高级口译0503听力原文汇总合集（6）

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　　中级口译考试介绍：

　　具有大学英语四级和同等英语能力水平的考生可以报考。

　　凡获得“上海市英语中级口译岗位资格证书”者均具有良好的口语水平和基本口译技能，可从事一般的生活翻译、陪同翻译、涉外导游以及外事接待、外贸业务洽谈等工作。

　　上海中级口译的笔试和口试虽然是分开进行的，但其笔试的证书在社会上却有很高的认可度。现在中国受金融风暴的影响，各大公司纷纷裁员，但中高级口译等高等专业人才仍存在很大的缺口。

　　为了方便广大口译考生备战秋季的考试，新东方在线口译频道特别汇总整理了近九年来的中级口译听力原文，供考生复习备考。

　　高级口译0503听力原文汇总合集（6）

　　Part A: Note-taking And Gap-filling

　　【原文】

　　It is impossible to wear clothes without transmitting social signals. Every costume tells a story, often a very subtle one, about its wearer. Even those people who insist that they despise attention to clothing, and dress as casually as possible, are making quite specific comments on their social roles and their attitudes towards the culture in which they live.

　　For the majority of people, clothing signals are the result of a single daily event, the act of dressing performed each morning. At the top and bottom of the social scale, this activity may lose its once-a-day frequency, with rich socialites changing several times daily as a matter of course, and poor vagrants sleeping rough in the same clothes they wear by day. Between these two extremes, the once-a-day routine is usually only broken for the dawning of specialized clothing. The man who gets dirty wears working clothes. The sportsman wears high-activity clothes, People attending special ceremonies, weddings, funerals, garden parties, dances, festivals, club meetings, formal dinners, change into the appropriate costumes. But although these pursuits mean the doubling of the once a day act of dressing, the change is nearly always from everyday clothes into specialized clothing. The old pattern, in which social rules demanded the changing from morning dress to afternoon dress to evening dress as a matter of regular routine, has now virtually vanished.

　　The modern trend in dressing behavior is usually referred to as one of increased informality. But this is misleading. In reality, there is no loss of formality, merely the exchange of old formalities for new. The wearing of a pair of jeans by a young male today is as much of a formality as was the wearing of a top hat by his equivalent in the previous epic. He may feel that he is free to wear anything he pleases, and is rid at last of the suffocating rules of costume etiquette that once dominated social life. But what he wears is as much a uniform today as the costumes of his predecessors were in earlier times.

　　The written rules of yesterday may have been scrapped, but they have rapidly been replaced by the unwritten rules of today. There are many interwoven trends that can be observed in the complex world of clothing signals. Some are long term, lasting for whole decades, while others are short term, surviving only for a season or two. Not all are easy to explain. One of the most mysterious is the relationship between female skirt length and economic conditions. During the present century, ever since the First World War, there has been a rather precise correlation between the length of female skirts and periods of boom and depression. On the surface, one would expect long skirts, employing greater quantities of material, to be related to the boom periods, and the skimpier, shorter skirts to be made when money also was short,. But, an analysis of the facts reveals that the exact opposite is the case. As the stock market rises, so too do the skirts. And when it falls, they descend with it. Attempts to change this relationship have met with disaster. For example, in Britain back in the boom period of the 1960s, the fashion houses tried desperately to increase the amount of cloth used in skirt making, by the introduction of the Midi, a skirt almost twice as long as the Mini Skirt then in favor. The Midi skirt project was an expensive failure, and skirts went soaring on upwards. Only with the recession of the 1970s did the longer skirt edge its way back into fashion.

　　Exactly why female should want to expose more of their legs when the economy is healthier, it’s hard to understand. Perhaps the general atmosphere of financial activity makes them feel more physically active, a condition favored by shorter, less hampering skirt length. Hopefully, future fluctuation will give us a clear explanation. More short-term variations are at work in a hundred different ways, as fashion trends diffuse themselves rapidly around the globe. Many of these are no more than novelty changes, based on the need to signal up-to-dateness by the wearers. Displaying the latest mode indicates not only the social awareness of the individual, but also the ability to pay for a new clothes at regular intervals, and therefore, has its own special status of value. Each new minor trend of this type modifies or reverses the fashion of the previous season, and can often be measured with precision. The width of male lapels, for example, has been growing during the last few years, as has trouser bottom width, tie width, shirt collar height, and shoe heel height. By measuring these changes, and hundreds of others like them, it should be possible to plot graphs of shifting clothing signals, and demonstrate the ways in which first one element, and then another is modified to produce a constantly varying costume display system. Unconsciously, we all plot such graphs, all the time. And without knowing quite how we do it, we read off the many signals that our companions’ clothes transmit to us in every social encounter. In this way, clothing is as much a part of human body language as gestures, facial expressions, and postures.

　　本文选自新东方口译名师裴晓栋的blog,blog链接地址：http://blog.hjenglish.com/peixiaodong

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