女空闲时间的增多有关，还不如说和女性自己的经济需要及高结婚率使可参加工作的单身女工人数的减少有关。

P32 Interest in historical methods has arisen less through external challenge to the validity of history as an intellectual discipline and more from internal quarrels among historians themselves. 对于历史研究方法的兴趣不是来自于外界认为历史作为一门学问的有效性的挑战，而是来自于史学界内部意见不一。

P32 Science depends far less on the experiments it prepares than on the preparedness of the minds of the men who watch the experiments. 科学与其说依赖于它准备的实验，不如说更依赖于做实验的人有所准备的头脑。

P33 But taking more than the body needs doesn’t make it function better, any more than overfilling your gas tank makes your car run better. 摄入的比身体所需的多并不能让身体更健康，正如往邮箱里加多了油并不会让你的车跑的更好一样。

P35 Many communities have a low literacy rate, making impossible handing out AIDS literature and expecting people to read it. 很多社区识字率很低，使得发放艾滋病的资料以及期待人们阅读这些资料变得不可能。

P35 I shall define him as an individual who has elected as his primary duty and pleasure in life the activity of thinking in Socratic way about moral problems. 我将他定义为这样一个人，他把以苏格拉底的方式思考道德问题作为他首要的任务和人生主要的乐趣。

P35 Widely acknowledged as a great and important play-writer, O’Neil brought to American artistic stage what was probably regarded as its first really serious drama. 奥尼尔被公认做是一个伟大且重要的剧作家，他给美国艺术舞台带来了可能被看做是第一个真正严肃的戏剧。

P36 Thus, the anthropological concept of “culture,” like the concept of “set” in mathematics, is an abstract concept which makes possible immense amounts of concrete research and understanding. 因此，人类学中“文化”概念就像数学中“集”的概念一样，是一个抽象概念，它使大量的具体研究和认识成为可能。

P36 Coupled with the centralization of economic growth is the disappearance of the extended families in favor of isolated, two-generation households. 伴随着经济增长的集中化，大家庭逐渐消失，取而代之的是单门独户的两代之家。

P36 Emerging from the 1980 census is the picture of a nation developing more and more regional competition, as population growth in the Northeast reaches a standstill. 1980年美国人口普查显示出这样一副国家景象：随着东北部和中西部人口增长近乎停滞，地区间的竞争越来越激烈了。

P36 Implicit with Tylor’s definition is the concept that culture is a learned, shared and patterned behavior. 泰勒对文化的定义中包含了这样一个概念，即文化石一种后天习得的，共有的，模式化的行为。

P36 Adding to a woman’s increased dose of stress chemicals, are her increased “opportunities” for stress. 女性承受压力机会的增加使得女性因压力产生的化学物质的增加。