2011 Postgraduate English Examination ​

🔷 Text 1 ⭐ ​

🔹 Text 1 翻译 ​

🚩 The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classsical-music world ever since the sudden announcement of his appointment in 2009. For the most part, the response has been favorable, to say the least. “Hooray! At last!” wrote Anthony Tommasini, a sober-sided classical-music critic.

🚩 One of the reasons why the appointment came as such a surprise, however, is that Gilbert is comparatively little known. Even Tommasini, who had advocated Gilbert's appointment in the Times, calls him “an unpretentious musician with no air of the formidable conductor about him.” As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by musicians like Gustav Mahler and Pierre Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at least some Times readers as faint praise.

🚩 For my part, I have no idea whether Gilbert is a great conductor or even a good one. To be sure, he performs an impressive variety of interesting compositions, but it is not necessary for me to visit Avery Fisher Hall, or anywhere else, to hear interesting orchestral music. All I have to do is to go to my CD shelf, or boot up my computer and download still more recorded music from iTunes.

🚩 Devoted concertgoers who reply that recordings are no substitute for live performance are missing the point. For the time, attention, and money of the art-loving public, classical instrumentalists must compete not only with opera houses, dance troupes, theater companies, and museums, but also with the recorded performances of the great classical musicians of the 20th century. These recordings are cheap, available everywhere, and very often much higher in artistic quality than today's live performances; moreover, they can be “consumed” at a time and place of the listener's choosing. The widespread availability of such recordings has thus brought about a crisis in the institution of the traditional classical concert.

🚩 One possible response is for classical performers to program attractive new music that is not yet available on record. Gilbert's own interest in new music has been widely noted: Alex Ross, a classical-music critic, has described him as a man who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into “a markedly different, more vibrant organization.” But what will be the nature of that difference? Merely expanding the orchestra's repertoire will not be enough. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to succeed, they must first change the relationship between America's oldest orchestra and the new audience it hopes to attract.

🔹 Text 1 题目 ​

🔹 Text 1 词汇 ​

1. philharmonic 爱乐乐团
2. favorable adj. 有利的；良好的；赞成的，赞许的；讨人喜欢的
3. sober-sided adj. 稳重的，严肃的
4. unpretentious 含蓄的
5. formidable adj. 可怕的，令人敬畏的
6. conductor 导体
7. hitherto 至今
8. concertgoer 常去听音乐会者
9. substitute 替代
10. instrumentalist 乐器演奏家
11. troupe 剧团
12. institution 由来已久的习惯，制度
13. markedly 显著地
14. to say the least 退一步说
15. with no air of 没有 ··· 的架子
16. strike ··· as ··· 给某人以 ··· 印象
17. for one's part 就某人而言
18. orchestral music 交响乐
19. boot up 装入操作系统，启动计算机
20. live / recorded performance 现场 / 录音演奏
21. of one's choosing 由某人选择
22. expand the orchestra's repertoire 增加表演节目

🔹 Text 1 长难句 ​

P2S3 - As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by musicians like Gustav Mahler and Pierre Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at least some Times readers as faint praise.

对于一个迄今为止一直由像古斯塔夫・马勒和皮埃尔・布列兹这样的音乐家来指挥的交响乐团，这样描述其下任音乐总监，似乎至少可能会让一些《纽约时报》的读者觉得是一种牵强的赞美。

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🚩 When Liam McGee departed as president of Bank of America in August, his explanation was surprisingly straight up. Rather than cloaking his exit in the usual vague excuses, he came right out and said he was leaving “to pursue my goal of running a company.” Broadcasting his ambition was “very much my decision,” McGee says. Within two weeks, he was talking for the first time with the board of Hartford Financial Services Group, which named him CEO and chairman on September 29.

🚩 McGee says leaving without a position lined up gave him time to reflect on what kind of company he wanted to run. It also sent a clear message to the outside world about his aspirations. And McGee isn't alone. In recent weeks the No. 2 executives at Avon and American Express quit with the explanation that they were looking for a CEO post. As boards scrutinize succession plans in response to shareholder pressure, executives who don't get the nod also may wish to move on. A turbulent business environment also has senior managers cautious of letting vague pronouncements cloud their reputations.

🚩 As the first signs of recovery begin to take hold, deputy chiefs may be more willing to make the jump without a net. In the third quarter, CEO turnover was down 23% from a year ago as nervous boards stuck with the leaders they had, according to Liberum Research. As the economy picks up, opportunities will abound for aspiring leaders.

🚩 The decision to quit a senior position to look for a better one is unconventional. For years executives and headhunters have adhered to the rule that the most attractive CEO candidates are the ones who must be poached. Says Korn/Ferry senior partner Dennis Carey: “I can't think of a single search I've done where a board has not instructed me to look at sitting CEOs first.”

🚩 Those who jumped without a job haven't always landed in top positions quickly. Ellen Marram quit as chief of Tropicana a decade ago, saying she wanted to be a CEO. It was a year before she became head of a tiny Internet-based commodities exchange. Robert Willumstad left Citigroup in 2005 with ambitions to be a CEO. He finally took that post at a major financial institution three years later.

