Section A Translate the underlined sentences of
the following passage into Chinese. Remember to write the answers on the answer
sheet. We are told that the mass media are the greatest organs for
enlightenment that the world has yet seen; that in Britain, for instance,
several million people see each issue of the current affairs
program—Panorama. It is true that never in human history were so many people
so often and so much exposed to many intimations about societies, forms of life,
attitudes other than those which obtain in their local societies. (82) This
kind of exposure may well be a point of departure for acquiring certain
important intellectual and imaginative qualities; width of judgment, a sense of
the variety of possible attitudes. Yet in itself such exposure does not
bring intellectual or imaginative development. (83) It is no more than the
masses of stone which lie around in a quarry (采石场) and which may, conceivably,
go to the making of a cathedral. The mass media cannot build the cathedral, and
their way of showing the stones does not always prompt others to build. For
the stones are presented within a self-contained and self-sufficient world in
which, it is implied, simply to look at them, to observe—fleetingly—individually
interesting points of difference between them, is sufficient in itself.
Life is indeed full of problems on which we have to—or feel we
should try to—make decisions, as citizens or as private individuals. (84) But
neither the real difficulty of these decisions, nor their true and disturbing
challenge to each individual, can often be communicated through the mass
media. The distinction to suggest real choice, individual decision, which is
to be found in the mass media is not simply the product of a commercial desire
to keep the customers happy. It is within the grain of mass communication. (85)
The organs of Establishment (代表官方),however well-intentioned they may be and
whatever their form (the State, the Church, voluntary societies, political
parties), have a vested interest (既得利益)in ensuring that the public boat is not
violently rocked, and will so affect those who work within the mass media that
they will be led insensibly towards forms of production which, though they
go through the motions of dispute and inquiry, do not break through the skin to
where such inquiries might really hurt. They will tend to move, when exposing
problems, well within the accepted cliche-assumptions of democratic society ad
will tend neither radically to question these cliches nor to make a disturbing
application of them to features of contemporary life. They will stress the
"stimulation" the program gives, but this soon becomes an agitation of problems
for the sake of the interest of that agitation in itself; they will therefore,
again, assist a form of acceptance of the status quo. There are exceptions to
this tendency, but they are uncharacteristic.