华慧考博英语翻译历年英译汉翻译真题练习第十六篇

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2018年已经正式到来。全国各大院校博士研究生招生已经陆续正式展开。对于2018年准备考博的考生来说，眼下除了确认好自己所心仪的院校之外，复习好考博英语也是重中之重。

根据全国各大院校历年考博英语真题显示，基本上大部分院校自主命题试卷的题型之中都出现了考博英语翻译测试，且不是简单的单个词句翻译而是整个段落的翻译。

段落翻译一般以英译汉的题型进行测试，大部的考试段落英语都选自一些优秀的小说、散文或者新闻事件。

为了让广大华慧考博学员可以更好地进行英语复习，华慧考博汇总了历年各大院校考博英语、考研英语及专业英语考试之中的英译汉真题，以便考生们进行复习。以下是第十六篇英译汉复习题：

原文：

Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau's idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening one's perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.

Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime depends on how high we choose our difficulties. Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of “The pleasure of taking pains”. The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to be effortless.

We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of difficulty. When someone ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun.