In Google's vision of the future, people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world's
main languages with machine logic, not expert linguists, leading the way.
     Google's approach, called statistical(統(tǒng)計(jì)的) machine translation, differs from past efforts in which it
does without language experts who program grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers. Instead,
they feed documents humans have already translated into two languages and then rely on computers to
decide patterns for future translations.
     Though the quality is not perfect, it is an improvement on previous efforts at machine translation, said
Franz Och, 35, a German who heads Google's translation effort at its Mountain View headquarters south
of San Francisco. "Some people who have been in machine translations for a long time see our
Arabic-English output, and then they say, that's amazing; that's a breakthrough(突破)." Said Och. "And
then other people who have never seen what machine translation was read through the sentence and they
say, the first mistake here in Line Five－it doesn't seem to work because there is a mistake there."
     But for some tasks, a mostly correct translation may be good enough. Speaking over lunch this week
in a Google cafeteria famed for offering free, healthy food, Och showed a translation of an Arabic Web
news site into easily digestible English.
     Two Google workers speaking Russian at a nearby table said, however, that a translation of a news
site from English into their native tongue was understandable but a bit awkward. Och, who speaks
German, English and some Italian, feeds hundreds of millions of words from parallel texts such as Arabic
and English into the computer, using United Nations and European Union documents as key sources.
     Languages without considerable translated texts, such as some African languages, face greater
obstacles. "The more data we feed into the system, the better it gets." said Och, who moved to the
United States from Germany in 2002.
     The program applies statistical analysis, an approach he hopes will avoid diplomatic embarrassing
mistakes in diplomatic situations, such as when Russian leader Putin's translator annoyed then German
Chancellor(總理) Gerhard Schroeder by calling him the German "Fuhrer ("leader" in English)," which is
forbidden in that context because of its association with Adolf Hitler.
    "I would hope that the language model would say, well, Schroeder is…very rare but Bundeskanzler
Gerhard Schroeder is probably 100 times more frequent than Fuhrer
and then it would make the right decision." Och said.

     I always knew that I wanted to be a doctor - at least from the age of eight or ten years old, anyway.
     Although my father wasn't a doctor, he made his own way of "house calls". I followed him as he
brought some food to an elderly man named Frank on all major holidays and when Frank was sick. As
far as I know, their only connection was that Frank was an occasional customer at Dad's small gas
station. Frank's home was a two-room house on the rough side of town with an old front porch (門(mén)廊)
where you could fall if you weren't careful. Frank had no relatives and as far as I could tell, no other
visitors either. Through his attitude and by caring, my father was teaching me to be a doctor, although
neither of us knew it at the time.
    When I was 13, my father developed lung cancer. He brought home a diagram the doctor had drawn
showing where his cancer was and told me that he was going to die. He asked me to take care of my
mother when he was gone. I was an only child. He said he loved me on the night when he died.
    When you're 13 and your father dies, you have some choices to make. You can use the situation as an
excuse for letting your actions and grades go down, or you can honor his memory and try to do something positive with yourself. I focused my energy on my schoolwork and my goal of becoming a doctor. 

     You might have such problems with a friend as follows:
     New friends replace an old friendship. You used to walk home from school with your friend, and
share everything. Now your friend is with someone else all the time and is always "too busy" for you.
One of your friends reveals a secret. You can not believe your ears. The deep, dark secret you shared
with your best friend was repeated back to you by someone you hardly know. Your friend told! Why
has your friend turned against you?
     These things hurt you. They make you feel angry and sad. In each situation your friendship would feel
threatened. When you are upset with someone, it is a good idea to go off by yourself and sort out your
feelings. Go for a walk, talk to yourself, and look at what you feel. Allow your anger to explode where
no one is around to hear you. Then calm down. Think through what you want to say to your friend.
     It helps to stand back and take a fresh look at your friendship. Just because you have been very close
to someone but it does not mean you are linked together or that you own one another. There should be
room in your friendship for other friends, higher achievements, slips of the tongue, sometimes a conflict is
a sign that you need to change the kind of friendship you have.
     It also helps to put yourself in your friend's shoes. What would you do if you found that you had more
fun with a new friend? What if you told your friend's secret to someone when you did not mean to? It is
painful to be the other, too.

     What do you want to be in the future? One way to answer this question is to make a career plan. A
career plan shows the steps you need to take to reach your career goal.
Steps to making a career plan:
     1. Thinking about your skills and interests can help you find a satisfying career. Determine your
interests, think about what you'd like to do. Think about experiences you have enjoyed. Make a list of
activities you have enjoyed during the past few years. Then make a list of skills you have. Even if you
haven't been employed before, you should have some skills which will help you find a job. For example,
if you volunteered at a hospital and enjoyed the experience, you may want to consider a medical career.
     2. Find out the types of careers that are suitable to you. If you don't research careers, you may not
know about the best jobs to fit your interests and skills.  It's also important to decide if the career you are
considering is really what you expect and whether it offers the salary and benefits you want. One good
way to learn about a career is to talk to someone who is in the career now.
     3. Once you have determined what career path you want to follow, think about what you need to do
to prepare for that career. Do you need special training? What kind of experience will you need to be
successful in the career?

語(yǔ)法填空強(qiáng)化練習(xí)
     In the past a gentleman would offer his seat __(1)__ a lady on a crowded bus.  But now, he will
probably look out of the window or hide behind his newspaper, __(2)__ (leave) the lady standing
__(3)__ someone else gets off.  You can't entirely blame men for this change in manners.  __(4)__(go)
are the days when women could be referred to the weak.  A whole generation has grown up demanding
__(5)__(equal) with men in jobs, in education and in social life.  Hold a door for some women __(6)__
you are likely to get __(7)__ angry lecture on treating women __(8)__ weaklings.  Take a girl out for a
meal and she'll probably insist on paying __(9)__ share of the bill.  All these, according to some
sociologists, will change men's attitude towards women and the conventional active politeness is perhaps
slowly being __(10)__(replace) by true consideration for the needs and feeling of women, so that men
can see women as equal human beings.

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