1998年考研翻譯題及參考答案

Part IV English-Chinese Translation

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (15 points)

They were, by far, the largest and most distant objects that scientists had ever detected: a strip of enormous cosmic clouds some 15 billion light-years from earth. 31) But even more important, it was the farthest that scientists had been able to look into the past, for what they were seeing were the patterns and structures that existed 15 billion years ago. That was just about the moment that the universe was born. What the researchers found was at once both amazing and expected: the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite -- Cobe -- had discovered landmark evidence that the universe did in fact begin with the primeval explosion that has become known as the Big Bang (the theory that the universe originated in an explosion from a single mass of energy).

32) The existence of the giant clouds was virtually required for the Big Bang, first put forward in the 1920s, to maintain its reign as the dominant explanation of the cosmos. According to the theory, the universe burst into being as a submicroscopic, unimaginably dense knot of pure energy that flew outward in all directions, emitting radiation as it went, condensing into particles and then into atoms of gas. Over billions of years, the gas was compressed by gravity into galaxies, stars, plants and eventually, even humans.

Cobe is designed to see just the biggest structures, but astronomers would like to see much smaller hot spots as well, the seeds of local objects like clusters and superclusters of galaxies. They shouldn’t have long to wait. 33) Astrophysicists working with ground-based detectors at the South Pole and balloon-borne instruments are closing in on such structures, and may report their findings soon.

34) If the small hot spots look as expected, that will be a triumph for yet another scientific idea, a refinement of the Big Bang called the inflationary universe theory. Inflation says that very early on, the universe expanded in size by more than a trillion fold in much less than a second, propelled by a sort of antigravity. 35) Odd though it sounds, cosmic inflation is a scientifically plausible consequence of some respected ideas in elementary particle physics, and many astrophysicists have been convinced for the better part of a decade that it is true.

31. 更為重要的是，這是科學家們能夠觀測到的最遙遠的過去的景象，因為他們看到的是150億年前宇宙云的形狀和結構。

32. 巨大的宇宙云的存在，實際上是20年代首創的大爆炸論得以保持其宇宙起源論的主導地位不可缺少的。

33. 天體物理學家使用南極陸基探測器和球載儀器，正在越來越近地觀測這些云系，也許不久會報告他們的觀測結果。

34. 假如這些小熱點看上去同預計的一致，那就意味著又一種科學論說的勝利，這種論說即更完美的大爆炸論，亦稱宇宙膨脹說。

35. 宇宙膨脹說雖然聽似奇特，但是它是基本粒子物理學中一些公認的理論產生的在科學上看來似乎可信的結論。許多天體物理學家近十年來一直確信這一論說是正確的。