职称考试教材英汉对照，中国石油2000年版本.docVIP

==================================================================== 1. Shopping Around the Web网上购物 1. A Saturday afternoon in mid-December: not a good time to be hanging around San Franciscos Union Square, the citys premier shopping district. Hundreds of people laden with purchases battle along the pavements, search despairingly for scarce taxis or struggle to get through Macys doors. It is enough to put any body off shopping for life. 1. 在十二月中旬的周六下午，去旧金山的主要商业区联合广场逛街可不是件轻松的事。成百上千的人带着大大小小的购物袋拥挤在人行道上，有的在拼命地寻找着出租车，有的在尽力地挤出莫西商场的门口。这种经历足以让所有人从此对购物望而却步。 2. But wait: surely Christmas shopping in l999 was different? After all, this is close to Silicon Valley, the center of the Internet revolution and the new economy, the land of the tieless billionaires who bought all their presents online at midnight the day after Thanksgiving. Yet the crowds in Union Square last December were as bad as ever. They seemed oblivious of a large billboard advertisement above their heads for one of the Bay Areas many s, which flashed the message: Say Goodbye to the Mall. And they paid no attention to the advertisement on many of their shopping bags that pointed a way out of their predicament: Online Shopping. No Experience Needed. 2．但是且慢，1999年的圣诞购物应该有所不同吧？毕竟靠近网络革命和新经济的中心——硅谷。在这里那些不戴领带的百万富翁们早在感恩节第二天的午夜就把礼物买好了。然而去年的联合广场依旧是人潮如涌。他们似乎根本就看不见头顶上一家海湾地区的网络公司所做的大幅广告，上面闪烁着“对商场说再见吧”的字样。许多购物袋上印着的“在线购物，勿须经验”的广告给人们指明了摆脱购物困扰的途径，但他们也熟视无睹。 3. Electronic commerce, it seems, still has its limited, even in California. For all the feverish excitement about the tripling of electronic shopping last holiday season, the total spent by American consumers online still amounted to only about l% of all retail sales -barely a tenth of the revenues from another method of distance selling that has been in use for a century: the catalogue. And the electronic shopping was concentrated on quite a narrow range of goods: mainly books, toys and music. Worse, the holiday season threw up as many stories of failed and late deliver