英语听力.比尔•盖茨在哈佛大学毕业典礼上的演讲doc.doc

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英语听力：比尔·盖茨在哈佛大学毕业典礼上的演讲

比尔·盖茨，微软前CEO，在大学三年级的时候从哈佛大学退学，并把全部精力投入到他与孩提时代的好友Paul Allen在1975年创建的微软公司中。时隔32年之后，在哈佛大学新一届的毕业典礼上被授予荣誉法学博士学位，并获得了掌声的欢迎.而他一番关于思索人类间的不平等的演讲，更带给哈佛学子和世人们更多思考。
President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates: I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”
尊敬的博克校长，前校长鲁登斯坦，即将上任的佛斯特校长，哈佛集团和监察理事会的各位成员。各位老师，各位家长，各位同学：有句话我憋了30年，今天终于能一吐为快了：““爸 我没骗你吧，文凭到手了！”
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year …and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my rsum.
我由衷地感谢哈佛这个时候给我这个荣誉。明年我要换工作（退休）。 我终于能在简历里注明自己有大学学历了。
I applaudthe graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class …I did the best of everyone who failed.
我要恭喜今年的毕业生们，因为你们毕业比我顺利多了。其实我倒是很乐意克莱姆森把我唤作“哈佛大学最成功的辍学生”。这大概是我脱颖而出的法宝……我是辍学生中的领头羊。
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.
我还要检讨一下史蒂夫-鲍尔默也是受我蛊惑从商学院退学。我劣迹斑斑。这就是为什么我会受邀参加毕业演讲。如果是开学典礼，恐怕今天的人会少很多。
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the antisocial group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.
哈佛是我生命里的一段非凡经历。校园生活格外充实，我旁听过很多没有选过的课程。住宿的日子也很爽我当时住在拉德克利夫的柯里尔宿舍，总是很多人在我的寝室讨论到深夜。 大家知道我属于夜行动物。就这样，我成为了这堆人的头目。我们粘在一起，摆出拒绝社交的姿态。
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.
拉德克利夫是个好地方。那里的女生比男生多，男生们大多都是科学怪人。所以我的机会来了，你懂的。可同时我也明白了一个道理——机会大也不能保证成功。
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, When I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
1975年1月在哈佛打出的一通电话让我毕生难忘。我打给位于阿尔伯克基的一个公司，那家公司当时着手制造世界上第一台个人电脑。我说我想出售软件给他们。
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
我担心他们会因为我学生身份而挂掉电话。但他们只是说：“现在还没有准备好 请一个月后再联系我们。”我长舒一口气，压根我们就没开工。从那时起 我不分昼夜地赶工 它是我大学生活结束的标志，也是微软伟大旅程的开始。
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.
哈佛的独特氛围让我充满精力和智慧。这里的日子可能振奋快乐、也可能令人退缩沮丧，但永远充满了挑战，神奇的体验！虽然我提前离开了这里，但是这段经历对我影响重大。
But taking a serious look back …I do have one big regret.
不过说心里话……我确实有一点遗憾。
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world - the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
我离开哈佛时，根本没有意识到这个世界是多么地不平等。健康、财富、机遇差异悬殊，数以百万计的人生活在绝望之中。
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
我在哈佛触摸着经济政治中的新思想，探索科学技术的未知前沿。
But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
但是，人类的进步不在于这些新发现，而在于如何运用这些发现减少社会不公。不管是通过民主政策、健全的公共教育、高质量的医疗保健还是广泛的商机，消除不平等始终是人类最大的目标。
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries It took me decades to find out.
离开校园的时候，根本不知道在美国上百万年轻人没有接受教育的机会。也对发展中国家被贫困和病痛折磨的人们一无所知。我花了几十年才明白这些事情。
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
如今，在座的各位应该比我更了解世界上的这些不平等现象。在你们的求学之路上我希望你们已经思考过这个问题——如何在这个高速发展的时代解决不平等现象。
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
试想一下如果你每周捐出几个小时，几块钱，来参与一项能够拯救生命和提高生活品质的项目，你会如何选择？
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
我和妻子梅琳达就面临着这样一个问题：怎样才能充分利用我们拥有的资源。
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year- none of them in the United States.
举棋不定时我们读到一篇文章，文章里说在贫困的国家里，每年有数百万，儿童死于于美国早已战胜的疾病——麻疹、疟疾、肺炎、乙肝、黄热病，还有一种从未听说的轮状病毒每年会夺走五十万儿童的生命，而在美国没有一例死亡病例。
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.
当时我们就震惊了。我以为全世界会不遗余力地拯救这些在死亡线上挣扎的儿童们，然而这些不值钱的救命药却没有送到他们手中。
If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revoltingto learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”
如果你坚信人生而平等，把生命分等级的做法简直令人发指。我们对自己说：“这绝不可能。但万一这是真的，那么这将成为我们慈善事业的首要任务。
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”
于是我们开始行动了 我相信这也会是你们的选择。我们疑惑：“这个世界怎么可以眼睁睁看着这些孩子死去？”
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system. But you and I have both. We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism.
