问答题
46) {{U}}During the adolescence, the development of political
ideology becomes apparent in the individual ; ideology here is defined as the
presence of roughly consistent attitudes, more or less organized in reference to
a more encompassing set of general principles.{{/U}} As such, political ideology
is dim or absent at the beginning of adolescence. Its acquisition by the
adolescent, in even the most modest sense, requires the acquisition of
relatively sophisticated cognitive skills: the ability to manage abstractness,
to synthesize and generalize, to imagine the future. These are accompanied by a
steady advance in the ability to understand principles. The
child's rapid acquisition of political knowledge also promotes the growth of
political ideology during adolescence. 47) {{U}}By knowledge I mean more than the
dull "facts" such as the composition of country government, that the child is
exposed to in the conventional ninth-grade school course.{{/U}} Nor do I mean only
information on current political realities. 48) {{U}}These are facts of knowledge,
but they are less critical than the adolescent's absorption of a feeling for
those many unspoken assumptions about the political system that comprise the
common ground of understanding, for example, what the state can "appropriately"
demand of its citizens, and vice versa, or the "proper" relationship of
government to subsidiary social institutions such as the schools and
churches.{{/U}} Thus, political knowledge is the awareness of social assumptions
and relationships as well as of objective facts. 49 ) {{U}}Much of the naiveté
that characterizes the younger adolescent's grasp of politics stems not from an
ignorance of "facts" but from an incomplete comprehension of the common
conventions of the system, of what is and is not customarily done, and of how
and why it is or is not done.{{/U}} Yet I do not want to
overemphasize the significance of increased political knowledge in forming
adolescent ideology. Over the years I have become progressively disenchanted
about the centrality of such knowledge and have come to believe that much
current work in political socialization, by relying too heavily on its apparent
acquisition, has been misled about the tempo of political understanding in
adolescence. 50) {{U}}Just as young children can count numbers in series without
grasping the principle of ordination, young adolescents may have in their heads
many random bits of political information without a secure understanding of
those concepts that would give order and meaning to the
information.{{/U}} Children's minds pick up bits and pieces of
data, but until the adolescent has grasped the encompassing function that
concepts and principles provide, the data remain fragmented, random,
disordered.
【答案解析】[解析] 比较结构的翻译；代词they的翻译
[句法] 由but连接的并列复合句。than...schools and churches作比较状语。其中包含that引导的定语从句修饰assumptions；for example后面的两个例子是对assumptions的补充说明。翻译注意：因为but后面的分句主要讲absorption，所以有必要在翻译时将主语由they调整为absorption。因此less critical than的比较含义就应该按照逻辑顺序翻译为“更重要一些”。
[点拨] absorption of a feeling for意为“关于…的感受的吸收”，如果这样翻译将十分拗口，让人看不明白，因此将absorption和feeling合在一起处理为“吸收理解”。