剑桥雅思5 Test 2阅读Passage 2原文翻译 what’s so funny

剑桥雅思5 Test 2阅读Passage 2原文翻译 what’s so funny

剑桥雅思5 Test 2 Passage 2阅读答案解析

第1自然段

The joke comes over the headphones: ‘Which side of a dog has the most hair? The left.’ No, not funny. Try again. ‘Which side of a dog has the most hair? The outside.’ Hah! The punchline is silly yet fitting, tempting a smile, even a laugh. Laughter has always struck people as deeply mysterious, perhaps pointless. The writer Arthur Koestler dubbed it the luxury reflex: ‘unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose’.

电话对面的人讲了个笑话：“狗的哪一边头发最多？左边。” 不，不好笑。再试一次。“狗的哪一边的头发最多？外边。”哈！笑话既愚蠢又贴切，让人微笑，甚至是大笑。笑声一直使人们感到十分神秘，甚至毫无意义。作家亚瑟·科斯特勒（Arthur Koestler）称其为奢侈的反射：“独特之处在于它没有明显的生物学目的” 。

第2自然段

Theories about humour have an ancient pedigree. Plato expressed the idea that humour is simply a delighted feeling of superiority over others. Kant and Freud felt that joke-telling relies on building up a psychic tension which is safely punctured by the ludicrousness of the punchline. But most modern humour theorists have settled on some version of Aristotle’s belief that jokes are based on a reaction to or resolution of incongruity, when the punchline is either a nonsense or, though appearing silly, has a clever second meaning.

关于幽默的理论可以追溯到很久之前。柏拉图文章来自老烤鸭雅思表达了这样的观点：幽默只是一种与众不同的优越感。康德和弗洛伊德认为，讲笑话是建立在一种心理张力上，这种紧张情绪可以被趣味横生的笑话所打破。但是，大多数现代幽默理论家都比较认同亚里士多德的某种观点，即笑话是基于对不一致的反应或解决。逗人发笑的地方虽然毫无意义或者显得很傻，但其具有巧妙的第二含义。

第3自然段

Graeme Ritchie, a computational linguist in Edinburgh, studies the linguistic structure of jokes in order to understand not only humour but language understanding and reasoning in machines. He says that while there is no single format for jokes, many revolve around a sudden and surprising conceptual shift. A comedian will present a situation followed by an unexpected interpretation that is also apt.

爱丁堡的计算机语言学家格雷姆·里奇（Graeme Ritchie）研究笑话的语言结构，从而理解幽默，以及机器中的语言领悟和推理。他说，虽然没有单一的笑话形式，但许多笑话都围绕着突然而令人惊讶的观念转变进行。喜剧演员将呈现一种情况，然后进行意外却适当的解释。

第4自然段

So even if a punchline sounds silly, the listener can see there is a clever semantic fit and that sudden mental ‘Aha!’ is the buzz that makes us laugh. Viewed from this angle, humour is just a form of creative insight, a sudden leap to a new perspective.

因此，即使笑话听起来很愚蠢，听众也可以看到有巧妙的语义匹配，而正是这种心理上突然的“啊哈！” 让我们笑出声来。从这个角度来看，幽默只是一种创造性洞察力的形式，是突然跃入新视野的一种方式。

第5自然段

However, there is another type of laughter, the laughter of social appeasement and it is important to understand this too. Play is a crucial part of development in most young mammals. Rats produce ultrasonic squeaks to prevent their scuffles turning nasty. Chimpanzees have a ‘play-face’ – a gaping expression accompanied by a panting ‘ah, ah’ noise. In humans, these signals have mutated into smiles and laughs. Researchers believe social situations, rather than cognitive events such as jokes, trigger these instinctual markers of play or appeasement. People laugh on fairground rides or when tickled to flag a play situation, whether they feel amused or not.

但是，还有另一种笑，即社交情景下的笑声。了解这一点也很重要。玩耍是大多数年轻哺乳动物发育中至关重要的部分。老鼠发出吱吱声，以防止它们的扭打变得严重起来。黑猩猩有一张“玩笑脸”-表情张扬，伴随着喘息的“啊，啊”的声音。在人类中，这些信号变成了微笑和大笑。研究人员认为，社交环境而不是诸如玩笑之类的认知事件触发了这种玩耍中的本能标志。人们在游乐场或者被挑逗的时候笑出声来，而不论他们是否觉得很有意思。

第6自然段

Both social and cognitive types of laughter tap into the same expressive machinery in our brains, the emotion and motor circuits that produce smiles and excited vocalisations. However, if cognitive laughter is the product of more general thought processes, it should result from more expansive brain activity.

