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高级口译0509听力原文汇总合集（5）

2010-09-02 00:00:00来源：网络

　　凌凌教你学口语：每日一句系列
　　备战口译：原创双语时事汇总
　　2010秋季上海口译考试报名通知

　　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0509听力原文汇总合集（5）

　　Questions 16 to 20

　　Why do manufacturers of gadgets and machines make them so complicated? And why do people want to buy such complicated things? Coming back to your point that we seem to want to buy these things, the evidence is they’re designed to confuse us so that we appear to want them. That’s a fairly subtle point. Let’s say there’s a tourist company. I’ll explain it in terms of tourist companies. It’s a bit easier to understand the general idea. You want to go to Costa Del Sol and some hotel. You want a swimming pool. You want to be near a beach, whatever. Whatever your criteria are. You’ve got kids and you want, so on…. If you look in any travel brochure about the hotels and resorts, they tell you different things about each hotel. And pretty soon you discover you don’t know how to make a decision, and you make a random decision. That’s deliberate. Because if you choose the best hotel, everybody would go to that hotel. So what the travel companies do is they tell you this hotel’s got a swimming pool. This hotel’s got, you know, access to the beach. This hotel’s got children’s facilities, and so on. Basically, the point of that is to spread the customers out amongst different hotels that they have on offer.

　　That sort of thing goes on with video recorders. The purpose isn’t to give you features you want. The purpose is to get you into the shop, confuse you so that you can be sold a product on the basis that it is a pound cheaper than a competitor’s, or that is made by a brand name that rings a bell, or that, you know, it was at the front of the shop. And those are all things they know how to control. So as you look at it, you know why they’re making confusing gadgets. Well, because they sell. And they sell, because confusing people is an easy way of controlling them. I once hoped that safety critical systems would be a way of improving things. We can all laugh about a video recorder, you know, at worst, you record the wrong program or whatever. You know, it’s just irritating, and we certainly laugh about it. But that sort of gadget is also available in, for instance, airplane cockpits. Have you seen an airplane cockpit? You know, they’re covered in knobs, buttons and things. Or a nuclear power station. You name it. In a safety critical environment, they have gone overboard in gadgets that are rather similar to video recorders. And it’s then no longer a joke. It’s deadly serious. I’ve worked with some of these interfaces, and in airplanes. And although it doesn’t help me to say this, my cynical view is they’re designed not to be easy to use. They are designed so that when the plane crashes, the manufacturers can say it was the pilot’s fault. If the user’s killed himself, so much the easier to blame the user himself. Then it’s not the machine’s problem.

　　14. According to the woman, why are the gadgets and machines made so complicated?

　　17. Why do travel companies tell you different things about different hotels?

　　18. According to the woman, how do people usually choose a hotel through a travel brochure?

　　19. What is the main point that the woman is making with the examples of travel brochures and video recorders?

　　20. Why are the safety critical systems made so complicated, according to the woman?

　　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