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2014年考研英语阅读真题 Text 1

In order to “change lives for the better” and reduce “dependency,” George Osbome,Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced the “upfront work search” scheme. Only if the jobless arrive at the job centre with a register for online job search, and start looking for work will they be eligible for benefit-and then they should report weekly rather than fortnightly. What could be more reasonable?

为了“让生活变得更美好”以及减少“依赖”，英国财政大臣乔治?奥斯本引入了“求职预付金”计划。只有当失业者带着简历到就业中心，注册在线求职并开始找工作，才有资格获得补助金——然后他们应该每周而非每两周报告一次。有什么比这更合理呢？

More apparent reasonableness followed. There will now be a seven-day wait for the jobseeker’s allowance. “Those first few days should be spent looking for work, not looking to sign on.” he claimed. “We’re doing these things because we know they help people say off benefits and help those on benefits get into work faster” Help? Really? On first hearing, this was the socially concerned chancellor, trying to change lives for the better, complete with “reforms” to an obviously indulgent system that demands too little effort from the newly unemployed to find work, and subsides laziness. What motivated him, we were to understand, was his zeal for “fundamental fairness”-protecting the taxpayer, controlling spending and ensuring that only the most deserving claimants received their benefits.

更加明显的合理性如下。现在领取求职者补贴要等待七天。“这前几天应该用来找工作，而不是办理失业登记（以获得救济金）。”他说，“我们这样做是因为我们知道，这样会帮助人们摆脱补助并让依赖补助的人尽快就业。”帮助？真的吗？乍一听，这是位关心社会的大臣，他努力改善人们的生活，包括对一个明显放纵的体系的“改革”，这个体系不要求新失业者付出多少努力去找工作，为其懒惰埋单。我们将会知道，激励他的是他对“基本的公正”的热诚——保护纳税人，控制花费以及确保只有最值得帮助的申请者才能得到补助金。

Losing a job is hurting: you don’t skip down to the job centre with a song in your heart, delighted at the prospect of doubling your income from the generous state. It is financially terrifying psychologically embarrassing and you know that support is minimal and extraordinarily hard to get. You are now not wanted; you support is minimal and extraordinarily hard to get. You are now not wanted; you are now excluded from the work environment that offers purpose and structure in your life. Worse, the crucial income to feed yourself and your family and pay the bills has disappeared. Ask anyone newly unemployed what they want and the answer is always: a job. 失业是痛苦的：你不会内心歌唱并跳跃着到就业中心去，为从这个慷慨国度得到加倍收入的前景而欣喜。在经济上它令人生畏，在心理感到难堪，并且你还知道那种扶持的微薄和非常难以得到。现在没人需要你；你现在被排除在工作环境之外，那里会给予你人生的目标和体制。更糟糕的是，失去了用以养家糊口和支付账单的至关重要的收入。问任何新失业者他们想要什么，答案永远是：一份工作。

But in Osborne land, your first instinct is to fall into dependency- permanent dependency if you can get it-supported by a state only too ready to indulge your falsehood. It is as though 20 years of ever- tougher reforms of the job search and benefit administration system never happened. The principle of British welfare is no longer that you can insure yourself against the risk of unemployment and receive unconditional payments if the disaster happens. Even the very phrase ‘jobseeker’s allowance’invented in 1996- is about redefining the unemployed as a “jobseeker” who had no mandatory right to a benefit he or she has earned through making national

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insurance contributions. Instead, the claimant receives a time-limited “allowance,” conditional on actively seeking a job; no entitlement and no insurance, at ￡71.70 a week, one of the least generous in the EU. 但是在奥斯本之国，你的第一反应就是坠入依赖——永远的依赖，如果你能得到的话——它由一个非常乐意放任你弄虚作假的国家所支持。好像这二十年一直严厉的求职和补助金管理系统的改革从未发生过。英国福利的原则不再是如果发生灾难，你能为自己投保失业险和得到无条件赔付。甚至正是“求职者补贴”这个词语，在将失业者重新定义为“求职者”，他人通过缴纳国民保险金可享有补助，而求职者则没有这个基本权利。作为替代，申请者得到的是一周71.70 英镑的限时“补贴”，条件是积极地找工作：没有津贴也没有保险，在欧盟这也是最小气之一了。

Text 2

All around the world, lawyers generate more hostility than the members of any other profession---with the possible exception of journalism. But there are few places where clients have more grounds for complaint than America.

Dur-ing the decade before the economic crisis, spending on legal services in America grew twice as fast as inflation. The best lawyers made skyscrapers-full of money, tempting ever more students to pile into law schools. But most law graduates never get a big-firm job. Many of them instead become the kind of nuisance-lawsuit filer that makes the tort system a costly nightmare. There are many reasons for this. One is the excessive costs of a legal education. There is just one path for a lawyer in most American states: a four-year undergraduate degree at one of 200 law schools authorized by the American Bar Association and an expensive preparation for the bar exam. This leaves today’s average law-school graduate with $100,000 of debt on top of undergraduate debts. Law-school debt means that they have to work fearsomely hard.

