有没有人在做LSAT阅读，一起讨论一下。

andylao2000

LSAT, 我是用来练阅读能力的，今天做第一套的前三篇，发现第三篇很难懂，看了三遍才勉强看懂。希望有人能讨论翻译一下。

As is well known and has often been described, the machine industry of recent times took its rise by a gradual emergence out of handicraft in England in the eighteenth century. Since then the mechanical industry has progressively been getting the upper hand (the upper hand: n.优势) in all the civilized nations, in much the same degree in which these nations have come to be counted as civilized. This mechanical industry now stands dominant at the apex of the industrial system.

The state of the industrial arts, as it runs on the lines of the mechanical industry, is a technology of physics and chemistry. That is to say, it is governed by the same logic as the scientific laboratories. The procedure, the principles, habits of thought, preconceptions, units of measurement and of valuation, are the same in both cases.

The technology of physics and chemistry is not derived from established law and custom, and it goes on its way with as nearly complete a disregard of the spiritual truths of law and custom as the circumstances will permit. The realities with which this technology is occupied are of another order of actuality, lying altogether within the three dimensions that contain the material universe, and running altogether on the logic of material fact. In effect it is the logic of inanimate facts.

The mechanical industry makes use of the same range of facts handled in the same impersonal way and directed to the same manner of objective results. In both cases alike it is of the first importance to eliminate the “personal equation (an element affecting a process: FACTOR因素),” to let the work go forward and let the forces at work take effect (take effect: v.见效, 生效) quite objectively, without hindrance or deflection for any personal end, interest, or gain. It is the technician’s place in industry, as it is the scientist’s place in the laboratory, to serve as an intellectual embodiment of the forces at work, isolate the forces engaged from all extraneous disturbances, and let them take full effect along the lines of designed work. The technician is an active or creative factor in the case only in the sense that he is the keeper of the logic which governs the forces at work.

These forces that so are brought to bear (to exert influence or force)
   in mechanical industry are of an objective, impersonal, unconventional nature, of course. They are of the nature of opaque fact. Pecuniary gain is not one of these impersonal facts. Any consideration of pecuniary gain that may be injected into the technician’s working plans will come into the case as an intrusive and alien factor, whose sole effect is to deflect, retard, derange and curtail the work in hand. At the same time considerations of pecuniary gain are the only agency (person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved: INSTRUMENTALITY “communicated through the agency of the ambassador”)
   brought into the case by the businessmen, and the only ground on which they exercise a control of production.

[此贴子已经被作者于2009-5-1 23:30:24编辑过]