中科新闻网天龙八部人物大全:下面是我PETS 课本里面的一篇文章, 我前后看了几遍也没办法把它顺畅地翻译过来, 好心的哥哥姐姐能帮帮俺吗
来源：百度文库 编辑：中科新闻网 时间：2024/04/28 23:43:20
In our “ Rurban” Age
-To know the countryside, you must live in the city
In his book badgers, the naturalist Michael Clark describes, surveying the animal back in the 1960s. Calling at a farm cottage, he asked an old countryman whether he knew of any baggers living nearby. “What’s badgers?”came the reply. The country man, clark writes,”genuinely didn’t know of the species.”
You can be a countryman, it seems. And know little of the country. But traditionally, country folks are regarded as being in furn with land. They live there, don’t they? What can townies know of the “way of nature”?
This assumption infects much of our culture, it predicates the existence of a clear devision between town and country. It enables the rural lobby to characterize itself as an indigenous culture, its “native” traditions and pastimes(hunting and fishing) threatened by an oppressive urban majority. The underlying message lies in that the countryside is best managed by country people. After all, they know about such things.
Unfortunately, to often, they don’t. As the historian, Keith Thomas showed in his study “Man and the natural world”, the growth of our knowledge about nature has come by correcting the “ vulgar errors” of country people. And although Thomas was writing about the period between 1500 and 1800, that process continues today-what country dwellers take for granted is still being confounded by the careful observation of reality.
A study, from York University, has cast strange new light on farmer’s enemy- foxes, the more foxes a farmer kills, the more lambs he appears to lose to foxes. That’s because: New foxes will occupy the slain animals’ territory. And the new animals, unused to the terrain, may then choose more obvious prey-such as lambs.
The message of studies such as this is that natural systems are complex, unpredictable: understanding them requires patient observation and careful analysis. The lack of these conditions explains why. In the early modern era, grass snakes were killed as venomous, and gardeners destroyed worms because they were thought to gnaw plant roots.
The assumption that people “ought” to know about such things is based on an urban-rural divide that opened up in the 18th century. For a couple of centuries, city and country people did inhabit separate realms. But the car, the phone, the media and the internet have contribute to the unifying tendency of what we call modern lifestyle; and the vast population outflow from cities into rural areas blurred the difference between urban and rural. Thus, a new word “rurban” has been coined to describe this condition. Most of us now work indoors or in office, and even if we are involved in our primary industries, we are far more likely to be staring at a computer than communicating with landscape. Human life has turned generally into a monoculture by work, sleep, shopping and TV-all actually identical whether performed in town or country.
-To know the countryside, you must live in the city
In his book badgers, the naturalist Michael Clark describes, surveying the animal back in the 1960s. Calling at a farm cottage, he asked an old countryman whether he knew of any baggers living nearby. “What’s badgers?”came the reply. The country man, clark writes,”genuinely didn’t know of the species.”
You can be a countryman, it seems. And know little of the country. But traditionally, country folks are regarded as being in furn with land. They live there, don’t they? What can townies know of the “way of nature”?
This assumption infects much of our culture, it predicates the existence of a clear devision between town and country. It enables the rural lobby to characterize itself as an indigenous culture, its “native” traditions and pastimes(hunting and fishing) threatened by an oppressive urban majority. The underlying message lies in that the countryside is best managed by country people. After all, they know about such things.
Unfortunately, to often, they don’t. As the historian, Keith Thomas showed in his study “Man and the natural world”, the growth of our knowledge about nature has come by correcting the “ vulgar errors” of country people. And although Thomas was writing about the period between 1500 and 1800, that process continues today-what country dwellers take for granted is still being confounded by the careful observation of reality.
A study, from York University, has cast strange new light on farmer’s enemy- foxes, the more foxes a farmer kills, the more lambs he appears to lose to foxes. That’s because: New foxes will occupy the slain animals’ territory. And the new animals, unused to the terrain, may then choose more obvious prey-such as lambs.
The message of studies such as this is that natural systems are complex, unpredictable: understanding them requires patient observation and careful analysis. The lack of these conditions explains why. In the early modern era, grass snakes were killed as venomous, and gardeners destroyed worms because they were thought to gnaw plant roots.
The assumption that people “ought” to know about such things is based on an urban-rural divide that opened up in the 18th century. For a couple of centuries, city and country people did inhabit separate realms. But the car, the phone, the media and the internet have contribute to the unifying tendency of what we call modern lifestyle; and the vast population outflow from cities into rural areas blurred the difference between urban and rural. Thus, a new word “rurban” has been coined to describe this condition. Most of us now work indoors or in office, and even if we are involved in our primary industries, we are far more likely to be staring at a computer than communicating with landscape. Human life has turned generally into a monoculture by work, sleep, shopping and TV-all actually identical whether performed in town or country.
这么长！