新概念英语（第四册，旧版）复习（原文及全文翻译）——Lesson 46 - The Menace of Urban Exploration（城市爆炸的威胁）

Lesson 46 - The Menace of Urban Exploration

After millennia of growth so slow that each generation hardly noticed it, the cities are suddenly racing off in every direction. The world population goes up by two per cent a year, city population goes up by four per cent a year, but in big cities the rate may be as much as five and six per cent a year. To give only one example of almost visible acceleration, Athens today grows by three dwellings and 100 square metres of road every hour. There is no reason to believe that this pace will slacken. As technology gradually swallows up all forms of work, industrial and agricultural, the rural areas are going to shrink, just as they have shrunk in Britain, and the vast majority of their people will move into the city. In fact, in Britain now only about four or five per cent of people live in rural areas and depend upon them; all through the developing world the vanguard of the rural exodus has reached the urban fringes already, and there they huddle, migrants in the favellas and barrios of Latin America, in shanty towns in Africa, in those horrifying encampments one sees on the outskirts of Calcutta and Bombay. We are heading towards an urban world.

This enormous increase will go ahead whatever we do, and we have to remember that the new cities devour space. People now acquire far more goods and things. There is a greater density of household goods; they demand more services such as sewage and drainage. Above all the car changes everything: rising incomes and rising populations can make urban car density increase by something like four and five per cent in a decade; traffic flows rise to fill whatever scale of highways are provided for them. The car also has a curious ambivalence: it creates and then it destroys mobility. The car tempts people further out and then gives them the appalling problem of getting back. It makes them believe they can spend Sunday in Brighton, but makes it impossible for them to return before, say, two in the morning. People go further and further away to reach open air and countryside which continuously recedes from them, and just as their working weeks decline and they begin to have more time for leisure, they find they cannot get to the open spaces or the recreation or the beaches which they now have the time to enjoy.

Recently some studies were made in the behaviour of mice when exposed to more than a certain degree of density, frustration, and noise, and the mice just became deranged. I think some sociologists wonder whether it might not be the same for men. This combination of very high density of population, goods and services, and machines, all increasing with almost brutal speed, does account for some really antisocial tendencies in modern urban growth.

参考译文——城市爆炸的威胁

经历过每一代人几乎觉察不到的千百年缓慢增长之后，城市突然开始全方位迅猛发展。世界人口每年增长2%，城市人口每年增长4%，在大城市，可能高达每年5%和6%。一个能注意到的加速增长的例子是，今天的雅典每小时增加三栋住宅和100平方米的道路。没有理由相信这一步伐会放缓。正如已在英国发生的情况那样，随着技术逐渐吞噬所有形式（工业或农业）的工作，农村地区将不断缩小，绝大多数人将不断迁入城市。事实上，在英国现在只有大约百分之四或百分之五的人生活在农村地区并依靠土地生活；在整个发展中世界，农村人口外流的先锋已经到达了城市边缘，聚集在那里，聚集在拉丁美洲的贫民区和郊区，在非洲的棚户区，在加尔各答和孟买郊区人们看到的那些可怕的贫民窟。我们正走向一个城市世界。

无论我们做什么，这种快速增长都将继续。我们必须记住，新的城市会吞噬空间。人们现在获得了更多的商品和东西。家庭用品的密度变得更高，人们需要更多的服务，如下水管道和排水网络。最重要的是，汽车改变了一切：收入的增加和人口的增加可以使城市汽车密度在十年内增加大约4%和5%；新增公路容量很快就会被新增交通流量占满。汽车真是一种奇怪而又矛盾的存在：它提高了人们的机动性，又能破坏机动性。汽车诱惑人们行驶到更远的地方，却让人们面临如何返回这一可怕问题。汽车让人们相信他们可以在布莱顿过周末，人们却发现凌晨两点之前还回不到家。人们走得越来越远，可以去到远离他们的野外和乡村。当人们的工作时间减少，开始有更多的时间休闲时，他们却发现自己到不了那些户外、娱乐场所或海滩（因为堵在了路上），尽管他们不缺时间。

最近，一些研究对老鼠暴露在超过一定程度的密度、挫折感和噪音等条件下的行为进行了研究，发现老鼠最终变得精神错乱了。我想一些社会学家可能正在思考，这一研究对人类来说是否有意义。高密度的人口、商品、服务及机器叠加在一起，野蛮增长，确实能解释现代城市增长过程中出现的一些“反社会（antisocial）”的趋势。

注：博主基于百度翻译校译而成

参考资料：

https://nce.koolearn.com/20210619/792031.html