possess中等

Beginning in 2006, some scientists have [argued] that plants possess neuron-like cells that interact with hormones and neurotransmitters, [forming] “a plant nervous system, [analogous] to that in animals,” said lead study author Lincoln Taiz, “They [even] claimed that plants have ‘brain-like command centers’ at their root tips.”

该研究的第一作者林肯·泰兹说：“从2006年开始，一些科学家就主张植物拥有与激素和神经递质相互作用的类神经元细胞，从而构成‘一个类似于动物神经系统的植物神经系统’，他们甚至声称植物的根尖处有‘类似大脑的指挥中心’。”

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。

These epochal figures represented lives hard to imitate, but to be acknowledged as possessing higher authority than mere mortals.

这些划时代的人物代表着难以效仿的人生，但人们应承认他们拥有高于凡人的权威。

For them, history did nothing, it possessed no immense wealth nor waged battles: “It is man, real, living man who does all that.”

在他们看来，历史什么也没做，它既不拥有巨大的财富，也不进行战斗：“做这一切的是人，现实的、活生生的人。”

Professionalism has turned the acquisition of a doctoral degree into a prerequisite for a successful academic career: as late as 1969 a third of American professors did not possess one.

专业化已使获得博士学位成为成功学术生涯的先决条件：而直到1969年，还有三分之一的美国教授没有博士学位。

His concern is mainly with the humanities: literature, languages, philosophy and so on. These are disciplines that are going out of style: 22% of American college graduates now major in business compared with only 2% in history and 4% in English. However, many leading American universities want their undergraduates to have a grounding in the basic canon of ideas that every educated person should possess. But most find it difficult to agree on what a “general education” should look like. At Harvard, Mr. Menand notes, “the great books are read because they have been read” — they form a sort of social glue.

他关注的主要是人文学科：文学、语言、哲学等。这些学科正在变得不受欢迎：如今22%的美国大学毕业生主修商科，而主修历史的只有2%，主修英语的只有4%。然而，许多美国一流大学希望本科生打好基础，掌握每一个受过教育的人都应具备的基本思想经典。但大多数大学难以就“通识教育”应该是什么样子达成一致。梅南先生指出，在哈佛，“名著之所以被阅读，是因为它们一直被人阅读”——它们形成了一种社会黏合剂。