翻译考试历年中级口译真题(1)_第5页

Questions 6—10

So you’ve got an invention—you and around 39,000 others each year, according to 2002 statistics!
The 64,000-dollar question, if you have come up with a device which you believe to be the answer to the energy crisis or you’ve invented a lawnmower which cuts grass with a jet of water (not so daft, someone has invented one), is how to ensure you’re the one to reap the rewards of your ingenuity. How will all you garden shed boffins out there keep others from capitalizing on your ideas and lining their pockets at your expense?
One of the first steps to protect your interest is to patent your invention. That can keep it out of the grasp of the pirates for at least the next 20 years. And for this reason inventors in their droves beat a constant trail from all over the country to the doors of an anonymous grey-fronted building just behind London’s Holborn to try and patent their devices.
The building houses the Patent Office. It’s an ant heap of corridors, offices and filing rooms—a sorting house and storage depot for one of the world’s biggest and most varied collections of technical data. Some ten million patents—English and foreign—are listed there.
File after file, catalogue after catalogue detail the brain-children of inventors down the centuries, from a 1600’s machine gun designed to fire square bullets at infidels and round ones at Christians, to present-day laser, nuclear and computer technology.
The first ‘letters patent’ were granted as long ago as 1449 to a Flemish craftsman by the name of John Utynam. The letters, written in Latin, are still on file at the office. They were granted by King Henry VI and entitled Utynam to ‘import into this country’ his knowledge of making stained glass windows in order to install such windows at Eton College.
Present-day patents procedure is a more sophisticated affair than getting a go-ahead note from the monarch. These days the strict procedures governing whether you get a patent for your revolutionary mouse-trap or solar-powered back-scratcher have been reduced to a pretty exact science.
From start to finish it will take around two and a half years and cost £165 for the inventor to gain patent protection for his brainchild. That’s if he’s lucky. By no means all who apply to the Patent Office, which is a branch of the Department of Trade, get a patent.
A key man at the Patent Office is Bernard Partridge, Principal Examiner (Administration), who boils down to one word the vital ingredient any inventor needs before he can hope to overcome the many hurdles in the complex procedure of obtaining a patent—‘ingenuity’.

6. People take out a patent because they want to __________.
 (A) keep their ideas from being stolen
 (B) reap the rewards of somebody else’s ingenuity
 (C) visit the patent office building
 (D) come up with more new devices
7. The phrase ‘the brain-children of inventors’ (para.5) means _________.
 (A) the children with high intelligence
 (B) the inventions that people come up with
 (C) a device that a child believes to be the answer to the energy crisis
 (D) a lawnmower that an individual has invented to cut grass
8. What have the 1600’s machine gun and the present-day laser in common?
 (A) Both were approved by the monarch.
 (B) Both were granted by King Henry VI.
 (C) Both were rejected by the Department of Trade.
 (D) Both were patented.
9. Why is John Utynam still remembered?
 (A) He is the first person to get a patent for his revolutionary mouse-trap.
 (B) He is the first person to be granted an official patent.
 (C) He is the first person to be an officer in the Patent Office.
 (D) He is the first person to have invented a lawnmower.
10. According to the passage, how would you describe the complex procedure of obtaining a patent for an invention?
 (A) It is rather expensive.
 (B) It is an impossible task.
 (C) It is extremely difficult.
 (D) It is very tricky.

Questions 11—15

All living cells on earth require moisture for their metabolism. Cereal grains when brought in from the field, although they may appear to be dry, may contain 20 per cent of moisture or more. If they are stored in a bin thus, there is sufficient moisture in them to support several varieties of insects. These insects will, therefore, live and breed and, as they grow and eat the grain, it provides them with biological energy for their life processes. This energy will, just as in man, become manifest as heat. Since the bulk of the grain acts as an insulator, the temperature surrounding the colony of insects will rise so that, not only is part of the grain spoiled by the direct attack of the insects but more may be damaged by the heat. Sometimes, the temperature may even rise to the point where the stored grain catches fire. For safe storage, grain must be dried until its moisture content is 13 per cent or less.
Traditional arts of food preservation took advantage of this principle in a number of ways. The plant seeds, wheat, rye, rice, barley millet, maize, are themselves structures evolved by nature to provide stored food. The starch of their endosperm is used for the nourishment of the embryo during the time it over-winters (if it is a plant of the Temperate Zone) and until its new leaves have grown and their chlorophyll can trap energy from the sunlight to nourish the new-grown plant. The separation by threshing and winnowing is, therefore, to some degree part of a technique of food preservation.
The direct drying of other foods has also been used. Fish has been dried in many parts of the world besides Africa. Slices of dried meat are prepared by numerous races. Biltong, a form of dried meat, was a customary food for travelers. The drying of meat or fish, either in the sun or over a fire, quite apart from the degree to which it exposes the food to infection by bacteria and infestation by insects, tends also to harm its quality. Proteins are complex molecular structures which are readily disrupted. This is the reason why dried meat becomes tough and can, with some scientific justification, by likened to leather.
The technical process of drying foods indirectly by pickling them in the strong salt solutions commonly called ‘brine’ does less harm to the protein than straightforward drying, particularly if this is carried out at high temperatures. It is for this reason that many of the typical drying processes are not taken to completion. That is to say, the outer parts may be dried leaving a moist inner section. Under these circumstances, preservation is only partial. The dried food keeps longer than it would have undried but it cannot be kept indefinitely. For this reason, traditional processes are to be found in many parts of the world in which a combination of partial drying and pickling in brine is used. Quite often the drying involves exposure to smoke. Foods treated in this way are, besides fish of various sorts, bacon, hams and numerous types of sausages.