1、CATTI二级笔译实务最全2003年12月英语二级笔译实务试题Section 1: English Chinese Translation (英译汉)Part A Nowhere to Go For the latest on the pursuit of the American Dream in Silicon Valley, all you have to do is to talk to someone like “Nagaraj” (who didnt want to reveal his real name). Hes an Indian immigrant who, like m
2、any other Indian engineers, came to America recently on an H-1B visa, which allows skilled workers to be employed by one company for as many as six years. But one morning last month, Nagaraj and a half dozen other Indian workers with H-1Bs were called into a conference room in their San Francisco te
3、chnology-consulting firm and told they were being laid off. The reason: weakening economic conditions in Silicon Valley, “It was the shock of my lifetime,” says Nagaraj.This is not a normal bear-market sob story. According to federal regulation, Nagaraj and his colleagues have two choices. They must
4、 either return to India, or find another job in a tight labor market and hope that the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) allow them to transfer their visa to the new company. And the law doesnt allow them to earn a pay-check until all the paperwork winds its way through the INS bureaucra
5、cy. “How am I going to survive without any job and without any income?” Nagaraj wonders.Until recently, H-1B visas were championed by Silicon Valley companies as the solution to the regions shortage of programmers and engineers. First issued by the INS in 1992, they attract skilled workers from othe
6、r countries, many of whom bring families with them, lay down roots and apply for the more permanent green cards. Through February 2000, more than 81,000 worker held such visas but with the dot-com crash, many have been getting laid off. Thats causing mass consternation in U.S. immigrant communities.
7、 The INS considers a worker “out of status” when he loses a job, which technically means that he must pack up and go home. But because of the scope of this years layoffs, the U.S. government has recently backpedaled, issuing a confusing series of statements that suggest workers might be able to stay
8、 if they qualify for some exceptions and can find a new company to sponsor their visa. But even those loopholes remain nebulous. The result is thousands of immigrants now face dimming career prospects in America, and the possibilities that they will be sent home. “They are in limbo. It is the greate
9、st form of torture,” says Amar Veda of the Silicon Valley-based Immigrants Support Network.The crisis looks especially bad in light of all the heated visa rhetoric by Silicon Valley companies in the past few years. Last fall the industry won a big victory by getting Congress to approve an increase i
10、n the annual number of H-1B visas. Now, with technology firms retrenching, demand for such workers is slowing. Valley heavyweights like Intel, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard have all announced thousands of layoffs this year, which include many H-1B workers. The INS reported last month that only 16,000 ne
11、w H-1B workers came to the United States in February down from 32,000 in February of last year.Last month, acknowledging the scope of the problem, the INS told H-1B holders “not to panic,” and that there would be a grace period for laid-off workers before they had to leave the United States. INS spo
12、keswomen Eyleen Schmidt promises that more specific guidance will come this month. “We are aware of the cutbacks,” she says. “Were trying to be as generous as we can be within the confines of the existing law.”Part B Topic 1 (选题一)What Is the Force of Gravity?If you throw a ball up, it will come down
13、 again. What makes it come down? The ball comes down because it is pulled or attracted towards the Earth. The Earth exerts a force of attraction on all objects. Objects that are nearer to the Earth are attracted to it with a greater force than those that are further away. This force of attraction is
14、 known as the force of gravity. The gravitational force acting on an object at the Earths surface is called the weight of the object.All the heavenly bodies in space like the moon, the planets and the stars also exert an attractive force on objects. The bigger and heavier a body is, the greater is i
15、ts force of gravity. Thus, since the moon is a smaller body than Earth, the force it exerts on an object at its surface is less than that exerted by the Earth on the same object on the Earths surface. In fact, the moons gravitational force is only one-sixth that of the Earth. This means that an obje
16、ct weighing 120 kilograms on Earth will only weigh 20 kilograms on the moon. Therefore on the moon you could lift weights which are six times heavier than the heaviest weight that you can lift on Earth.The Earths gravitational force or pull keeps us and everything else on Earth from floating away to space. To get out into space and travel to the moon or other planets we have to overcome the Earths gravitational pull.Entry into SpaceHow can we o
