英文原文：

Britain Loses Half Of Its Millionaires

Suddenly everyone is talking about disappearing millionaires.

Tuesday there was The Wall Street Journal talking about the vanishing Maryland millionaires. Now comes word that Britain has lost about half its millionaires.

The reason isn’t emigration or tax revolts. It is personal finances.

As I have been writing for the past year, the rich have been hammered by this crisis, largely because of the plunge in the value of their investments and real estate. As a result, the millionaire population (especially the lower end) is taking a dive.

参考译文：

英国百万富翁人数减少近半

突然之间，人人都在谈论不断消失的百万富翁们。

周二，《华尔街日报》有篇文章谈到了美国马里兰州百万富翁越来越少。现在有消息说，英国的百万富翁人数减少了约一半。

这并不是因为富翁们移民或是避税去了，而是个人财务状况出了问题。

正如过去一年中我所写的，富人们在此次危机中遭受了重创，原因主要是他们的投资和房地产的价值锐减。正因为如此，百万富翁(特别是富翁中的“贫困户”)的人数骤减。

　　中文原文：

当生活中的不确定感向你袭来

我的一个好朋友最近接受了白血病测试。她对我说，最令人痛苦的折磨就是苦苦等待测试结果的那一周时间。我朋友说，她可能会学着直面坏结果。但真正让人煎熬焦虑的是那种茫然的感觉。

孟克(Edvard Munch)的名画《呐喊》哈佛大学心理学家吉尔伯特(Daniel Gilbert)不久前在《纽约时报》(New York Times)的专栏中写道，不知道要发生什么坏事比知道什么坏事要发生的感觉更糟。我们大多数人之所以会夜不能寐、抽烟发泄，并不是因为道琼斯指数要再跌1000 点，而是因为我们不知道道指会不会下跌──不确定的感觉比不确定的事情本身更折磨人。

参考译文：

Coping With the Certainty of Uncertainty

A close friend of mine recently underwent tests for leukemia. The most agonizing part of the ordeal, she said, was the week-long wait for the test results. A bad outcome she could learn to cope with, my friend said. It was the not knowing, the uncertainty, that was so difficult.

People feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur,’ wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert in a recent New York Times op-ed. ’Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboro because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not ─ and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about.

中文原文：

与舞蹈和音乐相伴的歌谣跟口头流传的神话，远在文字出现之前就已大量产生。中国的文学正是发端于此。不过歌谣本是人们在生活中随兴而发的东西，上古时代也没有保存和记载它们的手段，因之也就很快湮灭，不留痕迹。我们只能从一些古籍书中推断它们的存在。古书中记载了一些据称年代非常久远的歌谣，但是大多出于后人的伪托，能够断定朝代的歌谣要到《诗经》里才能看见。从这点来看，古代神话对中国文学的影响更为显著。

　　参考译文：

Long before the emergence of the written word, ballads, accompanied by music and dance,and myths, passed around by word of mouth, were widely popular. Chinese literature finds its origins in these traditions. However, ballads were what people improvised out of daily life, and due to lack of means to record and preserve them in ancient times, they quickly disappeared without leaving much of a trace. Today, we can only deduce their existence from ancient books, which recorded some time-honored ballads, though most of these are believed to be derivatives of later generations. Ballads in the Book of Songs are the earliest writings that can be dated. From this point of view, ancient mythology obviously has had a great influence on Chinese literature.