剑桥雅思15Test2阅读Passage1原文及翻译

每年年中左右，国内“雅思图”都要翘首期盼一件重要大事的来临:雅思真题的发布。无论是备考初期、后期,甚至已经考过雅思的学生，也无论是学生还是老师,都会密切关注新题的发布。今年6月初,《剑15》如约而至、作为国内雅思培训的领军机构，新航道也时间为考生们带来了这太《剑桥雅思真题全解15:学术类》(以下简称《剑15全解》)。

本次我们盛情邀请了新航道全国冬分校最的学科带头人来组织编写这本《剑15全解》。其中，对于以客观选择题为主的听力与阅读部分，仍然请各校团队进行解题思路方面的指导;对于以主观题为主的写作与口语部分，我们则邀请了官方认证考官撰写地道的高分范文，作为官方范文之外的补充。下文中详细整理了剑桥雅思15Test2阅读Passage1原文及翻译，一起来看一下吧！

剑桥15电子版本，请扫描二维码，暗号“优化+剑桥15全解”，会有老师联系并发送资料。

1剑桥雅思15Test2阅读Passage1原文

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

Could urban engineers learn from dance?

AThe way we travel around cities has a major impact on whether they are sustainable. Transportation is estimated to account for 30% of energy consumption in most of the world's most developed nations, so lowering the need for energy-using vehicles is essential for decreasing the environmental impact of mobility. But as more and more people move to cities, it is important to think about other kinds of sustainable travel too. The ways we travel affect our physical and mental health, our social lives, our access to work and culture, and the air we breathe. Engineers are tasked with changing how we travel round cities through urban design, but the engineering industry still works on the assumptions that led to the creation of the energy-consuming transport systems we have now: the emphasis placed solely on efficiency, speed, and quantitative data. We need radical changes, to make it healthier, more enjoyable, and less environmentally damaging to travel around cities.

BDance might hold some of the answers. That is not to suggest everyone should dance their way to work, however healthy and happy it might make us, but rather that the techniques used by choreographers to experiment with and design movement in dance could provide engineers with tools to stimulate new ideas in city-making. Richard Sennett, an influential urbanist and sociologist who has transformed ideas about the way cities are made, argues that urban design has suffered from a separation between mind and body since the introduction of the architectural blueprint.

CWhereas medieval builders improvised and adapted construction through their intimate knowledge of materials and personal experience of the conditions on a site, building designs are now conceived and stored in media technologies that detach the designer from the physical and social realities they are creating. While the design practices created by these new technologies are essential for managing the technical complexity of the modern city, they have the drawback of simplifying reality in the process.

DTo illustrate, Sennett discusses the Peachtree Center in Atlanta, USA, a development typical of the modernist approach to urban planning prevalent in the 1970s. Peachtree created a grid of streets and towers intended as a new pedestrian-friendly downtown for Atlanta. According to Sennett, this failed because its designers had invested too much faith in computer-aided design to tell them how it would operate. They failed to take into account that purpose-built street cafes could not operate in the hot sun without the protective awnings common in older buildings, and would need energy-consuming air conditioning instead, or that its giant car park would feel so unwelcoming that it would put people off getting out of their cars. What seems entirely predictable and controllable on screen has unexpected results when translated into reality.

EThe same is true in transport engineering, which uses models to predict and shape the way people move through the city. Again, these models are necessary, but they are built on specific world views in which certain forms of efficiency and safety are considered and other experiences of the city ignored. Designs that seem logical in models appear counter-intuitive in the actual experience of their users. The guard rails that will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to cross a British road, for example, were an engineering solution to pedestrian safety based on models that prioritise the smooth flow of traffic. On wide major roads, they often guide pedestrians to specific crossing points and slow down their progress across the road by using staggered access points to divide the crossing into two - one for each carriageway. In doing so they make crossings feel longer, introducing psychological barriers greatly impacting those that are the least mobile, and encouraging others to make dangerous crossings to get around the guard rails. These barriers don't just make it harder to cross the road: they divide communities and decrease opportunities for healthy transport. As a result, many are now being removed, causing disruption, cost, and waste.

FIf their designers had had the tools to think with their bodies - like dancers - and imagine how these barriers would feel, there might have been a better solution. In order to bring about fundamental changes to the ways we use our cities, engineering will need to develop a richer understanding of why people move in certain ways, and how this movement affects them. Choreography may not seem an obvious choice for tackling this problem. Yet it shares with engineering the aim of designing patterns of movement within limitations of space. It is an art form developed almost entirely by trying out ideas with the body, and gaining instant feedback on how the results feel. Choreographers have deep understanding of the psychological, aesthetic, and physical implications of different ways of moving.

GObserving the choreographer Wayne McGregor, cognitive scientist David Kirsh described how he 'thinks with the body5. Kirsh argues that by using the body to simulate outcomes, McGregor is able to imagine solutions that would not be possible using purely abstract thought. This kind of physical knowledge is valued in many areas of expertise, but currently has no place in formal engineering design processes. A suggested method for transport engineers is to improvise design solutions and get instant feedback about how they would work from their own experience of them, or model designs at full scale in the way choreographers experiment with groups of dancers. Above all, perhaps, they might learn to design for emotional as well as functional effects.

Questions 1-6

Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

1 reference to an appealing way of using dance that the writer is not proposing

2 an example of a contrast between past and present approaches to building

3 mention of an objective of both dance and engineering

4 reference to an unforeseen problem arising from ignoring the climate

5 why some measures intended to help people are being reversed

6 reference to how transport has an impact on human lives

Questions 7-13

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

Guard rails

Guard rails were introduced on British roads to improve the 7………….. of pedestrians, while ensuring that the movement of 8………….. is not disrupted. Pedestrians are led to access points, and encouraged to cross one 9………….. at a time.