答案简单却残酷。市场经济中，拯救儿童没有利润，政府也不会给予补贴。父母无财无权 孩子们就死了。我们不一样，我们可以让市场更好地为穷人服务，如果我们可以改进现有资本主义制度。
If we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
改善市场环境，让更多的人赚到钱、维持生计，缓解苦难。给世界各地的政府施压 让他们把纳税人的钱花到最值得的地方。采取一些既满足满足穷人的需求，又能带来商业利润并为政治家带来选票的措施。
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.
采取一些既满足满足穷人的需求，又能带来商业利润并为政治家带来选票的措施，我们就摸索到了减少世界不平等的可持续发展道路。然而这项任务并没有终点，我们也许无法彻底解决。但只要不懈努力，就可以改变世界。
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just …don’t …care.” I completely disagree.
我始终保持乐观。但也听到过消极的言论。他们认为：“这种不平等现象会伴随我们一生，因为人们漠视这一切。但我不苟同。
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing, not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.
虽然我们不知道该如何帮助他们，但我们绝对有这份心。我们都有过这样的经历，看到令人心碎的悲剧，却没有伸出援手。不是因为冷漠 而是我们不知道该怎么做。如果我们知道如何去帮，就一定会采取行动。
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
阻碍援助步伐的并非冷漠，而是世界太复杂。要把爱心转变为行动，我们首先要发掘问题，然后寻找解决方案，并且监测效果。然而世界的复杂性阻碍着这些步骤的实施。
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
即使有了互联网和24小时不间断的新闻，人们仍然很难看到真正的问题。一架飞机发生坠毁事故，官员们会立刻召开新闻发布会，承诺调查起因，以避免今后发生类似的事故。
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.” The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
但如果那些官员敢讲真话，他们会说：“全世界每天会有好多人含恨而终，这起空难只是冰山一角。我们会不惜一切代价解决削平这一角冰山，此外的问题我们无力解决。” 可是与空难相比，那些夺走数百万生命的问题则更为严重。
We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.
事实上那些人的死轻如鸿毛，司空见惯，连媒体都不屑于报道。更无法吸引我们的注意。即使我们知道了 它也很难刺痛我们的神经。世间最痛苦的事莫过于看着他人经受苦难的却无能为力，于是我们选择了逃避。
If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
发现问题，只是迈出了第一步，接下来我们还要：寻找解决方案。
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares —and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
如果不想让爱心变成空谈，就必须找到问题的解决方案。如果有清晰可靠的方案，那么政府或个人组织就能立刻采取行动，将爱心落实。但是世界的复杂性使找寻方案的过程无比艰难 于是爱心才沦为空谈。
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverageapproach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.
打破复杂性需要四个步骤：确定目标、找到最有效的途径、寻找最理想的技术，并合理利用现有技术。无论是制作复杂的药物，还是利用简单的蚊帐，都行。
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.
以艾滋病为例。我们的目标是消灭它。最有效的途径是预防，最理想的技术是注射一剂疫苗实现终身免疫。所以现在政府、制药公司、基金会都在资助疫苗的研究。但可能要十几年才能研究出来，所以目前的最好的预防措施就是避开那些可能传播艾滋病的行为。
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
四步循环直达目标。记住永远不要停止思考和行动——永远不要像人们在20世纪对待疟疾和肺结核那样，向疾病投降。
The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.
在发现问题并找到解决方法后，还需监测结果，并与他人分享成功的经验和失败的教训，让别人也能从中受益。
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.
当然，你还得有统计数据。用来证明你的项目为上百万儿童接种了疫苗，证明这些孩子的死亡率降低了。这不仅有利于项目的改进，也有助于吸引更多的企业和政府投资。
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers. You have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
但如果想吸引更多的人参与进来，光靠数字还远远不够。你需要展示出项目承载的价值，让他们明白挽救一个生命对其家庭的意义。
Remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.
我记得几年前去达沃斯参加全球健康讨论会，关于如何挽救数百万人的生命。数百万人！只要想想挽救一条生命带来的震撼，再把这种震撼乘上几百万倍是什么感觉！然而，那是我见过的最无聊的讨论会。
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
之所以铭记在心是因为我最近参加的一款软件发布会的现场氛围异常火爆。人们激动地欢呼雀跃。看到人们因为软件兴奋，我也很开心——但我们为什么无法对挽救生命更感兴趣呢？
You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.
除非人们能感知到行动的影响力，否则人们就不会动心。如何做到这一点并不简单。
Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past.
尽管如此，我还是很乐观。是的，不平等现象一直存在，但我们总会想出新的解决办法。新技术可以帮助我们传播爱心，我对未来