2014考研英语复习：模拟试题之翻译专项练习(三十三)
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)
So precious to us is "home" that, like other precious things, the word is constantly subject to the corruption of commercial misuse. One does well to fear a restaurant that boasts of "home cooking", and if ever there was a home that one felt reluctant to enter because it was so utterly unhomelike it is a funeral home. 46) Nevertheless, we have to guard against our own suggestibility: making "home" stand for so much that is good in life turns it into a goal that thousands of manufacturers of domestic appliances are eager to exploit. In advertising terms, "home" equals "buy". If we Americans are tireless self-improvers, we are also tireless consumers, readily tempted to suppose that if only we buy the right garden hose, the right vacuum cleaner, the right automatic overhead garage-door opener we will surely have created home, sweet home. 47) The so-called shelter magazines woo us with the idea of shelter not so much for ourselves as for the possessions that we are encouraged to share habitable space with. 48) Nowadays, architects provide in their plans for new houses what they call a "family room", but the family itself is often hard-pressed to defend its territorial rights against the intrusion of objects that it has found itself unable to resist. The willingness to become a couch potato may deepen upon finding an area big enough to contain a couch, especially as TV sets approach the size of Steinways and even the once modestly scaled telephone is replaced by a combined telephone, message keeper, intercom, computer printer, and fax machine. A typical ad will show a family in the family room winsomely going over some new toy that the advertiser claims is indispensable to bliss. 49) But the toy might be a chemical spray that will remove wine stains from carpets at a single swipe, or a burglar-alarm system whose sensors can detect the motions of a mouse in labor.
But wait. Acquiring so many visible symbols of domestic contentment can be hazardous. To our dismay, we soon discover how close a house we own can come to owning us. Emerson said, "Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind," and in roughly the same fashion the things that fill a house from cellar to attic can tyrannize its occupants. 50) We are enslaved not only in respect to mortgages, property taxes, and utility charges but also in respect to the innumerable tyrant things that have it in them to break, or break down, or get lost, or lose their lustre, or grow too greatly cherished.
