2004年9月上海市高级口译笔试真题
The Art Loss Register has compiled a list of the artists whose works are most frequently stolen worldwide. Ms Smith said the most commonly stolen works were by artists that criminals could easily identify as famous and therefore valuable, and those produced by the most prolific artists.
1. What are "get out of jail free cards"? What is the use of such cards?
2. Introduce briefly the illicit trade in art in the UK and the countermeasures of the Metropolitan Police to crack down such criminal acts.
3. Det Sgt Rapely said "I tatally disagree with the Hollywood image of upper-class thieves who steal for some Mr. Big." (para.6) Give your interpretation of this statement.
Questions 4-6
A hundred years after the Wright brothers' triumph at Kitty Hawk, the European consortium Airbus announced a millstone of its own-surpassing the American aviation giant Boeing in the number of airliners delivered in 2003. Airbus, based in Toulouse, France, in now beating its U.S. rival at its own game of size and distance: The 555-passenger, long-range A380, bigger than any Boeing, is already in production.
Airbus's success should be no surprise. American and France may be sparring diplomatically, but technologically the two nations have had a long love affair. Each has developed outstanding innovations, and each has assiduously exploited the other's ideas.
Even the current U.S. military-industrial hegemony has some decidedly French roots. Sylvanus Thayer graduated from West Point in 1808, spent two years in Europe, and was utterly taken with French military thought and training. When he became superintendent in 1817, Thayer modeled the academy's demanding technical curriculum and ethic of honor and service after France's Ecole Polytechnique. Classics on sieges and fortifications by Louis XIV's engineering genius, Marshal Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, were standard texts; studying French was de rigueur.
The French connection persisted into the Civil War. The Minie bullet that made that conflict's rifle-muskets three times as deadly as earlier weapons was originally developed by French officers. In 1885, the French ordnance engineer Paul Vielle introduced smokeless powder. French artillerymen invented the revolutionary hydropneumatic recoil that allows cannons to remain murderously locked on target for shot after shot. And where would the Navy SEALs be without scuba gear, developed in 1943 on the French Riviera by Emile Gagnan and a soon-to-be famous French officer, Jacques Cousteau?
Even interchangeable parts, the foundation of America's mass production, have French roots. The historian of science Ken Alder has shown that a French gunsmith was using such a system as early as the 1720s. By the 1780s, French military officials were introducing uniform jigs and fixtures at arms factories to enforce strict tolerances and ensure deadlier firearms and ordnance. Thomas Jefferson praised the system, and while it fell into disuse in France in the 19th century, U.S. armories embraced it. Related methods became known in Europe as the American System and, later, as Fordism.
Speaking of Ford, what could be more American than the automobile? Yet a Frenchman built the first self-propelled vehicle, powered by steam, more than 200 years ago. A hundred years later the French company Panhard introduced the basic a
