笔译二级实务（综合）模拟试卷78
必做题
1. Record-breaking temperatures are occurring with alarming frequency in the United States, but Americans are reacting with a collective shrug. In a poll taken in January, after the country’s warmest December on record, the Pew Research Center found that climate change ranked close to last on a list of the public’s policy priorities.
People’s preferences about weather vary widely. Some want a snowfall every winter, while others would rather wear sandals year-round. So we sought to develop a measure of the average American’s weather preferences. To do this, we made use of research by economists who study local population growth in the United States. They have found that Americans have been moving to places with warm winters and cool, less humid summers. We made the inference (not true in every case, but reasonable to assume in general) that Americans prefer such conditions.
Then we evaluated the changes in weather conditions that Americans have experienced over the past four decades (i.e., roughly since climate change emerged as an issue in the public sphere). Climatologists customarily report weather changes averaged over the land surface—an approach that counts changes in sparse Montana just as heavily as shifts in populous California. But because we were interested in the typical American’s exposure to weather, we took a different tack, calculating changes over time on a county-by-county basis, weighted by population.
Our findings are striking: 80 percent of Americans now find themselves living in counties where the weather is more pleasant than it was four decades ago. Although warming during this period has been considerable, it has not been evenly distributed across seasons. Virtually all Americans have experienced a rise in January maximum daily temperatures—an increase of 1.04 degrees Fahrenheit per decade on average—while changes in daily maximum temperatures in July have been much more variable across counties, rising by an average of just 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over all. Moreover, summer humidity has declined during this period.
As a result, most people’s experiences with daily weather since the time that they first heard about climate change have generally been positive. By our calculations, the mild winters now regularly experienced in New York City make its weather nearly as pleasant as that of Virginia Beach back in the 1970s.
To those of us who believe climate change is the most profound challenge of our age, our discovery is both illuminating and disheartening. In previous work, we’ve shown that Americans make sense of climate change in part through their personal experience of the weather. Our new findings suggest that the weather changes caused by global warming cannot be relied on to spur the public to demand policies that address the problem. By the time the weather changes for the worse later in this century, it may be too late.
尽管美国气温屡创新高，但美国人对此却不以为然。在经历了有记录以来最温暖的12月份之后，皮尤研究中心(Pew Research Center)在今年一月份开展了一项民意调查，发现气候变化问题在公共政策优先事项清单中的排名靠后。
人们对天气的喜好截然不同。有些人希望每个冬天都下雪，而另外一些人宁可一年到头都穿凉鞋。因此，我们试图制定一项标准，了解普通美国人的天气偏好。为此，我们采用了研究美国当地人口增长情况的经济学家的调研结果，发现美国人一直在向冬季温暖、夏季凉爽和不太潮湿的地方搬迁。我们推测美国人喜欢这种天气(并非每种情况下都适用，但总体上可以合理地这样假设)。
接着，我们对过去四十年间(大约从气候变化作为公共领域的一个问题出现以来)美国的天气变化情况进行了评估。气候学家们习惯于报告地表上天气变化情况的平均值——这种方式将地广人稀的蒙大拿和人口稠密的加利福尼亚的变化同样对待。然而由于我们感兴趣的
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