英译汉 What we know today

英译汉1. Michael Phelps Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps admitted Sunday that he had engaged in "regrettable" behavior and "demonstrated bad judgment" after a photo was published that appeared to show him smoking cannabis. A British newspaper, the News of the World, published the photo allegedly showing the multiple Olympic gold medal-winner inhaling from a glass pipe which is generally used to smoke the drug. "I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment," Phelps said in a statement. "I am 23 years old, and despite the successes I have had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner that people have come to expect from me." "For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public—it will not happen again." The newspaper said the picture was taken on November 6, almost three months after Phelps won a historic eight gold medals at the 29th Olympics, when he went to a party at the University of South Carolina. USA Swimming, the national governing body for the sport, said it was disappointed by Phelp's admission. "We are certainly disappointed in Michael's behavior. Our Olympic champions are role models who are looked up to by people of all ages, especially young athletes who have their own aspirations and dreams," USA Swimming said in a statement. "That said, we realized that none among us is perfect. We hope that Michael can learn from this incident and move forward in a positive way." The US Olympic Committee also expressed disappointing in the swimmer, who on January 22 was named the USOC's Sportsman of the Year for making Olympic history by collecting the most golds won by any athlete at a single Game, giving him a career total of 14 golds. "We are disappointed in the behavior recently exhibited by Michael Phelps. "Michael is a role model, and he is well aware of the responsibilities and accountability that come with setting a positive example for others, particularly young people. In this instance, regrettably, he failed to fulfill those responsibilities," the USOC said. The photograph shows Phelps, wearing a white-shirt and a baseball cap back to front, holding the pipe—known as a bong—to his lips and apparently inhaling. The tabloid quoted a partygoer as saying: "You could tell Michael had smoked before. He grabbed the bong and a lighter and knew exactly what to do."

英译汉1. Who Puts a Spoke in Mitsubishi's Wheel With American sales of Mitsubishi, once one of the hottest car brands, in a free fall, the company's executives are trying to engineer a turnaround. Sales started picking up this month, but even so, Ms. Prendergast-Lunn expects her dealership to sell only half the number of vehicles it did a year earlier. "I'm hoping to end July with 35 or 40 sales," she said. In other words, circumstances in the car market have forced her to lower substantially her expectations. She is in effect being made to pay for mistakes Mitsubishi management has made over the past decade. Other dealers are struggling as well. The market share of Mitsubishi Motors North America, the United States unit of the Japanese automaker, has been halved in just a year, to 0.8 percent last month from 1.5 percent last June, according to the Autodata Corporation. In June, the company's sales dropped 45.7 percent, to 12,301. Shrinking sales resulted in diminished production. In 2008 production fell by 23 percent in Asia, 30 percent in Europe and a staggering 41 percent in North America. Mitsubishi announced last week that it would lay off 1,200 employees, or about a third of its work force. Mitsubishi has also decreased its advertising. For years it pitched the brand to young consumers with cheap financing and emotional eye-catching ads set to pop music. That strategy created some of its trouble because it suffered a high default rate on the loans. Analysts say that Mitsubishi needs to write off about $1 billion in bad loans. The American sales slump has been a big factor in the struggles of the Japanese parent company, but not the only factor. Mitsubishi has also suffered from a cover-up of defects in its cars and trucks for decades. It was hoped a new CEO would solve many of these problems. Finbarr O'Neill, who had recently rescued Korean carmaker Hyundai, was brought in. He promptly shifted the marketing focus from the unreliable youth sector to the older middle class, emphasizing quality and durability in new family cars. O'Neill's innovations failed to revive sales, and he abruptly left Mitsubishi. (He would later complain that the advertising agency had not explained those attractions adequately to potential buyers.) In April, Mitsubishi's minority owner, DaimlerChrysler, decided not to invest any more money in the troubled carmaker, and Mitsubishi had to scramble for money to cover its debts. The Phoenix Capital Company, a Tokyo-based investment firm, bought a third of the company, replacing DaimlerChrysler as the controlling partner. So what is Mitsubishi's reason for existence? The answer is to cast Mitsubishi's vehicles as performance-driven alternatives to some of the country's most respected brands. Advertising for the redesigned Galant midsize sedan introduced earlier this year, pits the car against the Toyota Camry in a high-speed crash avoidance test. The cars follow two trucks from which two men are throwing everything from bowling balls to iron bars in front of the two fast-moving cars. Each car swerves to miss the obstacles. Finally, two old cars fall out of the back of the trucks and the Galant and the Camry swerve to miss them. The Galant deftly maneuvers around them while the Camry is left in the dust. Along with the updated Galant a new sports car and a pick-up truck will go into production. Many experts doubt that those additions will be enough to save Mitsubishi from ultimate collapse in today's competitive car market.

