Spot Dictation

When most people think of the word “education”, they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casting, the teachers are supposed to stuff “education.”
But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffing of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing-out of what is in the mind.
“The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher, “is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him.”
And, as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, “I know, learn from me.” He said, rather, “Look into your own selves and find the spark of the truth that God has put into every heart and that only you can kindle to a flame.”
In a dialogue, Socrates takes an ignorant slave boy, without a day of schooling, and proves to the amazed observers that the boy really “knows” geometry – because the principles of geometry are already in his mind, waiting to be called out.
So many of the discussions and controversies about the content of education are useless and inconclusive because they are concerned with what should “go into” the student rather than with what should be taken out, and how this can best be done.
The college student who once said to me, after a lecture, “I spend so much time studying that I don’t have a chance to learn anything,” was clearly expressing his dissatisfaction with the sausage casing view of education.

翻译真题

中国传统的待客之道要求饭菜丰富多样，让客人吃不完。中国宴席上典型的菜单包括开席的一套凉菜及其后的热菜，例如肉类、鸡鸭、蔬菜等。大多数宴席上，全鱼被认为是必不可少的，除非已经上过各式海鲜。如今，中国人喜欢把西方特色菜与传统中式菜肴融于一席，因此牛排上桌也不少见。沙拉也已流行起来，尽管传统上中国人一般不吃任何未经烹饪的菜肴。宴席通常至少有一道汤，可以最先上或最后上桌。甜点和水果通常标志宴席的结束。