新概念英语85年上外美音版第四册 第13课

（单词翻译）

　　Lesson 13 Thames Waters 泰晤士河水域
Oxford¹ has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruthlessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to  Cowley and Pressed Steel, great lorries with a double deck cargo² of cars for export lumber³ past Magdalen and the University Church. Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither⁴ and the streets are thronged⁵ with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors, compression ratios and camshafts.
Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers. That this has not happened may be the fault of the university, for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend to live in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planet which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains⁶ that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge⁷ of extinction⁸, and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets, and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.