An unintended effect is to create psychological difficulties in crossing the road, particularly for less 10………….. people. Another result is that some people cross the road in a 11………….. way. The guard rails separate 12…………..,and make it more difficult to introduce forms of transport that are 13………….. .

2剑桥雅思15Test2阅读Passage1原文翻译

舞蹈对城市规划的启示

A 我们在城市中的出行方式对城市的可持续发展有着重要的影响。据估计，在世界上大多数最发达的国家中，交通运输的能耗占了总能耗的30%。因此，降低对耗能车辆的需求对于减少出行的环境影响而言至关重要。但是随着越来越多的人搬到城市，考虑其他的可持续性出行方式也变得极为重要。我们的出行方式会影响我们的身心健康、我们的社交生活、我们去上班的方式、我们所接触的文化，以及我们呼吸的空气。工程师的任务应该是通过城市设计改变我们的出行方式，但工程行业仍然按以往的前提在运作，正是在这些前提之下创造出了我们现在所拥有的高耗能交通系统：这类系统只强调效率、速度，以及量化的数据。我们需要进行彻底的变革，以使城市出行变得更健康、更愉悦、对环境的损害也更小。

B 舞蹈可能会带来一些答案。这并不是说每个人都应该跳着舞去上班，尽管这样可能会使我们变得健康和快乐，而是说编舞者在试验和设计舞蹈动作时所使用的技巧能够给工程师提供一些方法，帮助他们在城市规划中激发出新的想法。一位颇具影响力的城市规划家和社会学家Richard Sennett改变了人们对于城市规划方式的想法，他认为，自从开始使用建筑蓝图后，城市建设就一直受到“身心分离”的困扰。

C 中世的建筑师凭借对(建筑)材料的深入了解和对场地环境的亲身体验即兴创作和改造了建筑，而现在的建筑设计主要通过媒体技术进行构思和储存，这就使得设计师与他们所创造的实体和社会现实相分离。虽然这些新技术带来的设计方法对处理现代城市的复杂技术来说必不可少，但它们在实践过程中有个缺点，就是简化了现实情况。

D 举个例子，Sennett谈到了美国亚特兰大的桃树中心，这是流行于20世纪70年代的代主义城市规划方法下的一个典型的开发项目。桃树中心的街道和塔楼呈网格状分布，旨在使其成为亚特兰大一个新的适合不行的市中心。Sennett表示，这一方式之所以失败，是因为设计者过于信任计算机辅助设计所给出的操作方式。他们未能考虑到其特色的街边咖啡厅没有了老建筑中常见的防护遮篷后，在炎热的太阳下需要高耗能的空调系统才能够正常运营;也没有考虑到其巨大的停车场让人感觉很不便，以至于让人们都不愿意下车。在(电脑)屏幕上看起来完全可以预见或控制的东西，在转化为现实时就会产生意料之外的结果。

E 交通规划也是如此，它总是使用模型来预测和规划人们在城市中的出行方式。同样，这些模型是必要的，但它们是建立在特定的世界观之上的，这种世界观考虑到了效率、安全等某些方面的因素，而忽略了其他方面的城市体验。有些在模型中看似合理的设计，在用户的实际体验中却会显得有些违反常理。例如，在英国穿过马路的人都熟悉的护栏，原本是一种用于保护行人安全的设计方案，它是基于一套优先考虑交通顺畅性的模型建成的。在宽阔的主干道上，它们通常会将行人引导到某个横渡口(可简单理解为斑马线或人行横道。-译者注)，并利用分段马路岔口将横渡口一分为二-每个口对着一侧的马路，从而减慢行人过马路的速度。这样做会使人感觉过马路的时间变长了，给那些行动最不方便的人带来了心理障碍，也促使了其他人绕开护栏进行危险的穿越。这些障碍不仅加大了过马路的难度，还分化了群体，同时也减少了引入健全的交通系统的机会。因此，现在有许多这样的护栏正在被移除，这就又造成了混乱、损失和浪费。

F 如果这些设计者懂得像舞者一样运用他们的身体进行思考，想象这些障碍会带来怎样的感受，可能就会有一个更好的方案了。为了从根本上改变我们现在的出行方式，在工程设计中，设计师就需要更深入地了解人们为什么选择某种出行方式，以及该出行方式对他们有什么影响。编舞可能看起来不是解决这个问题的一个明显途径。然而，它和工程设计一样，目的都是在有限的空间内设计出移动方式。这是一种几乎完全通过身体来尝试各种想法而形成的艺术形式，并且能够获得关于结果的即时反馈。编舞者对不同的动作在心理、美感和身体上可能带来的影响通常有着深刻的理解。

G 认知科学家David Kirsh通过对编舞者Wayne McGregor的观察，描述了他是如何“运用身体进行思考”的。Kirsh认为，通过使用身体来模拟结果，McGregor能够设想出纯抽象思维不可能想到的方案。这类肢体知识在许多专业领域都得到了重视，但目前在正规的工程设计过程中还没有得到应用。给交通工程师的一个建议就是即兴创作设计方案，并通过自身的体验去获得设计效果的即时反馈，或者像编舞者那样用一组耕者反复进行尝试，进行全方位的模型设计。最重要的是，工程师可能要学会在设计中兼顾实用效应和情感效应。

提示：图中间的护栏设施为 staggered access points，意为“分段马路岔口”，控制行人一次过一半的马路，从而减缓了行人过马路的速度。