英译汉3. Continental winds blow from the northwest throughout winter and spring, creating cold dry weather suitable for wheat; in summer, the monsoon from the southeast drives warm moisture-laden air into the continent.

英译汉9. GM's hydrogen fuel car in China underscores a drive toward going green, company CEO Rick Wagoner says.

英译汉8. Since the executive teams of both firms have committed themselves to the deal, they would be utterly discredited if it fell apart.

英译汉4. ff the benefits outweigh the costs when it comes to utilizing such a tool, then it is hard to pass up.

英译汉11. They may pay lip service to respecting our heritage and environment.

英译汉2. Date palms have grown prolifically in both Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Egypt for many thousands of years. Dates are rich in sugar, and in such warm climates fermentation into a liquid containing alcohol took place fairly quickly. Thus, while our first records of dates being made into wine come from the period 3000 B.C. to 2000 B.C., we feel certain that it was made much earlier. Since the fruit itself houses the yeast fungus that causes fermentation, making date wine was a fairly simple process. The only pieces of equipment needed were a jar to hold the date and a strainer used at the end of the fermentation.

英译汉12. Carbon monoxide doesn't normally cause problems in a well-ventilated area where the gas is spread, but if it builds up in enclosed or poorly-ventilated spaces, it causes poisoning when the fumes are inhaled.

英译汉10. A bill that would give the White House expedited authority to enter into a Pacific Rim trade agreement finally appears to be on a path to the president's desk.

英译汉15. When a faculty has exclusive authority to determine its own membership, it has achieved full status as a professional body. The standards applied measure the individual's performance of the several faculty functions—teaching, research activity, and service to the community.

英译汉1. A Threat to the Starbucks Brand Starbucks founder and Chairman1 Howard Schultz has a challenge for his ever-expanding coffee empire. Schultz sees a threat to his brand, a problem that could impact on everything that has made Starbucks the great American success and growth story it is2, and tonight we are taking an in-depth look at this amazing turn of events. The letter by Schultz came in the form of a memo to Starbucks gossip blogger Jim Romenesko's email box on Wednesday. That's a week after Schultz wrote notes to top executives. Romenesko said he read it yesterday, believed the note was real3 and posted it on his website. The Wall Street Journal confirmed this afternoon that it was in fact genuine. In the memo, Schultz says he worries about what he calls the commoditization of the brand as a result of the company's massive expansion over the past decade, as well as the decisions company officials have made that have watered down the ideal coffee experience. Many of these decisions were probably fight at the time, Schultz writes, and on their own merit would not have created4 the dilution of the Starbuck's coffee experience, but in this case, the sum is much greater and unfortunately much more damaging than the individual pieces. Schultz was more specifically pointing out the effect of rapid growth on store architecture and ambiance. One of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of an independent neighborhood store. All these, Schultz concludes, could lead to loss of market share for the world's largest multinational chain of coffee stores. While the current state of affairs is for the most part self-induced, it has led to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators and morn-and-pop stores to position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and a test of loyalty of those people who previously have been Starbucks' customers. This must be stopped.5 Despite the release of the memo, the stock hardly moved on the day. The story was broadcast at 1:23 pm eastern time, shares dropping a mere 17 cents from that point, closing at $ 32.75. Perhaps that was an admission of the fact that most of what Schultz was saying was already obvious. Many customers we talked to today already knew this. It has lost a little of its romance.6 It's not the way it was in the beginning. It's not an experience at all; it's like McDonald's. Some close watchers of the Starbucks brand think the memo's reaching the public is a good thing for investors and customers. Now there is a debate as to whether Starbucks wanted to leak this memo. Some people believe that the release of the memo makes Starbucks look more human and original; still there are others that say that the memo would have been more convincing if it were meant to be released.