Reform-ing the system would help both lawyers and their customers. Sensible ideas have been around for a long time, but the state-level bodies that govern the profession have been too conservative to imple-ment them. One idea is to allow people to study law as an undergraduate degree. Another is to let students sit for the bar after only two years of law school. If the bar exam is truly a stern enough test for a would-be lawy-er, those who can sit it earlier should be allowed to do so. Students who do not need the extra training could cut their debt mountain by a third.

The other reason why costs are so high is the restrictive guild-like ownership structure of the business. Except in the District of Columbia, non-lawyers may not own any share of a law firm. This keeps fees high and innovation slow. There is pressure for change from within the profession, but oppo-nents of change among the regulators insist that keeping outsiders out of a law firm isolates lawyers from the pressure to make money rather than serve clients ethically.

In fact, allowing non-lawyers to own shares in law firms would reduce costs and improve services to customers, by encouraging law firms to use technology and to employ professional managers to focus on improving firms’ efficiency. After all, other countries, such as Australia and Britain, have started liberalizing their legal professions. America should follow. 在全世界，律师比任何其他职业的人都更招憎恨——新闻业可能是个例外。但是没有多少地方能比美国更让客户有更多的理由抱怨。 在经济危机之前的十年间，美国法律服务费用的增长速度是通货膨胀的两倍。最好的律师赚得盆满钵满，吸引着更多的学生争相进入法学院。

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但是大部分法学毕业生从未获得一份大律所的工作。他们中的许多人转而成为那种妨害行为诉讼的提交者，这使得侵权制度成了一场昂贵的噩梦。 这里面有很多原因。其一是法律教育的费用过高。在美国大部分州只有一条成为律师的途径；在某个无关的专业读四年取得本科学位，然后在美国律师协会授权的200 所法学院之一读三年取得法律学位，并为准备律师资格考试花费不菲。这给现在这些普通的法学院毕业生留下在本科债务之外10 万美元的债务。法学院债务意味着他们不得不拼命地努力工作。 改革这一体系会对律师和他们的客户都有所帮助。明智的想法已经存在了好长时间，但是管理该职业的州级机构对实施它们太保守了。一个想法是准许人们读本科学位时学习法律。另外一个是，让学生在法学院只读两年之后就参加律师资格考试。如果这一考试对于一名准律师来说确实是足够严格的测试，那么就应该准许那些有能力提早参加的学生们参加。不需要额外培训的学生就可以削减他们债务大山的三分之一。 费用如此之高的另外一个原因是该行业限制性的同业公会式的所有权结构。除哥伦比亚特区外，非律师人员不得持有律所的任何股份。这使得费用居高不下而创新脚步缓慢。在行业内部存在要求变革的压力，但是监管部门中的反对变革者坚称，将局外人排除在律所之外，可以让律师与赚钱的压力隔离而合乎职业道德标准地为客户服务。 实际上，准许非律师人员参股，通过鼓励律所采用新技术和聘请职业经理人来致力于提高律所效率，可以降低成本并改善对顾客的服务。毕竟，其它国家如澳大利亚和英国都已开始使其法律行业自由化。美国应该效仿。

Text 3

The US$3-million Fundamental physics prize is indeed an interesting experiment, as Alexander Polya-kov said when he accepted this year’s award in March. And it is far from the only one of its type. As a News Feature article in Nature discusses, a string of lucrative awards for researchers have joined the Nobel Prizes in recent years. Many, like the Fundamental Physics Prize, are funded from the telephone-number-sized bank accounts of Internet entrepreneurs. These benefactors have succeeded in their chosen fields, they say, and they want to use their wealth to draw attention to those who have succeeded in science.

What’s not to like? Quite a lot, according to a handful of scientists quoted in the News Feature. You cannot buy class, as the old saying goes, and these upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for those behind them, say scientists. They could distort the achievement-based system of peer-review-led research. They could cement the status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not fund peer-reviewed research. They perpetuate the myth of the lone genius.

The goals of the prize-givers seem as scattered as the criticism. Some want to shock, others to draw people into science, or to better reward those who have made their careers in research. As Nature has pointed out before, there are some legitimate concerns about how science prizes—both new and old—are distributed. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, launched this year, takes an unrepresentative view of what the life sciences include. But the Nobel Foundation’s limit of three recipients per prize, each of whom must still be living, has long been outgrown by the collabora-tive nature of modern research—as will be demonstrated by the inevitable row over who is ignored when it comes to acknowledging the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Nobels were, of course, themselves set up by a very rich individual who had decided what he wanted to do with his own money. Time, rather than intention, has given them legitimacy.

As much as some scientists may complain about the new awards, two things seem clear. First,

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