Part B
Directions:
The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G to fill in each numbered box. The first and the last paragraphs have been placed for you in Boxes. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)
[A] The rise of English as the EU’s dominant working language was given a decisive push by the Union’s last expansion, in 1995, when Austria, Finland and Sweden joined the club. Officials from all three countries, especially the two Nordic ones, are much more likely to be fluent in English than French. The Union’s public voice is increasingly anglophone. For a brief period earlier this year the spokesmen for all three major institutions in Brussels — the commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers — were British. Jonathan Faull, the commission’s chief spokesman, will be replaced this month by Reijo Kemppinen, a Finn. But for French-speakers the change is a double-edged sword. The good news for them is that this high-profile job will no longer be held by a Briton; the bad news is that Mr. Faull’s French is rather better than MR. Kemppinen’s.
[B] Some French officials argue that there are wider intellectual implications that threaten the whole European enterprise. In a speech at a conference in Brussels on the French language and EU enlargement, Pierre Defraigne, a senior official at the commission, argued that “it’s not so much a single language that I fear but the singled way of thinking that it brings with it.” When French was Europe’s dominant language in the 18th century, French ideas were the intellectual currency of Europe.
[C] In Brussels Mr. Dethomas was chief spokesman for Jacques Delors, the powerful and charismatic French head of the European Commission who stepped down in 1995. Until that year the sole working language in the commission’s press room was French, but it was already clear which way the wind was blowing. “Quite often”, say Mr. Dethomas, “I would give the official briefing in French, and then I would have to give a second briefing in my office in English.”
[D] These days, however, ambitious young Europeans need to perfect their English and so tend to polish off their education in Britain or the United States, where they are exposed to Anglo-Saxon ideas. For a country like France, with its own distinct intellectual traditions in economics, philosophy and law, such a trend is understandably galling. The commission’s Mr. Defraigne worries aloud whether “it is possible to speak English without thinking American.”
[E] But the rise of English within EU institutions particularly alarms the French elite because for many years the Brussels bureaucracy has been a home-from-home, designed along French administrative lines, often dominated by high-powered French officials working in French. Moreover, the emergence of English as the EU’s main language gives an advantage to native English-speaking Eurocrats. As Dethomas notes: “It’s just much easier to excel in your own language”.
[F] The fact that the key EU institutions have bases in francophone cities — Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg — means that lots of French will continue to be spoken in the EU’s corridors and meeting rooms. But the grip of English will tighten still more next year, when the Union will take in ten more countries, mainly from central Europe. The commission is planning to recruit over 3,000 Eurocrats from the former communist block. The best guess is that some 60% of them will speak English as their second language; for only 20% or so will it be French.
[G] From his desk at the European Commission’s office in Warsaw, Bruno Dethomas has been gloomily monitoring the decline of his native French within the European Union. “When I left Brussels in 1995,” he remarks (in perfect English), “70% of the documents crossing my desk were written in French. Nowadays 70% are in English.”
Order:
G → 41. → 42. → F → 43. → 44. →45.
Part C
Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (10 points)
The really critical implication of the discovery still lies with the door that geneticists have opened on the environmental influences of our behaviour, our personalities and our health, and for the critical blow it strikes the idea of biological determinism.
(46) For the past decade, the public has witnessed a rising epidemic of tales of discoveries of genes that dispose humanity to homosexuality, to alcoholism, to political persuasion, to running ability, and to artistic taste.
But even before yesterday’s revelations by Venter, scientists had stopped believing in the gay gene. Yet belief in its existence still persists among the public. (47) The assault on biological determinism that geneticists have now triggered will be timely, and human nature is a lot more complex and intriguing than determinists have given it credit for.
It has become increasingly fashionable for individuals particularly in the United States to blame actions and crimes on the influence of their genes. Several US defendants accused of violent crimes have argued that they were innocent victims of their genes. (48) In other words, genetic predestination could soon have been used to excuse murder or robbery — if it had not been for this discovery that we lack the genes to thus dispose us!
Kevin Davies is the author of “The Sequence”, a story of the human genome race. He said, (49) “There has been a recent study on perfect pitch, the ability to know the absolute pitch of a musical note, that strongly suggests that is acquired through the inheritance of a single gene”.
“That may sound like a clear-cut piece of biological determinism. However, there is a crucial corollary you have to be exposed to early musical training for the ability to materialise. In other words, even in seemingly simple inherited abilities, nurture has a role to play.”
And then there is the case quoted by Venter. “Take the example of colon (結(jié)腸) cancer. People say there is a gene that predisposes us to the disease. And certainly it runs in families. (50) However, it is only the colon where we find all sorts of toxins and bacteria that provides the harsh circumstances that final causes that gene to finally break down and for cancer to spread.”
In short, it is not a colon cancer gene but a gene that affects our ability to respond to the environment. And that, is what human nature is all about.