英译汉 Air pollution is not a popular subject

英译汉11. About Archives At some point1 most of us realize that having a personal archival strategy is an inescapable aspect of modem life: one has to draw the line somewhere. What should the policy be toward children's drawings and report cards? Toward personal letters and cancelled checks2? Toward family photographs and wedding mementos? Toward favorite but no longer usable articles of clothing? People work out ad hoc answers to such questions, usually erring, I suspect, on the side of overaccrual3. My father who is an artist, still has all his art school sketchbooks from when he was in his early teens, and he has some 10,000 Polaroid photographs of himself that he took over the years in order to capture details of lighting and drapery. He has a field of newspaper clippings about Fordham football games from the ]930s. Almost everyone seems to save—to "curate", as archaeologists say—issues of National Geographic. That is why in garbage landfills copies of that magazine are rarely found in isolation; rather they are found in herds, when an entire collection has been discarded after an owner has died or moved. I happen to be an admirer of the archiving impulse and an inveterate archivist at the household level.4 Though not quite one of those people whom public-health authorities seem to run across every few years, with a house in which neatly bundled stacks of newspaper occupy all but narrow aisles. I do tend to save almost everything that is personal and familial, and even to supplement this private hoard with oddities of a more public nature—a calling card of Thomas Nast's, for instance, and a baseball bat of Luis Aparicio's and Kim Philby's copy of The Joy of Cooking. I cannot help wondering, though, whether as a nation we are compiling archives at a rate that will exceed anyone's ability ever to make sense of them. A number of observers have cited the problem of "information overload" as if it were a recent development, largely the consequence of computers. In truth, the archive backlog5 has been a problem for millennia. The excavation of thousands of cuneiform tablets in the ancient archives of Ebla, in what is now Syria, was hugely important, but it will be many decades before the tablets are fully translated, and by then further discoveries will no doubt have dug scholars more deeply as it were, into a hole6. A few years ago a Vatican official spent a morning taking me through the rich labyrinths and frescoed recesses of the Vatican Library: "Do you even know what you have?" I asked at one point. He shrugged and said that although the name of every item probably existed in the records somewhere—"Here, like this," he said, pulling out an 18th century ledger and pointing to an entry in an elegant hand—he guessed that no one had actually opened up and looked at two-thirds of the collection.7 Writing's great advantage over memory has ever been that it allows one to remember what one can then forget about—an invitation to warehousing. The process keeps speeding up, and Roy Williams, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Computing Research, has attempted to calculate how fast. He notes that the amount of information now stored in all printed sources everywhere in the world is roughly equivalent to two hundred petabytes, a petabyte being one quadrillion bytes. In contrast, Williams has calculated, the amount of information that will have accumulated in online media alone by the year 2000—that is in the course of a mere couple of decades—is two and a half times as much as that, and he conceded that this figure may be a gross underestimation.

英译汉9. An energetic manufacturing sector pressed forward with a huge range of items, from ships and steam engines through textiles to the enormous variety of small manufactured goods.

英译汉7. Children obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school.

英译汉3. With little or no visual feedback to reinforce the mental map, a visually impaired person must rely on memory for key landmarks and other clues.

英译汉 Not all educated men are college graduates

英译汉6. The law makers in Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula have passed a vote of no-confidence in the local government in the latest twist of power struggle.