Death is inevitable, but not disease. Bacteria and viruses are no mean adversaries, nor are they easily defeated. (46)If we fail

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问题     Death is inevitable, but not disease. Bacteria and viruses are no mean adversaries, nor are they easily defeated. (46)If we fail to be watchful or to protect those most at risk, a public-health catastrophe is inevitable, and yet somewhere within the span of the last thirty years the idea of the common good has disappeared from our national consciousness, giving way to the misconception that we no longer need concern ourselves with the welfare of our fellow citizens. It is a dangerous conceit, and it leads us toward a future infected with unprecedented and unnecessary disease.
    A public-health system is only as strong as its weakest link; an epidemic enforces, in the most rigorous fashion, the American credo that all men are created equal. (47)If we allow one segment of our society to suffer and perish from preventable diseases, little stands in the way of collective doom. Yet today, 44 million people in the United States are without health insurance; those who can afford to pay for it generally receive inferior treatment, despite the fact that Americans spend $1.4 trillion annually for their health care. Prevention becomes secondary to simply keeping people alive. (48)We must not simply concern ourselves with the state of American public health; as distances collapse and human populations grow ever more mobile, so also new and deadly diseases find their way across deserts and oceans.
    Ironically, the medical revolutions of the twentieth century have contributed to our over-confident neglect of the public-health infrastructure. (49)We spend vast sums to lengthen the lives of terminally ill patients by a few days and refuse to make modest investments that would prevent millions of needless illnesses and death.
    The Americans we know pay too much for their health care, and compared with other countries we receive a very poor return on our investment. The reason are many, but they are not hard to understand: in essence, we have tended historically to view health care as a commodity like any other. But health is not a product; it is a public good. The evidence is clear even when viewed through the reductive lens of purely economic self-interest, market-based medicine is a failure. Healing people after they fall ill is vastly more expensive than preventing the illness in the first place. (50)Yet policymakers have consistently preferred the most expensive and least efficient models of health care, proving once again that the supporters of privatization are motivated not by practical economics but by an ideology that is little more than a mask concealing the most irrational self-interest.


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答案我们投入大量的经费以让那些身患绝症者的生命能够拖延一两天,而不愿意投入适量的经费来预防上百万的病症和死亡。

解析 此题目的难点在定语从句的翻译。从句法上分析,定语从句that would prevent millions of need- less illnesses and death是修饰其先行词modest investments。如果将该部分翻译成前置定语"而不愿意投入可以预防上百万的病症和死亡的适量的经费",明显,定语太长,不通顺。从整个句子语义分析,这句定语从句也可以表示为投入经费的目的,因此,可以泽为"…来预防…"。另外,动词lengthen一词译为"拖延"比直译为"延长"能突显出原文作者对只注重治疗而不注重预防的政策的强烈反对,更符合文章整体意思。考查点:定语从句的翻译。
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