英语四级之大学英语四级翻译练习（八）

　练习八
　　Directions: Read the underlined sentences carefully, and then translate them into Chinese. You may check your answers after you finish them.
　　Passage One
　　As is known to all, the organization and management of wages and salaries are very complex. Generally speaking, the Account Department is responsible for calculations of pay, while the Personnel Department is interested in discussions with the employees about pay.
　　If a firm wants to adopt a new wage and salary structure, it is essential that the firm should decide on a method of job evaluation and ways of measuring the performance of its employees. In order to be successful, that new pay structure will need agreement between Trade Unions and employers.
　　In job evaluation, all of the requirements of each job are defined in a detailed job description. Each of those requirements is given a value, usually in “points”, which are added together to give a total value for the job. For middle and higher management, a special method is used to evaluate managers on their knowledge of the job, their responsibility, and their ability to solve problems. Because of the difficulty in measuring management work, however, job grades for managers are often decided without reference to an evaluation system based on points.
　　In attempting to design a pay system, the Personnel Department should compare the value of each job with those in the job market. It should also consider economic factors such as the cost of living and the labour supply.
　　It is necessary that payment for a job should vary with any differences in the way that job is performed. Where it is simple to measure the work done, as in the work done with the hands, monetary（金钱的）encouragement schemes are often chosen, for indirect workers, where measurement is difficult, methods of additional payments are employed.
　　Passage Two
　　I came across an old country guide the other day. It listed all the tradesmen in each village in my part of the country, and it was impressive to see the great variety of services which were available on one’s own doorstep in the late Victorian countryside.
　　Nowadays a superficial traveller in rural England might conclude that the only village tradesmen still flourishing were either selling frozen food to the inhabitants or selling antiques to visitors. Nevertheless, this would really be a false impression. Admittedly there has been a contraction of village commerce, but its vigor is still remarkable.
　　Our local grocer’s shop, for example, is actually expanding in spite of the competition from supermarkets in the nearest town. Women sensibly prefer to go there and exchange the local news while doing their shopping, instead of queuing up at a supermarket. And the shopkeeper knows well that personal service has a substantial cash value.
　　His prices may be a bit higher than those in the town, but he will deliver anything at any time. His assistants think nothing of bicycling down the village street in their lunch hour to take a piece of cheese to an old age pensioner（领养老金者）who sent her order by word of mouth with a friend who happened to be passing. The more wealthy customers telephone their shopping lists and the goods are on their doorsteps within an hour. They have only to hint at a fancy for some commodity（商品）outside the usual stock and the grocer, a red-faced figure, instantly obtains it for them.
　　The village gains from this sort of enterprise, of course. But I also find it satisfactory because a village shop offers one of the few ways in which a modest individual can still get along in the world without attaching himself to the big battalions（大批，许多）of industry or commerce.
　　Passage Three
　　Ernest Hemingway was born in a prosperous Chicago suburb, Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a highly-respected physician, and unusually keen amateur naturalist devoted to hunting and fishing. He actually taught his precocious (早熟的) son Ernest to handle a fishing line at three and a half and a gun not long thereafter. From the time the boy was six he proudly accompanied his father on vacations in the North Michigan woods, leaving an older sister, three younger ones and a baby brother at home with mother. Grace Hall Hemingway was, like her husband, a Christian, but they had few other tastes in common. She was determined that her oldest son, who had perfect pitch ----both his hearing and sense of smell were extraordinary sharp all his life although his eyesight was poor----should become a musician. Much of the lifelong opposition he felt toward his mother expressed itself in anger at her having kept him out of school a whole year in an unsuccessful attempt to force concentrated study of the cello (大提琴).
　　Ernest shared his father's love of the outdoors, greatly admired his skills and enjoyed his company, but was unhappily conscious that Dr. Hemingway was never really dared oppose his wife. A bitter short story, "The Doctor and His Wife", gives a picture of their relationship and their son's reaction to it at an early age. In his late novel the hero, Robert Jordan, thinks sadly that his father was really a coward who finally proved his cowardice（怯懦）by committing suicide. (Dr.Hemingway, ill and aging, had shot himself some twelve years before the novel was written.)
　　Passage Four
　　When Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, the North American continent was an area of astonishing ethnic（种族的）and cultural diversity（差异）. North of the Rio Grande, which now marks the border between the United States and Mexico, was a population of over 12 million people representing approximately 400 distinct cultures, 500 languages and a remarkable variety of political and religious institutions and physical and ethnic types. Compared to the Europeans, the Indian peoples were extraordinarily heterogeneous (异族的), and they often viewed the Europeans as just another tribe.
　　These varied tribal cultures were as diversified as the land the Indians inhabited. In the high plains of the Dakotas, the Mandan developed a peaceful society centered around agriculture. Only a few hundred miles away, however, in northwestern Montana, the Blackfeet turned from agriculture and began to use horses, which had been introduced by the Spaniards. As skilled riders, they became hunters and fighters and developed a fierce and aggressive culture centered around the buffalo. In the eastern woodlands surrounding the Great Lakes, the Potawatomis were expert fishermen, canoe builders, and hunters which included the Senecas and the Mohawks. In the Northeast the six Iroquois nations were among the most politically sophisticated people in the world, forming the famous Iroquois confederation. This confederation, with its system of checks and balances, provided a model for the United States Constitutions.