fiction中等

Nowadays, his reading material has changed from science fiction and reference books: recently, he revealed that he reads at least 50 nonfiction books a year.

如今，他的阅读材料已不再是科幻小说和参考书：最近，他透露自己每年至少读50本非虚构类书籍。

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England’s southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy Pay Office — a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dickens’s mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dickens’s birth, his mother’s father was caught stealing and fled to Europe, never to return. The family’s increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as “the young gentleman.” His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father’s imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens’s greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction.

狄更斯出生于英格兰南部海岸的朴次茅斯。他的父亲是英国海军军饷处的一名职员——一个体面的职位，但社会地位不高。他的祖父母分别是管家和女管家，因为当过仆人，地位更低，狄更斯后来隐瞒了他们的出身。据说狄更斯的母亲出身于一个更体面的家庭。然而在狄更斯出生前两年，他的外祖父因偷窃被抓，逃往欧洲大陆，再也没有回来。家境日益贫困，迫使狄更斯在12岁时辍学，到沃伦鞋油作坊——一家鞋油厂——做工，在那里其他做工的男孩嘲笑他是“小绅士”。后来他的父亲因负债入狱。父亲入狱的屈辱和他在鞋油厂做工的经历成了狄更斯最大的创伤，也成了他最深的秘密。他甚至无法向妻子吐露这些事，尽管它们构成了他小说中未被承认的基础。

The potential evolution of today’s technology, and its social consequences, is dazzlingly complicated, and it’s perhaps best left to science fiction writers and futurologists to explore the many possibilities we can envisage.

当今技术可能的演变及其社会影响复杂得令人眼花缭乱，也许最好留给科幻作家和未来学家去探索我们所能设想的种种可能。

The interest in science fiction is on the rise.

人们对科幻小说的兴趣在上升。