2. 职称英语
  3. Jane Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realized tha

Jane Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realized tha

游客2025-01-24  22
问题    Jane Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realized that her passport was missing. In just a few hours, she was due to depart on her first trip to Africa. A school friend had moved to a farm outside Nairobi and, knowing Goodall’s childhood dream was to live among the African wildlife, invited her to stay with the family for a while. Goodall, then 22, saved for two years to pay for her passage to Kenya: waitressing, doing secretarial work, temping at the post office in her hometown, Bournemouth, on England’s southern coast. Now all this was for naught, it seemed.
   It’s hard not to wonder how subsequent events in her life — rather consequential as they have turned out to be to conservation, to science, to our sense of ourselves as a species — might have unfolded differently had someone not found her passport, along with an itinerary from Cook’s, the travel agency, folded inside, and delivered it to the Cook’s office. An agency representative, documents in hand, found her on the dock. "Incredible," Goodall told me last month, recalling that day. "Amazing."
   Within two months of her arrival in Kenya, Goodall met the paleontologist Louis Leakey — Nairobi was a small town for its white population in those days — and he immediately offered her a job at the natural history museum where he was curator. He spent much of the next three years testing her capacity for repetitive work.
   Louis Leakey believed in a hypothesis first put forth by Charles Darwin that humans and chimpanzees share an evolutionary ancestor. Close study of chimpanzees in the wild, he thought, might tell us something about that common progenitor. He was, in other words, looking for someone to live among Africa’s wild animals. One night, he told Goodall that he knew just the place where she could do it: Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, in the British colony of Tanganyika (now Tanzania).
   In July 1960, Goodall boarded a boat and after a few hours motoring over the warm waters of Lake Tanganyika, she stepped onto the pebbly beach at Gombe.
   Her finding, published in Nature in 1964, that chimpanzees use tools — extracting insects from a termite mound with leaves of grass — drastically altered humanity’s understanding of itself; man was no longer the natural world’s only user of tools.
   After two and a half decades of living out her childhood dream, Goodall made an abrupt career shift, from scientist to conservationist.
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答案    1957年3月，简-古道尔(Jane Goodall)已站在伦敦的一个码头上，突然发现护照不见踪影了。再过几个小时，她就要出发，踏上自己的第一次非洲之旅。她的一位校友此前移居东非内罗毕郊外的一座农场，因为知道古道尔自幼梦想与非洲的野生动物为伴，所以邀请她前往家中小住。时年22岁的古道尔，为了肯尼亚之行，花了两年时间打工存钱。她做过服务员，当过秘书，还在家乡(英格兰南部沿海城市伯恩茅斯)的邮局干过临时工。现在看起来，似乎这一切都要白费了。
   古道尔后来的活动在自然环境保护、科学研究以及人类对自身的认知方面有着重要作用。但是当天，要不是有人找到了她的护照，难以想象，古道尔接下来的人生轨迹将会如何。捡到的护照里夹着库克旅行社的日程安排，因此被送到了库克旅行社的办公室。旅行社一位工作人员拿着护照在码头上找到了古道尔。上个月，古道尔回想起那天发生的事情，对我说：  “难以置信，太神奇了”。
   古道尔到达肯尼亚后不到两个月就遇见了古生物学家路易斯-李基(Louis Leakey)。对当地的白人来说，当时的内罗毕也就是个小镇。李基在自然史博物馆当馆长，马上就在博物馆给她安排了一个工作。接下来的三年中，他花了大量时间考查她有没有从事重复性工作的能力。
   路易斯-李基相信由达尔文首先提出的一项假设：人类和黑猩猩是由共同祖先进化而来的。他认为，如果仔细研究野外黑猩猩，关于这一共同祖先，我们或许可以知晓得更多。换言之，他在物色一个人，能和非洲的野生动物一起生活。一天晚上，他告诉古道尔，他知道有个地方或许能让她完成这项工作：贡贝河黑猩猩保护区，地点在英国殖民地坦噶尼喀(今坦桑尼亚)。
   1960年7月，古道尔登上一艘小船，在坦噶尼喀湖温暖水域航行数小时后，抵达贡贝，在布满鹅卵石的沙滩上岸。
   1964年，她的研究成果在《自然》杂志上发表，该成果证明黑猩猩会使用工具，能够用草叶把白蚁堆里的白蚁掏出来。这彻底改变了人类对自身的认识，人类不再是大自然中唯一会使用工具的物种。
   古道尔用25年时间实现了自己儿时梦想，之后突然改变了职业方向，由科学家成为一名环保工作者。
解析    本文是叙述性文章，采取倒叙手法。开篇就把镜头对准1957年的一个戏剧性的场景：古道尔丢失了前往非洲的护照，几乎前功尽弃。然后时间继续后退，讲述古道尔为实现去非洲的梦想如何努力打工挣钱。
   第二段时间反复穿梭。先是回到现代，评价古道尔此行对后世的贡献。然后再回到1957年，讲述护照事件戏剧性的转机。接着回到现代，添加了古道尔本人回忆起这件事后做出的评价。
   第三段到结尾按照时间顺序概括性地讲述了古道尔到达非洲后的经历、后来取得的学术成就以及人生轨迹。文章的前两段时间往返穿梭，给翻译造成一定困难，需要特别注意。
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