社交和认知类型的笑都进入我们大脑中相同的表达机制，情感和运动回路产生笑容和激动的声音。但是，如果认知笑声是更普遍的思维过程的产物，它应该来自更广泛的大脑活动。

第7自然段

Psychologist Vinod Goel investigated humour using the new technique of ‘single event’ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). An MRI scanner uses magnetic fields and radio waves to track the changes in oxygenated blood that accompany mental activity. Until recently, MRI scanners needed several minutes of activity and so could not be used to track rapid thought processes such as comprehending a joke. New developments now allow half-second ‘snapshots’ of all sorts of reasoning and problem-solving activities.

心理学家Vinod Goel使用“单一事件” 功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）的新技术研究了幽默。MRI扫描仪使用磁场和无线电波来跟踪伴随精神活动的血液含氧量的变化。直到最近为止，MRI扫描仪都需要活动几分钟才行，因此无法用于跟踪快速的思维过程，例如理解笑话。现在，技术进步让所有类型的推理和问题解决活动的半秒钟快照成为可能。

第8自然段

Although Goel felt being inside a brain scanner was hardly the ideal place for appreciating a joke, he found evidence that understanding a joke involves a widespread mental shift. His scans showed that at the beginning of a joke the listener’s prefrontal cortex lit up, particularly the right prefrontal believed to be critical for problem solving. But there was also activity in the temporal lobes at the side of the head (consistent with attempts to rouse stored knowledge) and in many other brain areas. Then when the punchline arrived, a new area sprang to life – the orbital prefrontal cortex. This patch of brain tucked behind the orbits of the eyes is associated with evaluating information.

尽管Goel觉得脑部扫描仪并不是一个欣赏笑话的理想场所，但他发现有证据表明，理解笑话涉及广泛的心理转变。他的扫描显示，在笑话刚开始时，听众的前额叶皮层会亮起来，它被认为对解决问题至关重要。但是在头部侧面的颞叶（与试图激发储存的知识相一致）以及其他许多大脑区域也有活动。然后，当笑点到来时，一个崭新的区域出现了-眶前额叶皮层。这一藏在眼眶后面的大脑区域与评估信息有关。

第9自然段

Making a rapid emotional assessment of the events of the moment is an extremely demanding job for the brain, animal or human. Energy and arousal levels may need to be retuned in the blink of an eye. These abrupt changes will produce either positive or negative feelings. The orbital cortex, the region that becomes active in Goel’s experiment, seems the best candidate for the site that feeds such feelings into higher-level thought processes, with its close connections to the brain’s sub-cortical arousal apparatus and centres of metabolic control.

对当下事件进行快速的情感评估对于动物或人类的大脑来说都是一项极为艰巨的工作。眨眼间可能需要重新调整精力和兴奋水平。这些突然的变化将产生积极或消极的感觉。轨道皮层，Goel实验中活跃的区域，似乎是将这种感觉馈入高级思维过程的最佳人选，它与大脑皮层下的兴奋装置和代谢控制中心紧密相连。

第10自然段

All warm-blooded animals make constant tiny adjustments in arousal in response to external events, but humans, who have developed a much more complicated internal life as a result of language, respond emotionally not only to their surroundings, but to their own thoughts. Whenever a sought-for answer snaps into place, there is a shudder of pleased recognition. Creative discovery being pleasurable, humans have learned to find ways of milking this natural response. The fact that jokes tap into our general evaluative machinery explains why the line between funny and disgusting, or funny and frightening, can be so fine. Whether a joke gives pleasure or pain depends on a person’s outlook.

所有温血动物都会对外界事件做出不断的微小调整，但是由于语言的发展，大脑内部活动变得更加复杂的人类对周围环境和自己的思想都会产生情感上的反应。每当找到一直以来所寻求的答案时，人们就会感到欣喜若狂。创造性的发现是令人愉悦的，人类已经学会产生这种自然反应的方法。笑话进入了我们的普遍评估机制，这一事实解释了为什么可笑与令人厌恶或令人恐惧之间存在完好的分界线。开玩笑给人带来快乐还是痛苦取决于一个人的观念。

第11自然段

Humour may be a luxury, but the mechanism behind it is no evolutionary accident. As Peter Derks, a psychologist at William and Mary College in Virginia, says: ‘I like to think of humour as the distorted mirror of the mind. It’s creative, perceptual, analytical and lingual. If we can figure out how the mind processes humour, then we’ll have a pretty good handle on how it works in general.’

幽默也许是一种奢侈品，但其背后的机制绝非偶然。正如弗吉尼亚州玛丽学院的心理学家Peter Derks所说的那样，“我喜欢把幽默当作心灵扭曲的镜子。它具有创造力，感知力，分析能力和语言能力。如果我们能弄清大脑如何处理幽默，那么我们将对它的总体运作方式有一个很好的把握。”

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