🚩 Many recruiters say the old disgrace is fading for top performers. The financial crisis has made it more acceptable to be between jobs or to leave a bad one. “The traditional rule was it's safer to stay where you are, but that's been fundamentally inverted,” says one headhunter. “The people who've been hurt the worst are those who've stayed too long.”

🔹 Text 2 题目 ​

🔹 Text 2 词汇 ​

1. cloak 斗篷
2. vague 模糊的
3. board 董事会
4. impulsive 冲动的
5. aspiration 愿望
6. executive 高管
7. scrutinize 仔细检查
8. turbulent 动荡不安的
9. cautious 谨慎的
10. pronouncement 声明
11. cloud 使模糊；给 ··· 蒙上阴影
12. turnover 事变更率；人员调整率
13. abound 有很多
14. headhunter 猎头
15. instruct 指导
16. sitting 现任的
17. recruiter 招聘人员
18. disgrace 耻辱
19. depart as 离开
20. come out 公开表明（同意或不同意）
21. reflect on 反思
22. succession plans 继任计划
23. get the nod 得到点头
24. take hold 开始完全控制，变得十分强大
25. deputy chiefs 副局长
26. adhere to 坚持

🔹 Text 2 长难句 ​

无。

🔷 Text 3 ⭐ ​

🔹 Text 3 翻译 ​

🚩 The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional “paid” media — such as television commercials and print advertisements — still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create “earned” media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage “owned” media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site. The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing's impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media.

🚩 Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initiator for users' responses. But in some cases, one marketer's owned media become another marketer's paid media — for instance, when an ecommerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies' marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned.

🚩 The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more (and more diverse) communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them.

🚩 If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company's response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.

🔹 Text 3 题目 ​

🔹 Text 3 词汇 ​

1. leverage 影响力，手段；杠杆力，杠杆作用
2. initiator 引发剂
3. appeal 上诉
4. hijack 劫持
5. hostage 人质
6. stakeholder 利益相关者
7. allegation 指控
8. boycott 抵制
9. alleviate 缓解
10. engage 参与
11. dominance 主导地位
12. be obsessed with 痴迷于
13. in one's infancy 在婴儿期
14. go further 走得更远
15. the presence of ··· 存在 ···
16. user traffic 用户流量
17. dramatic technological changes 巨大的技术变革
18. become hostage to 成为人质
19. make negative allegations 做出负面指控
20. apply pressure on 施加压力
21. put sb. / sth. at risk 把某人 / 某事处于危险之中
22. recall crisis 召回危机
23. well-orchestrated 经过精心策划
24. engage with sb. 与某人接触

🔹 Text 3 长难句 ​

P4S3 - Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.

例如，丰田汽车公司通过发动相对迅速、协调有致的社交媒介回应活动，包括在微博Twitter和社会新闻网Digg等网站上与消费者直接互动，缓解了今年早些时候的召回危机所造成的部分损害。

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🚩 It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful, provocative magazine cover story, “I Love My Children, I Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter — nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, lifeenriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soulcrushingly hard, Senior writes that “the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight.”

🚩 The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive — and newly single — mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual “Jennifer Aniston is pregnant” news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands.

🚩 In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn't seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the childless. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn't have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives.

🚩 Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their “own” (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.

🚩 It's hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it's interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren't in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting “the Rachel” might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.

🔹 Text 4 题目 ​

🔹 Text 4 词汇 ​

1. insightful 富有洞察力的
2. fulfilling 充实的
3. miserable 悲惨的
4. dampen 抑制
5. newsstand 报摊
6. persistently 持续
7. procreation 生殖；生产
8. provoke 引发
9. gape 打呵欠
10. dumb 愚蠢的
11. glamorous 迷人的
12. happiness-enhancing 提升幸福感
13. child rearing 抚养孩子
14. anything less than 少于
15. moment-to-moment joy 即时的快乐
16. day-to-day experience 日常经验
17. dampen one's moods 使情绪低落
18. mom-to-be 准妈妈
19. lean on 依靠
20. on one's own 独自地
21. round-the-clock 日夜不停，夜以继日的
22. a piece of cake 小菜一碟
23. in a small way 在很小的程度上
24. contribute to 增加，增进

🔹 Text 4 长难句 ​

P1S1 - It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful provocative magazine cover story, “I Love My Children, I Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter — nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience.

珍妮弗・西尼尔见解深刻、颇具挑衅性的杂志封面故事《我爱我的孩子，我讨厌我的生活》引发了热烈议论，这并不意外——没有什么比“育儿绝非完全是成就自我、丰富生活的体验”这一提议更能引发人们的讨论了。

P3S3 - Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn't have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives.

不幸福的父母很少被激起对“自己是否本不该要孩子”的思考；但不幸福的无子女者会不断被“孩子是世界上唯一最重要的事情”这一信息所烦扰：显然他们的痛苦必定是他们生活中那些豁开的、孩子大小的窟窿所带来的直接后果。

P5S2 - But it's interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren't in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting " the Rachel” might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.

但思考一下这个问题也很有趣：我们每周看到的“毫无压力、提升幸福感”的为人父母形象也许是在以某种细微的、潜意识的方式造成我们自己对实际体验的不满。就像我们中有少部分人曾希望剪一个“瑞秋”发型使自己看起来有那么一点像珍妮弗•安妮斯顿。