>71 The Alaska Pipeline
      The Alaska pipeline starts at the frozen edge of the Arctic ocean. It stretches southward across the largest and northernmost state in the United States, ending at a remote ice free seaport village nearly 800 miles from where it begins. It is massive in size and extremely complicated to operate. The steel pipe crosses windswept plains and endless miles of delicate tundra that tops the frozen ground. It weaves through crooked canyons, climbs sheer mountains, plunges over rocky crags, makes its way through thick forests, and passes over or under hundreds of rivers and streams. The pipe is 4 feet in diameter, and up to 2 million barrels (or 84 million gallons) of crude oil can be pumped through it daily. Resting on H shaped steel racks called"bents", long sections of the pipeline follow a zigzag course high above the frozen earth. Other long sections drop out of sight beneath spongy or rocky ground and return to the surface later on. The pattern of the pipeline's up and down route is determined by the often harsh demands of the Arctic and subarctic climate, the tortuous lay of the land, and the varied compositions of soil, rock, or permafrost(permanently frozen ground). A little more than half of the pipeline is elevated above the ground. The remainder is buried anywhere from 3 to 12 feet, depending largely upon the type of terrain and the properties of the soil. One of the largest in the world, the pipeline cost approximately ＄8 billion and is by far the biggest and most expensive construction project ever undertaken by private industry. In fact, no single business could raise that much money, so 8 major oil companies formed a consortium in order to share the costs. Each company controlled oil rights to particular shares of land in the oil fields and paid into the pipeline construction fund according to the size of its holdings. Today, despite enormous problems of climate, supply shortages, equipment breakdowns, labor disagreements, treacherous terrain, a certain amount of mismanagement, and even theft, the Alaska pipeline has been completed and is operating.

      阿拉斯加输油管
      阿拉斯加输油管道以北冰洋的冻冰边缘为起点，向南延伸穿过美国的最 北又是最大的州，在离起点 800 英里以外的一个偏僻的不冻海港中止。 它跨幅巨大，而且 运作极端复杂。 这个钢质管道穿过强风不断的草原和无边无尽的覆盖于冻土之上的苔原。 它盘垣于弯曲的峡谷之间，攀上陡峭的山峰，从岩石遍布的峭壁俯冲下来，穿越浓密的森林， 从上或从下经过成百上千 条的河流与溪水。 管道的直径有四英尺，每天能运送高达 200 百万桶(合 8400 万加仑)的原油。 枕在 H 型的铁架上，管道长长的一部分在冰冻地面的上空 走着"之"字形。 其它部分消失在松软或坚硬的地面下然后又回到地面上。 管道这种或上或 下的路线决定于严酷的极带和副极带气候、复杂的地形和构造各异的土壤、岩石、永久冻土。 一大半管道悬在地面上空，其余部分则埋入 3 至 12 英尺的地下。 深浅大部分由地形状况和 土壤特征而定。 作为世上最大的管道之一，它花费了将近 80 亿美元，至今仍是私有产业进 行的最浩大最昂贵的建筑工程。 实际上，单个公司不可能拿出这么多的资金。 为了分担成 本，八大石油公司组成了一个大财团。 每个公司都控制着油田中一定土地上的开采权，并 由股份的比例把资金投入到管道建设中。 尽管有气候严寒、供应不足、设备损坏、劳工纠 纷、地形复杂等巨大困难，并有一些管理上的不善甚至被盗现象，阿拉斯加管道现已峻工并 正在运行。
>72 The Satiric Literature
      Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality of perspective. Satire rarely offers original ideas. Instead, it presents the familiar in a new form. Satirists do not offer the world new philosophies. What they do is to look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful, or affected. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false. Don Quixote derides the stupidity of knights Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science; A Modest Proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism. None of these ideas is original. Chivalry was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldous Huxley, and people were aware of famine before Swift. It was not the originality of the idea that made these satires popular. It was the manner of expression, the satiric method that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome or ethically instructive. They are stimulating and refreshing because with commonsense briskness they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions. With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into incongruous juxtaposition, and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.
      Satire exists because there is need for it. It has lived because readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus, an irreverent reminder that they live in a world of platitudinous thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into an awareness of truth, though rarely to any action on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear, and read in popular media is sanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially true. Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it. Soldiers rarely hold the ideals that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens devote their lives to unselfish service of humanity. Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they do not hear them expressed.

      讽刺文学
      或许讽刺文学最显著的特点是其视角的新颖性和独特性。 讽刺作品很少有创 造性的思想。 相反，它用一种新的形式把人们熟悉的东西呈现出来。 讽刺作家没有为世界 贡献新的哲学。 他们所做的就是采取这样一种立场来看待熟悉的环境，使得它们看上去愚 蠢、有害或者造作。 讽刺作品使我们排除了自满情绪，并愉快地惊叹道许多我们毫无疑问 地接受的价值观是错误的。 《堂吉诃德》使骑士看起来愚蠢可笑； 《奇妙的新世界》嘲弄 了科学的自命不凡；《温和的建议》戏剧性地提倡同类相食来消灭饥饿。 所有这些观点都不 是创造性的。 在塞万提斯以前骑士制度就受到了怀疑，在阿尔道斯·赫胥黎以前的人文主 义者就反对纯科学的主张，而且在斯威夫特以前就认识了饥荒。 并不是独创性的思考使这 些讽刺作品变得流行，而是表达的方式、讽刺的方法手段使它们变得有趣和引人入胜。 人 们读讽刺作品是因为在美感上它们是令人满意的艺术作品，而不是因为道德的完美和伦理的 说教。它们有启发性、使人耳目一新是因为它们用简明的常识洗刷去了幻觉和旧的观点。讽 刺作品用自然的嘲讽态度重新设置了观点，将熟悉的事物自相矛盾地置在一起。 讽刺文学 用自己的语言，而不是采用抽象的陈词滥调来表达。 讽刺作品的存在是由于有需求。 它的 存在是因为读者欣赏使人耳目一新的刺激，毫不客气地提醒他们活在一个思相陈腐、道德低 廉、哲学荒谬的世界里。 讽刺作品有助于促进人们认识真相，虽然很少促动人们为真理而 行动。 它有助于提醒人们日常媒介中所见所闻所谈的许多东西是假装神圣、感情用事或半真半假。 生活只在很少程度上与它流行的映像相象，战士很少有电影赋予他们的完美，一 般的公民也很少奉献他们的生命为人类无私的服务。 明智的人们了解这些事理，但当他们 没有听到这些事理，就倾向于把它们忘掉。